Engaging Both World and Word in Mortal Combat

We are not to confine God in the confines of religiosity.  We set aside one sacred day and one sacred place where we may meet with Him and bring adoration to Him. Then we go home, and our lives remained unchanged.

God is to come right into our lives. Let Him intrude. Let Him come home. Let Him assume authority over every area of our dealings with fellow man. Let God is brought into every square corner of our lives. Let us let God enter in every square corner of the world. 

Before the world was, His glory was with Christ. And Christ manifested the Name of God to the men God gave Him out of the world. Now that Christ is no longer in the world, but ascended to be with the Father, He has left us, His disciples who have received Him Word, in the world. It is through us that God acts and speaks. He has left us with His very essence – the Word, and it is through the Word that He moves in us and in the world. The disciples have the Word, and they have Christ within them. Repeatedly Christ petitions the Father to keep the disciples, that they may be united with God. The world at large will hate the Word of God and hate those who bear and those who proclaim it. That is to be expected. But those whom God calls out of the world by His Word and gives them Him Word, -these are called out of God, the Ecclesia.

The disciples become a visible community on the earth. Though called out of the world, they remain squarely in the world. Christ prays that God may protect them, not from the world, but from the evil one. Christ has no desire that the disciples be removed from the world. If so, the world no longer will have the Word of God, which it loathes and despises but which it very much needs.

The truth of God continues to sanctify the disciples through the Word. And through their Word, which they preach throughout the world much to the disgust of the world, more will come to believe in Christ. And these too will be united to God. 

The goal and mission of Christ is that the world may believe in Him, that He is sent of God – that they may believe the Word. 

The reason why the disciples are in the world, though they have been called out of it, is to proclaim the Word and bring many to believe in Christ. They exist as Christ exists. Christ longs that the disciples may join Him, where He is in glory, and behold the glory which the Father has given the Son, the love with which the Father loves the Son, the Son the Father, and the Son the disciples.

The disciples are those who have known Christ, and now Christ is in them.

Christ came through Him God might bestow eternal life – the knowledge of God and the Christ sent of God. Christ finished His Work. He called disciples out from the world, taught them and gave them the Word. Then He ascended. And the task of the disciples now is to preach the Word, to call others out from the world into the Word. And the only way this is done is for the disciples to go into every square corner of the world and saturate it with the Word. In the very darkest recesses of the world the disciples are scattered.

One would think they should remain together, that they may have a corner of the world that is purely grounded in the Word, away from sin. But the nature of the sanctity of the Word is that it is holy in the very midst of the unclean world. One reality is that the disciples are very much grounded in present circumstance and reality – the world. Yet the greater reality is that they transcend present circumstances and realities, and they have an eternal perspective and eternal life because of the Word. 

The disciple is not defiled by the world nor entrapped by it because the same Word that called them out of the world, sent them back into it to proclaim Himself, now keeps them and sanctifies them in the very midst of the world. 

Two things will happen then. Firstly, the world will resist the Word, for the Word is antithetical to the world and spells out its destruction. Secondly, and at the same time, many caught in the world will see the beacon of light and grasp out for it, receiving the transforming Word.

The Word goes out into the world through the called-out disciples that it may call out disciples unto itself.

And thus the world will grow increasingly antagonistic against the gospel and at the same time be increasingly saturated with it. The world is fighting a losing battle, a battle that already has been lost, against the Word. The Word has triumphed and ascended. As disciples, we may seem alone and scattered throughout a cold and unfriendly world. But the Word that has triumphed is within us, we need only trust God. Furthermore the more the world fights against the Word, the greater is the victory of the Word, for the evil one knows his time is short.