One day last week, I saw an Alabama motor vehicle tag number “JHN151.” As I had been in a heightened state of prayer that morning, I immediately saw the tag number as a message from God. I frequently quote Henry Blackaby as saying in the 1990 book, Experiencing God, “God speaks to us by the Spirit through the Bible, prayer, circumstance and the church to reveal Himself, His purposes and His ways.” However, I’m not sure I’ve seen Him speak through a car-tag, but I guess that could be considered “circumstance.”
The tag puzzled me, though as I couldn’t figure out whether it was abbreviated “John 1:51” or “John 15:1.” The former states, “He then added, ‘Very truly I tell you, you will see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” I mused on that passage for a while and thought as how it could have a particular meaning for me. In it, Jesus refers to the passage in Genesis 28:10-19 in which Jacob, in a dream, sees a giant ladder descending from Heaven to Earth upon which angels are freely traveling up and down.
That could be a sign that God is at work doing something in these troubled times, perhaps a mighty work. The truth of that notwithstanding, the passage just didn’t “click” as the one to which God was pointing me this time. As I prayed, “Lord, which one?” He said, “Watch and wait,” so I did.
The second and more likely passage is “John 15:1” which states, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.” That passage, one of Jesus’ last incarnate sayings before his Passion, opens a multi-verse dissertation in which Jesus compares the relationship between His disciples, and thus all Christians, and Himself, to that of a vine and a branch. The gist of the passage holds that we Christians, for all our great ideas and machinations, can do nothing of eternal good if we have cut ourselves off from Him, the True Vine. Thus, it is more important to stay in contact with that Vine than to do stuff, even if the stuff appears to be good.
Pastor Alan Cross of Petaluma Baptist Church in California has recently taught on this very thought. I suggest that such is one of Pastor Alan’s life themes, one that he not only preaches but practices. Consequently, the thought stuck in my mind.
Likewise, Pastor Jay Cooper of First United Methodist Church Montgomery, Alabama, in his daily Facebook® postings of iconography at the church facility, posted a photograph of a plaster casting of the Vine adorning the entrance to the building at left, q.v.
Thus, that day, God began to answer the threshold question. Now, however, the second, and the maybe greater question is, “What am I to take from it?”
As I prayed over the subject, I received an email from Tabby Case, a friend of long-standing, in which she connected me with her daughter, Abigail, who is a bi-vocational missionary on an island in the South Pacific. Abigail, like the rest of us, has been in lock-down for weeks.
Abigail spends her days working at her continuing, but scaled-down, menial day-job, the one that sustains her to do the real work, that of serving as a missionary to hundreds of young people. She stated in a recent email message and a video that during the period, she has had the opportunity to dwell deeply in prayer. In those sessions alone with God, God has revealed many things to her, things will inform her ministry and mission not just for the near-term, but long-term as well. I quote a passage from her note:
Our ministry, as well as the global body, is being shut up in our homes. We are waiting for the Lord to deliver us from what enslaves us, like consumerism, materialism, this constant need to be entertained and distracted; we are waiting for death to pass over us. I believe this time is a time of reconciling our hearts back to our first love – back to the only one who can satisfy. The Father is coming through His people and pruning back what is not necessary and poisonous (John 15) to bring forth lasting fruit. I believe this period of silence is a period of massive deliverance and refinement of the body of Christ, where we are being stripped of all the subtle idols and comforts that have crept into our hearts and stolen the love that rightly belonged to God.
Abigail’s prophesy is so profoundly succinct that I will not attempt to interpret, comment, or otherwise obscure the clear and present message from God Himself – from the pen of one young in years – but growing mightily in the Faith. More than this, I dare not say.
So let it be written, so let it be done.
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