The Forerunner Times

"A life journal by Nathan J. Elias, called under God's grace to be His forerunner and restorer for His glory."

The Second Calling
by Nathan J. Elias - 9 February 2007

If you’ve read my previous writings in my blog, you will notice that at times, I grow weary of not getting mature quickly enough and I felt that I was not quite “getting there” at times. Well, thanks to God, everything changes in 2007. Things went so fast, and in this first month only, I have received a lot of things from Him, more than what I received in the whole 2006. But well, each year has its own purpose and story, I guess.

This 2007 began with a commitment to renew my life and grow more spiritually mature for Him. Then suddenly a mission and vision comes to me. It all began with a new name. Elias, which means “forerunner”, one who opens the way before the LORD, much like what John the Baptist did in the New Testament. I am to be the one who open people’s hearts and pave the way so that Jesus can come in there. And I’m doing this not for just anyone, but for GOD, so there comes my name of Jehovah-Elias (God’s forerunner).

I must admit that at first I wondered myself whether I picked that name just to sound cool, or it’s really a name that God wants me to take into my life, along with a purpose, vision and mission that comes along with it. I kept praying for it, and soon, I totally forgot how did I come upon that name and how did I first think of it. What’s inside my mind is only that God wants the name for me and God wants me to do a life of mission for Him, touching other people’s hearts through my sharing and experiences (such as this) and point them to the way of life.

The meaning of forerunner does not only apply to unbelievers. I was also used lately to strengthen and share my life with other believers who are seeking God’s purposes in their lives. God has sent me four people to minister to so far, and I believe not by accident. What those people seek and experience are the same with what I experienced myself, so I can relate quickly with them. So here, I “prepare” them for the right way and true purpose, preparing them to be used for God’s own plan and His highest honor. This might also relate to the second meaning of Elias, which is “restorer”. I restore those who have lost their path and are now seeking for God’s plan. I try to lead them back to God’s path, so that God can use them mightily.

It’s funny to see how God seems to have a three-year cycle in His plans of my life. Back then in 2001, I was baptized without really understanding the true meaning of it. It was a meaningless act of ritual, which my church told me to take only because I was 17 already and by tradition, people in my church are baptized by 17 if they have been there long enough (since Sunday School and so on). Then on 2004, I received my true calling and became truly born-again. God opened my passion for music and arts back then, and it made me understood who He really is and what a Christian life is supposed to be all about. He put people into my life who taught me many things and made me into what I am today.

On 2007, He gave me a new name and a true calling, a new mission and vision of life, that I learned as I was reading the Purpose Driven Life book (and the Cat and Dog theology, which is a good read). I don’t know if He will have something new again for me by 2010, but for now, I’ll just live my life with the purpose He has given me. Touch others day by day with my life, willing to be used in every opportunity and chance that He planned for me. Minister to those people He has sent me by His divine appointment. Become a living testimony, an “open book” for others to read. In short, become a “daily missionary” that can lead others to the true salvation, Jesus Christ.

I also have some other personal missions for Him that I cannot share here at the moment, but if those missions are from God himself, He will open the way and empower me to fulfill it. The three weeks of my return to Indonesia will be partly for that mission. I pray that He will continually find use for me in my life, so that my life can be a life full of service for His own purpose, plan and glory. I will have to daily remember that my life is not my own, but it is His. He shall use it as He see fit, as He knows the best way to bring the best in me out for His glory.

May the name of the LORD be glorified. Amen.

The Door and The Key
by “Nathan J. Elias” - 1 February 2007.

God gave each one of us different talents, abilities and gifts that we must use for His purposes. More often than not, though, when we first accepted Jesus into our lives, we didn’t know what potentials we have and what gifts we can use to bring glory to His name. It’s like God has given us a lot of things, but those things lie behind a special door, locked with a special keyhole that only a special key can open. A unique key, one that is made to open your door and unleash the potential that lies beyond that door.

The church is the key. God has given them the responsibility to nurture the growth of the believers and help them find and achieve their true purpose in life, that is to glorify God with all their have and what God has given them. As each of us is unique and have our own special keyholes, there are also a vast number of churches in this world and one of them has been specially designed to fit our keyhole and open the door. This is also one reason why we shouldn’t dispute between the large number of denominations and claim that one is better than the other, for every one of the churches are made according to God’s own design and purpose, as part of the Body of Christ. They were made to nurture and attend to different kinds of believers, each becoming unique keys to open up the different types of doors that each believer may have.

Now what will happen if you force a key that doesn’t fit into a keyhole, trying to open the door? Which one will be broken in the end? The key or the keyhole?

The answer is both.

When we force ourselves to serve and minister in ways that we’re not made to, we will either become bored or disgruntled, and soon our ministry will lose their meaning. Either we will stop ministering because we can find no meaning, or we can keep on ministering without meaning, both of which are bad for our spiritual health and growth. In this manner, our door is now left unopened because there is a wrong key on the keyhole that prevented us to put in the right key and open the door. We lose every reason to open the door, and we lose the desire to find the right key to open the door and we just leave the non-fitting key as it is on the keyhole. We just let things be, satisfied with the closed door, thinking “that’s as far as I get on opening the door”.

Ministering in the wrong place can also bring pain and hurt, and block us from opening the door. I tried ministering in music when I was in high school, but my high school fellowship was not the place to nurture my musical talent, and in the end I experienced a hurt that kept me out from the music ministry for more than four years, thinking that it was not my talent. I didn’t realize that actually music IS on the other side of my door, because my wrong environment made me think otherwise, thus in this manner, by forcing to open the door, the false key have broken up the keyhole. It took me a long time before God fixed my broken keyhole, called me again to the ministry and this time provided me with the right key, the right church, to open my door, unlocking my potential on the musical ministry.

Doing the wrong ministry can also bring harm to the church. It has the potential to prevent others with a true calling to that ministry to do the ministry, because we are doing it. Let’s say that we are actually not called to be a songleader, but we keep on doing it out of obligation and duty. Another person who actually have the talent to be a songleader could not minister there because there were no room for him to join the ministry. In the end, he either went to another church and became a songleader there, or were forced to took part in another ministry that is not his true calling (and breaking his keyhole). Thus, the key has become dull and out of shape, losing its ability to open the doors it should have opened, and in turn, damaging the church itself. Ministry in the church began to lose meaning and effectiveness, and many people are left in the dark with their true potentials unrealized.

The question I want to ask you today is, “Have you found the right key?”. Do not force a key that doesn’t fit your shape into your keyhole, you will only damage yourself, others and the church. God won’t be pleased with that.

We can also have more than one door in our lives. I thank God that he has given me two churches, two keys that each opened up different doors in my life. The first one opened my musical talents, and the other one opened my evangelical, counseling and encouragement or sharing talents. I never knew I was cut out to share to others, to speak to others and help them and encourage them to find their true calling and their way to Christ. It has only been since last month that God opened up this door for me, before I would never have imagined I had this talent and calling. It has also called me to write a lot lately, because I learn a lot of things from sharing and listening to others, that I felt that I must share these experiences with others too with my writings. These were a whole new dimension of me, a whole new lot of potentials that I never knew were lying dormant inside me.

When your spiritual growth seems to have stopped, ask God whether you still have another door that He wants you to open. If the answer is yes, ask for His guidance and calling to show you the right place to nurture your next phase of spiritual growth, to “find your next key and open the next door”.

The Mountain Road
by “Nathan J. Elias” - 22 January 2007.

There are moments in life where I felt like my spiritual maturity would never be able to go further than it is already. Everytime I took a step forward, I took another five steps backward. It feels like the struggle to reach spiritual maturity is a trivial one. You go very slowly up the mountain, and yet one small slip on the way up would send you tumbling back again to ground zero. When you think of reaching spiritual maturity as a journey to go towards the peak of a mountain, you feel like the road is so slippery that you would never ever be able to reach the top. In this moment in life, when I needed just another truth to move my life back on the track again, God provided me with an allusion that helped me understood it all.

Take this spiritual journey as going up the mountain road by a car. If you drove manual, you’ll understand this truth better. When you go with your car up a mountain, do you go by the first gear or you go by the final gear? Of course, you’ll use the first gear (even the strongest car with the most experienced driver out there won’t dare climb a mountain on full speed with the final gear, no matter what those mountain drift movies told us). The first gear, while slow, gives you the most power (torque) out of your car. It gives you stability. No matter how slow it may be, you’re sure that at the end of the day, you’ll eventually reach the top. Even though at times your engine won’t be strong enough to take it all in one stride and you need to take stops to cool down and rest the engine along the way, you know, you will still get to the top this way.

There’s a spiritual lesson to be learned from this. Most of the time, we want to go towards that maturity peak as soon as possible, as fast as we can. Well, just like a car speeding towards the mountain peak can fall towards the bottom of the ravine, going too fast at your own set pace can send you towards the bottom of the pit. Learn to follow God’s pace, not yours. It may be a seemingly slow-paced journey up the mountain, but with God, who knows the mountain road best and knows the best pace for you to tackle it on, you’re sure to reach the top one day. It may be a hard journey with a lot of breakdowns, tears and agony - God understands it.

At times where you can’t take it anymore, He will give you rest. He will ask you to hand your burden to Him and He will carry you through it all. There may be some rests and “pit-stops” that you will need along the way - moments when you’ll need to get closer to God and understand His Word and purpose for your life, moments that will cool down any tension and stress you might have in your life and “refuel your tank” for the next trip up the mountain. Don’t push it all the way at once. As a car’s engine might overheat and break down from the pressure, you too can experience mental, spiritual and emotional breakdowns from your life’s pressure. Know when to stop and take a rest, taking a leave from your day-to-day trivialities to spend time with God, asking Him to heal you, refresh you, revitalize and reinvigorate you and provide you with strength for the coming day.

The next lesson we can learn comes from the question, “How do you get a car to go backwards when going up a mountain?”. Simple, you don’t even need to put the car into reverse or even neutral for that to happen. Just do nothing. The same principle applies to our spiritual lives. You don’t need an effort to backslide. Just do nothing - no prayers, no devotional times, no studying God’s word, nothing. Sometimes we may think that by doing nothing, we won’t be going up but we won’t be going down either. This is a very wrong and dangerous principle. Satan keeps trying to pull us down every moment in our lives, that’s why, like the way gravity pulls down your car in a mountain road, during the uphill battle of spiritual maturity, doing nothing will make you backslide, because there is a force out there that is pulling you down.

It is far easier for us to go down than to go up, far easier to backslide than to grow to maturity. But with God in our side, we will be abled to reach that goal He has set for us. Even though sometimes we may feel we’re going at the first gear, know that we’re making progress. And just as there’s no man crazy enough not to do anything when his car starts to go backwards in a mountain, we must do the same with our spiritual lives. When you feel you’re going down, hit the brakes, pull the handbrake! Stabilize yourself and keep going again, even with the first gear. As time passes, we will grow familiar with the temptations and tactics that Satan is using on us (as we grow familiar with the mountain road the more we tackle it on), and we will eventually be able to move up and up, no matter how slow-paced it may be, towards our final destination with God.