Greg Crawford

Category: Culture

  • Freedom or Liberty?

    A nation celebrates its birth today and recognizes its freedom, but can we truly feel its liberty? With so many nations in turmoil and the earth groaning in this hour for the manifest sons of God, who will truly walk in more than freedom but liberty? Freedom is the power to determine an action without restraint.  It is individualistic.  This is not always good and many times leads us into corruption. Hence what we see politically in our nation. Liberty deals more with the rights of a person who is under governmental rule. Liberty is to a corporate people. Liberty means freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control external or foreign rule, obligation and hampering conditions of being able to do, think or act. As we see we have lost sight of liberty for the sake of freedom.

    Our founder fathers sought after liberty more than unrestrained freedom. Whom the son sets free is free indeed. But do not use that freedom to be entangled again with sin. Freedom that is not under liberty is actually a person own interpretations to not be restrained by liberty. The biblical foundation for liberty is where the presence of the Lord is there is liberty. God’s presence is governmental and has the ability to hold restrain upon freedom that it will not become a condition that hampers a nation.

    Today the Holy Spirit said “How are people using their freedom? Are they using it to voice their opinion and rights or are they using it to fight for liberty? Who is using the freedom of Christ to bring the Liberty of the kingdom of God upon the earth to shift nations?” for me this is my meditation today.

  • From Sub-culture to Counter Culture

    In this hour of the Church, with so much upheaval and division over political agendas and candidates, we need to be sure we are advancing the Kingdom of God and not the kingdom of man. As  those who are the true Ecclesia, we must begin to take our role as governing the spiritual realms to establish a Kingdom upon the earth that the structure of man, both political and economical, would be willing to participate in and draw wisdom from it.

    As the Church, we have become a subculture like any other subculture within our nation. We have less voice than the recent rising voices of homosexuality, women’s rights, etc. This is due to the eroding away of the Church’s culture of morality and holiness and allowing ourselves to lose footholds we once had in place. For the most part, we have become irrelevant in the decision making process of our government.

    We are in dire need of a true spiritual awakening. An awakening that would once again position us as a voice within a culture. Our biblical knowledge from the tree of good and evil is not enough  to convince the gainsayers that we have the goods. We must eat from the tree of life to confound the wisdom of the wise and allow virtue to flow forth touching hearts and shifting culture.

    In our last Awakening Fires gathering, our speaker Eric Reeder, had a divine revelation from Act 3. “Why are we constantly passing by what is broken to go and enter into a place (the temple) that Jesus said was no longer relevant?” Amazing revelation! When we look more closely, we can see that once virtue flowed, holiness came and position in culture was shifted from inside the walls to Solomon’s porch. That positioning caused a great stir as it came from a Psalms 133 posture. The previous Psalms were spoken as they ascended the steps of the temple to the porch. Psalms 133 was spoken as they stepped onto the porch.

    This touching of a small part of the culture, a man begging at the gate Beautiful, allowed Peter and John to have a platform, Solomon’s porch, from which to begin to educate the people. As I look at things, it appears we want all or none, when in reality the Biblical pattern was portions were given to show stewardship of truth before more was given.  Eventually the whole was impacted and felt the effect of the Kingdom. Not all became Christian, which is not really our assignment. Our real assignment is to make disciples, thus disciple nations. That is about Kingdom impact more than conversions. Conversions without true deep discipleship will not change nations but will create a subculture within a nation. For the most part, this is what we have done. We have healed them at the gate to only drag them into the temple into what is no longer significant, thus keeping them in an old model and not putting them on Solomon’s porch, a place of audience before nations and a place nations came to hear the wisdom of God.

    Maybe we need to stop walking by what is broken. Maybe once people are healed, we need to no longer bring them into what is insignificant. Perhaps we are not the voice of the hour because we have not stewarded what is within us by allowing the virtue to flow out of us to impact the world around us.