Landscapes

The Landscape of the Human Heart.
The landscape of the human heart yearns for a visitation from the Lord.

A voice is calling, “Clear the way for the Lord in the wilderness; Make smooth in the desert a highway for our God. Let every valley be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; And let the rough ground become a plain, And the rugged terrain a broad valley; Then the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh will see it together; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” Isaiah 40: 3-5

The prophetic voice of the Lord prepares a highway for God which leads into our very hearts. The voice brings down mountains of haughtiness in our prideful hearts and elevates valleys of despair and insecurity in our fearful hearts. The prophetic voice of the Lord smooths the rough edges of our bitter hearts and converts the desert of our hearts into fruitful fields.

And in the Church which is comprised of imperfect people, the prophetic word of the Lord brings mountains and valleys together for service and fellowship. He smooths out the rough places of our uneven relationships as iron sharpens iron.

The Ideological Landscape.
False ideas ultimately fail. True ideas ultimately succeed. False and failed ideas litter the land in which we live. The last 150 years have witnessed an accumulation of false and failed ideas. In our daily walk through the cultural landscape we stumble and trip over them everywhere we go.

False and failed ideas promise pleasure but bind us and box us in. They pledge to solve our society’s ills but in the end they create more problems. They guarantee us comfort and security but instead drive us toward selfish ambition. And sometimes they promise utopia but provide us with bitterness and disappointment.

God desires to occupy this ideological landscape, to conquer it, to subdue it with the truth. We the Church, like Israel of old, are commissioned to take the ideological ground and turn it into a land of fruitfulness.