Dream Word – BECOME
James 3:11,12 Does a spring send forth fresh water and bitter from the same opening? Can a fig tree, my brethren, bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Thus no spring yields both saltwater and fresh. NKJV
At the time of my writing, I believe that Britain still currently holds the abysmal record of producing the worst serial killer ever to the stalk the earth. That Doctor of Death, Harold Shipman, was convicted for the murder of hundreds of his patients. No one really knows that actual number.
Before the horror of Harold, it was the ferocity of the serial killer, Fred West, that haunted people’s dreams and turned them into nightmares. Fred West and his wife Rose confessed to killing thirty people, and the remains of many of them were found to be an integral part of the structure of where they lived, at 25 Cromwell Street. This house has long since been demolished and every brick has been crushed and every piece of the timber has been burnt.
However, it is not 25 Cromwell Street that bothers me tonight, but rather it is 27 Cromwell Street, even the building next door, which was, and still is at the time of my writing, a Seventh Day Adventist Church, still offering 'Sunday School and Divine worship on the Sabbath.'.These services both are and were then at the time of the murders, held right next door to this house of death, I mean just feet from these grotesque happenings. Twice on the Sabbath and no doubt midweek as well, they would lift their faces to God Most-High, in prayer for themselves, in prayer for their missionaries, in prayer for their communities, and I have no doubt, in prayer for their neighbours, even the people who lived next door to them. Yessiree, whilst the brutal raping and murdering was being carried out next door, just feet away, prayer and worship were being offered to God. Just feet away. Imagine that.
As God looked down from heaven, He saw in the same screenshot, both the hands of these worshippers lifted high in praise and supplication, and no doubt the pleading hands of women being brutally raped, mistreated, begging for their life before being murdered, and then hacked to death and hidden just feet away from the all the prayers and praise. God saw the living and the loving wanting to be anointed for service and sacrifice, whilst next door He saw the blood in the basement and the bodies in the walled-up chimney, the screams of those murdered now settled silently in ready-mix concrete. One community of life and light pleading for mercy and another community of darkness and death, screaming for justice, and both just feet from one another. All this happened down a simple street in England, down our street, down my street, down your street. Now tell me, a week before Halloween, how haunting is that!
Dare I say, dare I suggest, that in a similar manner, we Christians all, draw near to God, and so often it with our lips full of praise whilst our hearts, like the sinking Titanic, are ripped and pierced below the waterline. Some chambers of our sorry ship are playing ‘Nearer my God to thee,’ whilst other chambers, just nearby, are full of laughter and hope, still others, behind the water-tight doors, are already full of death and drowned bodies. Still, other chambers are sealed with murders, unforgiveness, vengeance, bitterness, greed, foul and pestilent thoughts and all this, all this, in the same body, just feet from one another, inches, millimeters, seconds, all drawing near to God at the same time. Imagine that.
In the same terrible screenshot, God looks at every happening on the surface of our earth and sees it all in the same awful blood-red technicolour picture. In the same awful screenshot, God takes in every event in our world that has happened, that is happening and that
