Spirit-Inspired Shared Meaning

            All communication is based on one vital principle: shared meaning. If I ask you if you have a dog, you can answer the question easily because we both understand what the word dog refers to. It doesn’t matter if the picture of that word in your head is different from mine. There’s enough shared meaning that we can talk about a dog.
            What if I ask you if you have a schlapple? You can’t possibly answer that question because you have no idea what a schlapple is. We have no shared understanding of that word.
            What difference does this make? All the difference in the world. Especially in our current culture. You see, there has been a deliberate strategy to muddy our language so that we cannot know for sure what a person means when they say a particular word.
            I call it Satan’s Babel revenge. His goal is division. His method is inciting people to redefine words. And his target in not just worldly unbelievers. The redefinition is just as rampant in the Church, particularly when it comes to end-time terminology.  Think: “reset” or “awakening.”
            It’s gotten to the point where it is hard to use certain biblical terms because they no longer mean the same thing, even among the Body of Christ. We have to take the time to add all sorts of caveats to make sure we are not misunderstood.
            We saw this when we highlighted the Spirit-inspired connections concerning the end-times in God’s Word. Words such as tribulation, great tribulation, birth pains, and the Day of the Lord have been muddied to the point that shared meaning is next to impossible.
            We hope to wash away the mud with the water of His Word (Eph. 5:26) in our next video series and blogs so that the Church can walk in love, walk in the light, and walk in wisdom in these times.
Once the mud is gone, it is our prayer and hope that the confusion over the end-time views will clear up as well. At least for those who are willing to set aside their preconceived ideas and search the Scriptures with us.
            We need to walk in the shared meaning intended by the Holy Spirit and recorded by the founding apostles in the New Testament. We will be looking at the key biblical terms concerning the end-times. First up, the “tribulation."
            It’s time to thwart the enemy’s strategy.   It’s time that “we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ” (Eph. 4:13-15).