"Somehow the Truth makes nothing else seem to matter."
- Jesus Freaks: Revolutionaries
"Uncompromisingly righteous and rigidly just are You, O Lord..."
- Jeremiah: Jeremiah 12:1 (amp)
I once watched a documentary on the U.S. special forces, and one of the soldiers said something that has stuck with me. "Compromise is death." If only the body of Christ believed that the way these non-believing soldiers do.
They focus on one single thing, to be the most precise and deadly soldiers on earth. If only the church had that same focus, but to know God and make him known as their goal.
The Bible has thousands of promises contained in it, and most, if not all have some kind of requirement, conditions that must be fulfilled before that promise can happen. For some, like salvation, the requirement is that we must believe, others require actual physical actions.
For example Isaiah 58 talks about fasting, and the correct way to do it. Faith mixed with fasting alone is very powerful, but add the other elements of Isaiah 58 like feeding the poor and caring for the homeless and it becomes a powerhouse.
One of the primary requirements named over and over again is righteousness, and not just regular old righteousness, but uncompromising righteousness as translated in the Amplified version of the Bible.
"Uncompromisingly righteous and rigidly just are You, O Lord..."
God is not lazy. He is not half-hearted. He does nothing in a lax way. Every movement is calculated, thought out, and precise. If He decides to do something, there isn't a thing you or the devil can do to stop it. Sometimes He decides to give you the choice for blessing or curses, and then you have a say, but you cannot stop Him from returning.
God is disciplined and structured, he is uncompromising. However I do not want to build the image of a disciplinary, militant, angry God in anyone's mind. That is not the goal here. God is also full of joy and love. He is a perfect father and a perfect general.
We are His soldiers, and it is our entire purpose in life the imitate Him. He is uncompromisingly righteous and rigidly just, we must be the same way if we are going to be like Him.
I don't mean unmerciful, and don't mean we aren't gracious, and I don't mean we are cold, because God is none of those things. However we must refuse to compromise our own walk with God no matter if others are by our side or not.
Imagine how it must have been for Jesus to walk on this earth. If ever there was a lonely walk it was His. He only did what He saw His Father doing, and His Father constantly asked Him to preach things nobody understood, or offended them. They didn't offend because He said hurtful things, but because He preached things that were culturally offensive. Jesus only ever rebuked harshly the religious hypocrites, never the sinners.
Imagine if your entire ministry was completely misunderstood by others, and your own disciples didn't believe you?
Most ministers today work so hard to please the crowd and get more members through fleshly means. Nobody even understood Jesus was talking about, and yet multitudes followed Him. What was it He had that caused this? It wasn't His confusing message, it was the power of God drawing them in through His relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
How did He get that? He imitated God like any son does, and He is uncompromisingly righteous and rigid. Remember when the rich young man came and asked what He had to do to be saved, he had been fulfilling all the commandments well, and Jesus told him he had to give away everything he owned. The rich young man walked away, and Jesus let him!
If that was most of us, when we started to see that we would have grabbed the guy and said, "Well, you know, maybe that's too much for you right now. You can hang onto your money for a while, and little by little get to the point where you can give it all away."
Jesus refused to compromise His message, the truth, to have more numbers. It is our job to imitate Him, not big numbers.
"Our Lord has surnamed himself Truth, not Custom"
Tertullian
"The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night."
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