I can't remember when I first came on the idea of the Courts of Heaven. I guess it wasn't long ago, a few months or maybe a year or so. At any rate, it's not something that immediately caught my attention and made me pay attention to it, until very recently.
Once I started looking into it, though, it soon enough got my interest and attention, and for all kinds of reasons.
This doesn't yet seem to have become a major, popular teaching in the church, though I have my suspicions that it will catch on more and more in the next few years, and become something major. My plan is to go into why I think that way at the end of this book, so let me just tease it a little by saying that I think this teaching about the Courts of Heaven will become more and more popular because it gives the faith healers and Word of Faith bellowers the things they want most.
I'm sure most people who call themselves Christians would consider humility to be a virtue, something the Bible commends to us. I'm sure that we can think of ways in which this virtue can be faked, or misconstrued, or done badly. Passivity, for example, is a false form of humility. A soppy, milquetoast attitude would be another. The postmodern attitude of extreme uncertainty is another form of it, and often enough it's a lie, as those who claim we should be uncertain are only trying to sneak in their own certainties. Even pride can disguise itself as humility.
Dignity so often suffers the same fate. Pride is often mistaken for dignity. We can easily imagine the person with a haughty bearing being considered dignified.
But just as humility is not discarded just because there are fake forms of it, so too should dignity not be discarded, thoughtoo often it seems to be discarded, as Bill Johnson discarded it.
Dignity and humility. Even now, those seem like two strange things to combine. But the truth is, the Bible commends both of them to us. We are to be humble, and we are to be dignified, and it may well be said that we cannot be the one without being the other.
If you take a look at the events over the past few decades that have been considered “moves of God” by many people, it seems that dignity and self-control are two virtues that have all too easily been thrown aside by those claiming to be hungry for more of God, wanting to be in on what God is doing, or any such similar thing.
The buffoonery is staggering. You can see a video of a man named John Scotland, apparently a speaker at the Toronto outpouring, acting like he's had a few pints too many, even telling the people that “I've been going through different stages of drunkenness, and the stage I'm at at the moment is slouching. I've gone through the hiccup stage. I've gone through the stage of heckling the preachers” And that's before he starts making trumpet and rooster sounds whenever he's trying to read anything from the Bible.
"It could be considered a sure sign of decadence when we try to make prayer into a way of getting the good life, when we get chastised because we don't dream big enough to inspire God to act. We live in a world where many Christians live under various kinds of suppressions and persecutions, where Christians in North Korea live in inhumane conditions in state prisons in which they suffer physical tortures and even starvation, where many countries restrict churches' abilities to meet and spread the Gospel. You need only look up places like Voice of the Martyrs to see numerous examples of the ways believers in other parts of the world suffer.
"Yet far too many of our “pastors” seem more concerned that we should “have God-sized dreams”, whatever those might be, and to be more concerned with having a life of adventure and fulfillment. All of it dressed up in Christian-like language, of course. You getting your dream job is justified if it can be called “spreading the kingdom”."
