Isaiah 5:20 Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
Matthew 24:12 And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many (some translations say, “most”) will grow cold.
As we continue to inspect our hearts and take spiritual inventory of our lives during this month of Elul in preparation for the fall feasts, we should stay particularly aware of Yeshua’s prediction in Matthew 24:12, “The love of many will grow cold.” He warned that a sign of the last days would be abounding lawlessness and that callousness and hardness of heart would characterize the end times. The evidence of this is everywhere.
Mass looting, street violence, and robbery are commonly reported in thousands of mobile phone videos and mainstream news to an alarming degree unheard of even a few years ago. Meanwhile, much legislation has been perverted and manipulated to persecute Christians for their beliefs. Isaiah plainly described this present social and moral catastrophe, “Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil!”
In the midst of this, we have to ask ourselves, “Are our hearts becoming calloused? Are we losing our love to the increase of wickedness?” The atmosphere itself breathes strong temptation to be isolated, self-protective, and loveless, even toward our brothers and sisters, much less the multitude of lost and wayward souls around us. If the day is looming when “no man can work” [John 9:4] have we already begun to decide that loving for Christ’s sake is hardly a worthy cause any longer?
D.L. Moody once said, “(If) we have got the true love of God shed abroad in our hearts, we will show it in our lives. We will not have to go up and down the earth proclaiming it. We will show it in everything we say or do. “He also said, “Out of 100 men, one will read the Bible, the other 99 will read the Christian.”
How are you being read today? Are you gradually becoming stoic and isolated like your neighbor? Is your heart slowly but surely growing tough skin? “The love of many (or most) will grow cold.” Such a terrible expectation; God forbid that environmental and reactive fear, anger, and manipulation steal the fruit and character you’ve spent years cultivating in the Lord. God is love. There is no fear in love; perfect love casts out fear. [1 John 4:18] Allow yourself to be consumed by the love of God — and in doing so, you’ll be more than a conqueror through Him [Romans 8:35-39] in these last days!
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]Revivals, that is, genuine Divinely ordained seasons of the activity of God among men, have a universally unusual character. Normal activities and behaviors give way to the tangible influence of God’s Holy Spirit, whose inspiration brings a freedom of expression, emotion, conviction, worship, and other variations from normal experience.
During the Catholic inquisitions, as millions of Christians were being killed by the Jesuit Priests for apostasy, throughout Europe, Christians were fleeing. In Bohemia alone, there were an estimated 4,000,000 Christians before the Jesuit inquisition, and ten years later, only 800,000 people remained in Bohemia – all of whom were Catholic. These terrible events prepared the ground for one of the greatest moves of God that have ever been recorded, the Moravian Revival, which lasted for over 100 years. Gustav Warneck, the German Historian of Protestant Missions, testified, “This small church in twenty years called into being more missions than the whole Evangelical Church has done in two centuries.”
I love to study past revivals and in studying them, there are two recurring themes that stand out:
First, that He has often used obscure and unknown individuals to lead revivals, and that even these men whom He used so powerfully never considered themselves to be “special”, but often wanted to stay out of the limelight.
During the Great Depression, poverty swept across America like a whirling tornado, ripping up dreams and scattering hopes to the wind. One such poverty twister hit a small part of Texas where a man named Yates ran a sheep ranch. Struggling even to keep food on the table, Yates and his wife did all they could to survive. Finally, they had to accept a government subsidy or lose their home and land to the creditors.
When Joseph was thrown into prison, his life was thought to be over. How could anyone escape an Egyptian prison? But then, in one day, according to God’s perfect timing, he was instantly promoted to reign over all Egypt with only the Pharoah, (“god on earth”) as his Lord…
As we continue our study of Mashiach ben Yosef, we observe that both Joseph and Yeshua (Jesus) were chosen or ‘anointed’ for a special task. When Jacob gifted his son Joseph with a coat of many colors, lifting him up above his brothers, he reflected Joseph’s calling by the Lord for a life work as a leader.
Joseph interpreted dreams and revealed their meaning to those around him, and so Pharaoh gave him the name, Tsofnat Paneach (Zaphnathpaaneah) which means the “Decipherer or Revealer of Secrets”. Yeshua, (Jesus) at his first advent as “Mashiach ben Yosef” also came revealing secrets; not as an interpreter of dreams, but as one who disclosed the secrets of men…