Who's running the operation?

We’re ambassadors. II Cor. 5:20. Paul’s very clear about what our function in ministry is.
Jordan says, “I love that verse Eph. 4:1. There’s a vocation associated with your calling. Our ministry is to go out and preach that message of reconciliation IN the world and TO the world.

"In order to carry out our ambassadorship we need to understand the world in which we live and how it operates. Otherwise we’re just going to be drifting along, or we’re going to be carried along by the flow, and that’s what I fear. I don’t want somebody else running my life. I don’t want to be controlled and run. I want to live on purpose. I want to live on faith.

“When you gather big nations of people together, what you’re going to get are some cycles in the way that nation works that are going to cover the ‘seasons’ of a person’s lifespan. The cycles are going to go through spring, summer, fall and winter.

“If you study history, you can identify those turnings. Historians who don’t know the Bible have done this. When you take what they’ve done and put it together with biblical understanding, it’s a fascinating overlay.

“Every great historian has studied history in a cyclical pattern. The problem they had is they just didn’t know where to go to get the pattern that was real. They didn’t know about Gen. 8, Ecclesiastes 3 (or didn’t know how to apply it).

“In American history, we are in the seventh one of these cycles. If you go back to the founding of the Anglo-American culture in Britain (that’s where our laws and systems and the whole foundation of the culture come from), we’re in the 4th cycle that’s all-American. The dates are kind of fascinating.

“There’s 1946 to 1964 (spring); 1964-1984 (summer); 1984-2005 (fall); 2005-2025 (winter). The one before this started in 1865-1886. What ended in 1945? WW II. What ended in 1865? Civil War. Every cycle has a major war. Wars in each one of these seasons is different. Wars in winter are different that wars in spring and summer. In spring, it’s a standoff. Think of the Korean War.

“Remember the War of 1812? Does anybody even know what it was about? When you remember WWII, what happens? Your heart thumps a little bit, pride comes up in you and you say, ‘Wow, we did something!’ With Vietnam, you say, ‘Totally pointless. What was the use of that?’ You weren’t the first generation that ever said that. The previous war in that same cycle was the Spanish-American War. Choked up about that one? But you do about the Civil War.

“Wars fought in the fall are strange wars that are quickly won and soon forgotten. Think of Desert Storm.”

(Editor’s note: To be continued . . .)