How would we live if we knew how little time we had? Would we live differently if we knew we had only a year left? Or a month? If we knew our time was short, wouldn’t we throw caution to the wind and live outside the boundaries of what’s considered by most people to be reasonable?
Okay then.
Tell me the difference between that and how I should be walking with Jesus, the Lover and Savior of my immortal soul. Fact is, no matter how I look at it, I only have a little time. Even if it’s as much as fifty more years, it will pass in a blink and not come again. There are opportunities I have today that I will never get back if I don’t seize them now. So I admonish myself, "How dare you not live how you ought to!" How could I not want to go all in with all I have, even if it doesn’t seem like much? I don’t want to need more grace than I already do. In the kingdom, success is obedience and nothing less.
We want nothing to do with an anti-gospel that won’t call on Jesus, doesn’t require Him, and refuses to submit to Him.
Maybe that's one reason why we recently received an invitation to become road staff with The Extreme Tour's east leg for 2021. The Extreme Tour has been piercing the darkness for almost thirty years, and our staffing commitment is from mid-May to late September. We're hitting the road for Nashville around May 14th and won't be home until October. Most of the bands that go are only on board for a few weeks, but our invitation is to be road staff for the whole four months, plus a few weeks of pre-tour training. As we prayed and considered the implications, the clarity we gained became razor sharp. The only response we could ever give in the light of all we now see and understand is yes, even if our “yes” seems to be all we have in our hand.
Going with Nothing but Our Yes
Peculiar, but as you step into what God calls you toward, and as you activate your faith, you realize step by step that you have far more than your yes. This is because God meets you and supplies all your needs, for sure, but it’s also because faith is so powerful that even the tombs of old dreams long dead tend to open and tremble as your shadow, now going with Christ, falls across them. The resurrected dreams are now so new, and so purified by fire, that even though they used to be all about you (and this was the reason they had to die), now the only reason they have anything to do with you is because you’re the vessel God is pouring them through. And now they’re not mere dreams but eternal God-given purpose, and with that comes great power. All you’re doing is following Jesus for love and obedience; He’s doing literally everything else. And like Jesus, now there is a train of captives in your wake: captive thoughts now obedient to Christ, captive dreams now submitted to His Lordship, captive ideas fully realized, awake and alive and regenerated by His omnipotent wisdom and humble love.
When we left everything behind last year, we didn’t have much except our yes—that is, our commitment to simply go, and go simply, with whatever we had, knowing and believing that God would supply whatever we needed whenever it became necessary. That hasn't changed. But our circumstances have, and much for the better. I'm here to tell you, waiting on the Lord, doing things His way, is well worth it. For those who read and believe the Word of God for what it so clearly says, it’s not a huge stretch to perceive that when God tells us it’s the Father’s good pleasure to give us the entire kingdom, He means precisely that. He is no ridiculous mystic genie, but He certainly is our One Source, which means we genuinely have no need for anxiety. What we have is everything we could ever need or hope to ask for.
Traveling light is the only way to go anyway. What we need will come to hand when we need it, and that will build our faith. And faith is priceless.
This is Warfare
The general public generally freaks out about burning buildings. In fact, unless you’re a fireman and have a good reason to go into one, you wouldn’t dare try it. But to a fireman, who is not only trained for the environment but also has a mission and purpose there, the only thing to freak out about is the fact that there are people trapped inside. They need rescuing. He won’t hesitate.
Consider this analogy: the burning building is the kingdom of darkness. The people inside are our fellow humans, and they are trapped in addiction, hopeless, isolated, bound captive to terrible lies, and trapped in deadly cycles of behavior. The firemen are the Church, and the only training we need is the unction of the indwelling Spirit of God; we don’t have to go to seminary or some arbitrary christianese program before we’re ready to serve. God can and does use anyone, and He does as He pleases. We are living proof.
The reason this is warfare is because so many of us refuse to go where we’re supposed to be. God doesn’t light us up so that we can be light in places that are already lit. A disciple of Jesus Christ is never not on mission. The Father lights us up to send us back into the darkness and snatch His people out of the fire, whether they now know they are His people or not. What kind of fireman would show up and stand outside behind a safety barrier, shouting to the perishing that “help is here, you can come out now!” Or worse, try like hell to force a programmed prayer so that the sinner suddenly becomes valuable. Or even worse, invite them to a building to listen to a monologue by some joker whose nostrils don't even know the smell of smoke. Have we forgotten who Jesus hung out with?
The reason this is warfare is because so many of us, having received the message of hope and transformation, choose to respond in fear, not faith, and we sit on it. Worse, we expect those who need what we have to come to us. How are we not the unfaithful servant who buried his one talent in the ground?
What kind of messenger refuses to carry what he’s been given to those who need it? Has he forgotten that before he received it with gladness from whoever carried it faithfully to him, he too was perishing? How selfish and dead inside must he be to stand idly by while his fellow humans burn to death in the fire of their own raging passions?
Raising Support...Or Not
Like a lot of stuff in the kingdom, this isn’t going to be what we thought it was. Yes, we’ve done this before; we’ve left it all behind and gone, even to the opposite side of the globe. But we haven’t done it this way before. And the need out there has never been as starkly poignant, at least to us. If I may (continue to) be frank, we’ve never been this absolutely in tune with the call and so ready to go that we can taste it. In a lot of ways, we’re already gone, we're already on tour. Still, there’s a lot of work to be done.
One of the things we heard God say from the moment we launched WhiteNoise Studio last year was that He was doing things in a new way we had never seen or imagined. Even now we hear Him saying like He said to Israel in the wilderness to stay close; we haven’t come this way before.
God's aforementioned new way touches down everywhere in what we’re doing, not least of which is the way we’re organized legally. We have two very good reasons for not being a nonprofit. But the best reason is because we heard God very clearly from the beginning about how He wanted us to build WhiteNoise Studio.
He told us to start with the content, to build His house by faith, and to trust Him to build ours. For the past year we’ve been doing precisely that; building His house with the content He has given us in the form of new songs, new books, blogs, sermons, videos, and more. He even gave us a studio space to do it in, which, brief as our time there was, seems a little extravagant, at least to me. How good is our God, y'all! And now that we’ve been invited to rock out with the Extreme Tour this summer (see the video at the end of this post), we get to build even more content as God expands our territory and influences the influencers through us. Now as we go, this content will drown out and obliterate unwanted sound: the drone of intolerance and hatred and groupthink, all the counterfeit trash that’s been hammering the Church, the culture, and the family with the anti-gospel of antichrist for a hundred years or more.
Trust me when I tell you that God wants to move, and He is eager to receive those who are ready to come in. They are not about to come into an earthly house but the very House of God, the bride and body of Christ, the fellowship of the saints, the true Church, the light of the world, the place in the spirit where the glory of God dwells. The workers are indeed few, but we are going because God still has our yes. Raising support? Not like you might think. More like activating the next growth stage of our faith.
The Opportunity
Some see the status quo like this: the world is a dark threat. They cry out like cowards, "There be beasts without, roaming and roaring, foaming at the mouth!" Indeed there is a lion raging in the street, he has set himself against all comers, thrashing any who dare to speak against his zeitgeist, hating all who see and declare the nudity of his emperor. But we are not those who run and hide. We are not those who shrink back.
We have had quite enough of the antichrist’s masquerade. He who is in us is greater than he who is in the world, and we have not been given a spirit of fear, but adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” we know that our prayers are not only heard but effective for pulling down strongholds—the very strongholds antichrist has built and that even now masquerade as a strange new gospel in which Jesus isn’t mentioned, isn’t needed, isn’t honored, isn’t known, and in which man self-righteously excuses his sin, chases weird mysticism and signs and wonders instead of the Spirit of God, supplies his own perverse needs instead of being patient, self-justifies his hypocrisy, and gobbles up blood money in his countless betrayals of light, reason, truth, and justice.
We, however—probably like you—see the status quo not as a threat but as an opportunity to shine. If the world is a dangerous thing, and if indeed it "be very dark and dread," all the better to go there and shine the brighter for the manifest contrast between good and evil.
We are taking songs like Fighter and books like Declaration of Dependence into the darkness like weapons. We’re taking the light and love of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God—alive and well in His Church—and our very feet are the feet that are going, our very hands are the hands that are working, and our very souls are the souls embracing the lost and wounded. Those who are predestined to become our eternal brothers and sisters in Christ are out there, still waiting for the hope the Church knows but has too often taken for granted, if she has taken it anywhere. If some won't, we will. We are going to get those who belong to our Master and bring them in, not to a building but to the Body because not one will be lost. And going isn’t a sacrifice; it’s a joy.
The Response
If this moves you, and if you want to help in the effort, you can start by sharing this post with anyone and everyone you know.
If you want to go further, you can participate by preordering our music and our book, knowing there is much more to come.
And if you want to go even further and be a sender, please reach out to us about becoming a sponsor for the tour.
There is indeed a crisis in the world today. Yes, the American family is in tatters. But God says it's not over, and if I could reach through this screen and shake you until you believed it, I would. We have a great unfailing hope that abides, and it does not disappoint. Hope, faith, and love are just getting started because we the Church are just beginning to awaken. Love. Never. Fails.
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