GIVE THEM SOME SPACE?

At a press conference Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake explained why she held the police back from early and aggressive response to protestors.  She wanted police to “…make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech.”

She went on to say “…we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well, and we work very hard to keep that balance and to put ourselves in the best position to de-escalate." (NBC News)

The mediaverse lit up about Baltimore Mayor’s “Space to Destroy.”  The mayor was accused of incompetence, indifference, complicity with the violence, even racism and conspiracy to see poor Baltimore burn.  The mayor and her defenders said her words were mischaracterized, taken out of context, etc. etc.   

I don’t know.  

But I do know that what Mayor Rawlings-Blake said sounded an awful lot like something Jesus said.

In Revelations chapter 2, the Apostle John quotes Jesus from His letter to the church of Thyatira:

^Nevertheless I have a few things against you, because you allow that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, to teach and seduce My servants to commit sexual immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols. ^And I gave her time to repent of her sexual immorality, and she did not repent. (Revelations 2: 20, 21)

The King James Version renders the quote like this: I gave her SPACE TO REPENT. 

Jezebel was the evil wife of King Ahab, queen of northern Israel-Samaria, and nemesis of the prophet Elijah.  She was responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of Jewish prophets, the corruption local and national leaders; and she nearly succeeded in making pagan worship the official and exclusive religion for 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel.

Jezebel was not a good person.

Jesus said that John the Baptist was the Elijah of his day.  In similar manner, this woman in Thyatira was/ would be the new Jezebel.

Not a good person.

But the Lord didn’t/ wouldn’t intervene early to stop Jezebel’s murderous activities.   In 1 Kings 18 & 19, God authorized Elijah  to call down fire from Heaven and order the execution of Jezebel’s favorite prophets, but God didn’t let Elijah take out Jezebel.   The Lord let her live for years more, sending unheeded warning after unheeded warning to her, her husband, and their subjects.   

When the Lord finally fulfilled His prophetic promise to destroy Jezebel and all of her house,  Elijah had gone on to glory in a flaming chariot, and his protégé Elisha had to certify the execution (2 Kings 9).

But why wait?  She was not a good person.  She’s a Jezebel.  Her name is synonymous with being a bad person.  Why stand back and let her do all that damage?

Well, why stand back and let you do all the damage you’ve done?

How many hearts have you broken?

How many lies have you told?

How much pain and suffering has been caused by you, or the friend you love, or the child you adore, or the sibling you still believe in?

And why didn’t God take YOU or THEM out early?

We are all given more “space” than we deserve.

The theological terms for this are: grace, mercy, longsuffering, love.

Gracious, merciful, loving God gave, and will give, Jezebel space to repent.   She used, and will use, it as space to destroy.  Gracious, merciful, and loving God responds to that choice with destruction.

Anderson T. Graves II, circa 1992, was not a good person.  I wasn’t a murderer, but in other areas of my personal life I had some decidedly Jezebelish ways.  God gave me space to repent. In February 1994, I used that space to repent.  God saved my soul and changed my left for better than I had imagined. 

Samaria, Thyatira, Baltimore, Montgomery, or wherever you are---- in those places, we are all given more space than we deserve. 

It can be space to repent or it can be space to destroy.  The choice is in your control.

The consequences of that choice are not. 

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama;  executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO);  and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

Subscribe to my personal blog  www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com

Friend me at www.facebook.com/rev.a.t.graves

Follow me on twitter @AndersonTGraves 

#Awordtothewise

You can help support this ministry with a donation to Miles Chapel CME Church.

You can help support Rev. Graves’ work by visiting his personal blog and clicking the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar.

Support by check or money order may be mailed to 

Miles Chapel CME Church

P O Box 132

Fairfield, Al 35064

PARENTING & COLLATERAL DAMAGE

In February in Ohio, a man got into an argument with his wife and threw a coffee mug at her.  He missed and hit their 2 month old son.   He wasn’t aiming for the boy.   He was mad at his wife.

Their son died.  (Link to article.)

In 2 Samuel chapter 11, King David committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her husband killed to cover it up.  In the next chapter, God sent the prophet Nathan to David with this message:  Because by this deed you have given great occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme, the child also who is born to you shall surely die. (2 Samuel 12:14)

Neither David nor Bathsheba aimed their sin at their innocent child, but that is who absorbed the brunt of consequences for their sin.

I live in perpetual fear of scenarios like these. I’m scared that I will do something unrelatedly stupid that will ricochet onto my children, so I pray, “Lord, please don’t let them hurt because of me!”

But here’s the truth stated by the Bible and reinforced by current events: as parents, our choices --- positive and negative ---- affect our children, even when the choosing has nothing to do with them.

What I do with my money, my money that I’ve earned, will expand or limit the options my children have as they enter adulthood.

The way I treat people, especially my wife, will forever shape what my daughter and my son expect from and give to every significant relationship they have.

My walk with God in accord with or in contrast to the Scriptures I claim to believe: that’s the filter through which my children and the grandchildren who look to them for spiritual guidance will process every theological idea that pops into their heads.

When I was a kid in early elementary school, my father and I were watching a pro football game.  I remember  that the Dallas Cowboys were playing.  Pops made an out loud comment to himself  about how stupid the game was and how the players didn’t know him, didn’t care about him, and it didn’t make sense for him to care about their stupid game.  He kept watching the game.  Heck, he wasn’t even really talking to me, but to this day I have no interest whatsoever in professional sports.  I don’t even watch the Superbowl.

What we throw out hits them even if they’re not the ones we’re aiming at.

That’s what I think it means when God says that He visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation. (Exodus 34: 7b)

The rule inthis life is that what we throw out as parents WILL ricochet onto our children.  Ricochet and reverberate for generations.

And the only reason the accumulation of ancestral idiocy hasn’t rendered us all too screwed up to function is that God in the same breath declares Himself to the God who keeps mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. (Exodus 34: 7a)

Because God is merciful, He has interceded so that my children are on track to growing into better persons than I was and am.  He is answering my cry, “Lord, please don’t let me screw them up!”

But because I understand the rule, I am still very careful about what I throw.  I’m more and more mindful and intentional with money decisions.  I try (I tryyyy) to treat everybody like my kids will review the interaction on youtube.  I live and pray and fail but never surrender in pursuit of the holiness to which every believer is called. 

I can’t predict when my kids will step into the path of the words, actions, and example I toss out into the world.  Neither can you.    But we can order our lives according to God’s Word so that whatever touches them from our hands raises them up and doesn’t lay them low.

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama;  executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO);  and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

Subscribe to my personal blog  www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com

Friend me at www.facebook.com/rev.a.t.graves

Follow me on twitter @AndersonTGraves 

You can help support this ministry with a donation to Miles Chapel CME Church.

You can help support Rev. Graves’ work by visiting his personal blog and clicking the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar.

Support by check or money order may be mailed to 

Miles Chapel CME Church

P O Box 132

Fairfield, Al 35064

SILENCE IS NOT CONSENT

“So do not pray for this people, or lift up a cry or prayer for them; for I will not hear them in the time that they cry out to Me because of their trouble.” (Jeremiah 11: 14)

Often, people take arguments personally.  When you actively dispute their position, they take it to mean that you don’t like them--- personally don’t like them.  But that’s not necessarily so, especially if your argument is the honest exposition of God’s Word.

God told Ezekiel, “Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel; therefore hear a word from My mouth, and give them warning from Me.  (Ezekiel 3: 17)

God sent Ezekiel to argue with Israel because God wanted Israel to change, because if Israel changed then God could help them.

When the prophets are loud, it means that God is offering mercy instead of destruction.

On the other hand, people tend to think that when you stop audibly disagreeing with them that it means they won the argument

Not necessarily so.  Sometimes it means that you’re just through arguing with this fool and you’re just gone leave them to continue in their foolishness and bear the consequences of it.

Like when God told Moses, “Now therefore, let Me alone, that My wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them.” (Exodus 32: 10)  

Silence doesn’t mean consent.  And prophetic silence, means exactly the opposite.    Prophetic silence means that God has turned against you so thoroughly that He doesn’t even want to talk about it.

There are men and women of God who truly live for the Lord and who speak His Truth with accuracy and integrity.  They speak the same things, confirming that they are led by the same Spirit.

When all or a bunch of them suddenly go quiet----- that’s when you need to be afraid, very afraid.

When they’ve been warning you and warning you about the path you’re on and they just suddenly shut up----- it doesn’t mean that you’ve won them over to your side.  It means that God has told them to let it go and move out of the way.

But we don’t see it that way.  We think we’ve won the “cultural argument,” “shifted cultural discourse in our favor,” or “isolated the opposition.” 

But consider the people who are quiet now.   Do they say what’s popular, or do they say what God tells them to say?

And if they speak God’s Word, don’t you think they’ll also keep God’s silence?

When the prophets are loud, it means that God is offering mercy instead of destruction. When the prophets go silent, it means that God is pissed off.

And it is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of a silent God.

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Hall Memorial CME Church in Montgomery, Alabama, executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO) and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

Email atgravestwo2@aol.com

Friend me at www.facebook.com/rev.a.t.graves

To listen to sermons and learn more about the ministry at Hall Memorial CME Church, visit www.hallmemorialcme.blogspot.com .

You can help support this ministry by clicking the DONATE button on the right-hand sidebar.

Support by check or money order may be mailed to

Hall Memorial CME Church

541 Seibles Road

Montgomery, AL 36116

HONEST LOVE

The calling of the disciple Levi brought together the most hated, most respected, most sinful, and most religious people in the nation all under one roof for one meal and a lesson for us.

As we continue through the formative moments of the original church, we look at the calling of a tax collector and in a message that touches on this moment in our nation, in the church, and in our personal spiritual lives.

The message is called: HONEST LOVE.

(Quick confession:  Near the end of the sermon I reference the work of Harriet Tubman  but I call her Sojourner Truth.  I do know better.)

Listen well.

---Anderson T. Graves II   is a writer, community organizer, and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Hall Memorial CME Church and the executive director of SAYNO (Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization) in Montgomery, Alabama.

Call  334-288-0577
Email atgravestwo2@aol.com
Friend me at www.facebook.com/rev.a.t.graves

Subscribe to my personal blog  www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .

If you enjoy our work, please help support our work in the community. Send a donation of any amount by check or money order.
Mail all contributions to:
Hall Memorial CME Church
541 Seibles Road
Montgomery, AL 36116

LOVE ISN'T ALL YOU NEED

When it comes to relationships, the romantic refrain is “All We Need is Love.” On the surface is seems a very Christian perspective.  After all doesn’t the Bible say that “the greatest of these is LOVE”?

Well, yeah, but that’s not all it says.

Walk through the scriptures with me and face an important truth that may transform your relationships. 

See, the truth is YOU NEED LOVE, BUT LOVE ISN’T ALL YOU NEED.

Find out what else there is.

Listen well.

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---Anderson T. Graves

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is the pastor of Hall Memorial CME Church

Call/ fax: 334-288-0577
Email us at hallmemorialcme1@aol.com   
Friend Pastor Graves at www.facebook.com/rev.a.t.graves
If you want to be a blessing to this ministry, contributions may be made by check or money order.

Mail all contributions to:

Hall Memorial CME Church
541 Seibles Road
Montgomery, AL 36116