The photo above is an image of a vein. Veins are designed to carry blood toward the heart. Blood is designed to go to the heart, from where it is pumped out again to take life to the rest of the body. Notice that in this picture, though, that blood flow is restricted by two dark clots. The amount of blood reaching the heart - and the rest of the body - is less than ideal.
Consider that the Church is the heart of the kingdom of God. Blood cells are individuals brought to the church through the vein of God's choosing. There, at the heart, they are given a purpose, a mission to carry life into the rest of the world - a body dead without those little Christians coursing through the arteries of its limbs, generating new cells to be carried back into the heart to begin the cycle afresh.
What happens when we allow darkness to enter the Church?
1 John 1.5-7
This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.
1 John cuts straight to the core, and without apology, John asserts that darkness has NO place in the Church. When we walk in darkness, we become clots in the veins of God's kingdom. Many of those cells that would otherwise be pumped into the heart, repurposed, and sent back into the world to bring more into the kingdom will never enter a heart clotted with darkness.
Today's Church is in desperate need of a cardiac catheterization. We must flush out the darkness (or bypass stubborn clots) to allow God to bring a fresh flow of life into the chambers of our churches and out into the far appendages of the world.
-mo
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