The Mercy Season

If you know me very well, you've probably heard me talk about the Redemptive Gifts as enumerated in Romans 12:6 - 8. The teaching on the gifts has been extremely meaningful to me, and I love trying to figure out what gift a person has. I've even gone so far as to create a questionnaire to use to determine people's gifts. Why are these gifts so important to understand? "Identity is central." If you know who you are and who you were designed to be, you will be better able to make decisions about what you should be doing in your life and how you should be doing it.

As I understand the gifts, each person is designed with one primary gift in which to operate. We do well to cultivate the strengths of all the gifts, but one of them will feel like "home" to each of us. Here's a brief description of the gifts (in order, which is important, as we'll see later).

Prophet: designed to solve problems based on understanding and application of God's principles
Servant: designed to create an atmosphere in which everyone else can thrive
Teacher: designed to heal those who have been spiritually or emotionally wounded by applying God's truth to their lives
Exhorter: designed to reveal the nature of God through encouraging others
Giver: designed to provide resources for people and programs
Ruler: designed to pull together a team of people to accomplish complicated tasks
Mercy: designed to bring the spiritual climate into right alignment through the blessing of presence

Bill Gothard (of the Institute of Basic Life Principles) was the one who first recognized these seven gifts as a different category of gifts from the "manifestation gifts" of I Corinthians 12. Arthur Burk of Plumbline Ministries has fleshed out the concept by coordinating the redemptive gifts with other lists of sevens in Scripture. For example, a Prophet may gain special understanding of himself and his design by studying the first day of creation, the first words of Christ spoken from the cross, and the first letter to the churches in Revelation.

Arthur Burk went on to apply the redemptive gifts to land. As part of a city-reaching strategy, he encourages believers to determine the redemptive gift of their city and to pray and act with that design in mind. When I first heard this teaching, I was quite skeptical. How can cities have redemptive gifts? Yet each of us knows intuitively that one city "feels" different from another. Cities do seem to have a personality of their own; could this be the redemptive gift coming through? After listening to Arthur Burk's "Redemptive Gifts of Cities" CD set, I'm now comfortable with that concept.

In fact, I've tried my hand at determining the redemptive gifts of some cities in my area. I may give more details in a future post about how I have arrived at these designations.

Champlin: Servant
Dayton: Mercy
Anoka: Teacher
Brooklyn Park: Giver
Maple Grove: Giver
Osseo: Mercy

I had lots of fun applying this teaching to cities; it helped me view my mission field in a different way. I was pleased that I had been able to wrap my mind around this concept and gain fresh insight because of it that I hope to be able to use to advance Christ's kingdom.

The next time I turned around, however, Arthur Burk was applying the redemptive gifts to time and history. This was indeed a stretch! I was starting to question whether my favorite Bible teacher had gone off the deep end, but I decided to hear him out. After listening to his "Mercy Season" CD set, I was easily able to see how the redemptive gifts can be applied to the seasons of the New Testament era. Having been raised in a fundamentalist Baptist church and Bible College, I had heard many sermons and teachings about how the seven letters to the churches recorded in the book of Revelation parallel the time periods of the Christian era. Since Arthur Burk believes the letters parallel the redemptive gifts, this is another way of expressing the same concept. Here are the eras that Arthur Burk suggests:

Prophet: Jesus through the apostles
Servant: the persecuted church from 100 - 300 A.D.
Teacher: the dark and middle ages; the monastic era
Exhorter: the Renaissance and Reformation
Giver: the century of missions (the 1800s)
Ruler: the 20th century in which institutions and programs were built
Mercy: the current era, beginning in 2004

Arthur gives reasons for placing the conception of the Mercy Season in 2004. His primary rationale is that at that point leaders in many different streams of the body of Christ began to notice that the things they had been doing weren't working anymore. Have you noticed a change in the way the time "feels" now compared to four or five years ago? You may feel slightly out of place, or restless, or unfulfilled. A major hallmark of the Mercy Season seems to be that institutions pale in importance compared to intimacy and relationships.

Does the Mercy Season have eschatological significance? Well, we know that the Bible says that the end times will have something in common with the days of Noah. Genesis 5:28 says, "He (Lamech) named him Noah and said, 'He will comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed.'" Sounds like mercy, right? The mercy gift parallels the seventh day of creation in which God "rested from all his work."

Arthur believes that we are entering only the second Mercy Season since the beginning of time. He suggests that the seasons look like a wave: Time began with Adam in a Prophet Season and the curve descended through Seth, Enoch, and Methuselah until it reached its nadir at Noah; it then began to rise throughout the Old Testament period, revisiting the gifts in reverse order. Here's my suggestion for how the time periods might have lined up.

Mercy: Noah
Ruler: Abraham through Moses
Giver: Joshua and Judges
Exhorter: Israel's united kingdom
Teacher: Israel's divided kingdom and the Exile
Servant: 400 years of silence
Prophet: Jesus' first coming

The wave then continued with the seasons coming in one through seven order. This could mean that we are in the final season before Christ's return--we are nearing the second nadir of the wave. Then again, there could be another cycle--who knows?

It seemed funny to me that time would end at the nadir of the wave, but then I considered that the seasons could go backwards again through the millenium, reaching a zenith with another Prophet period at which time God would create a New Heaven and a New Earth. Time ceases at that point (I think).

What should we do about the Mercy Season? The mercy gift is all about relationship, spiritual intimacy, and worship. I have observed that the youth of today have no tolerance for facades; they value transparency. Of course, there is no true intimacy without transparency. I believe God will (and already is) working differently in the Mercy Season than He did during the Ruler Season. It was easy to focus on performance in the Ruler Season, and we were probably able to get away with it. But now God is more than ever calling us to BE the church, not just DO church. Our faith must permeate all facets of our lives, from our employment, to our friendships, to our community involvement, to our family relationships.

Now more than ever I believe God is calling us to have relationships with our family members that represent who He is. To reach our communities during the Mercy Season, we need to have our act together. We need to be able to be transparent. Reconciliation within our families and then within the body of Christ is "Job One," at least for me for now. I don't believe we as individuals will be released to impact the culture until we have done the hard work necessary to be reconciled to everyone in our lives. Jesus said, "If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift" (Matthew 5:23-24).

For those who have already passed this milestone, I think it's time to connect with people on a very real and intimate level. I don't think people are going to be reached primarily through church outreach programs. They will be reached by the Church in the marketplace: everyday Christians exerting their influence on society and in one-on-one relationships. I believe the prayer evangelism approach planted during the latter years of the Ruler Season will mature and bear its best fruit during the Mercy Season.

But, when it comes down to it, I'm just as much a learner in this Mercy Season as everyone else is. We are waiting on God to see what He will reveal in this new season. I just know it's going to be exciting, and I want to be in the middle of it getting my hands dirty!