Author: Joshua Johnson

February 8, 2024

On Thursday, February 8, 2024 the word of the Lord came to me, saying:

Nations of the earth, long have I tolerated your nation-building, world-conquering, annihilation of My creation. Long have I looked the other way while you have committed atrocities upon My earth, ofttimes in My Name. I have shown mercy when you have been merciless; I have shown restraint when you have followed your covetous desires; I have allowed you to trample My capitals when you have assaulted the freedoms of others in your quest for dominance and order and peace. My toleration of these and other sins is now ended.

In the days to come, I will upend the lordship you exercise over your constituents. When the floods come to assault your shores, I will turn your people against you. There will be riots in the streets and armed conflicts in the cities. I will set your people free from your tyranny of lies and deceptions. I will wrangle from you your power and might, and I will give it to the humble and the poor of the land.

Long I have tolerated the persecution of My people and the adulteration of My Gospel. As I judge the leaders of the church, so, too, will I judge the leaders of men. None will escape the darkness of the days to come, for you have sowed to the darkness, and you will reap what you have sown. Chaos will reign supreme in the days and years ahead; chaos and confusion—a darkness that can be felt. I will bring ruin to the fields and to the forests, to the winds and to the waves, to the corn and to the maize, to the rice and to the wheat. I will send a blight against your growings and pestilence to consume your crops and your children. I will call upon the gods you have worshipped and the knowledge you have accumulated to save you from My hand, O nations of the earth. Devastation and ruin will remain behind when bounty was ahead.

Why would I assault you in these ways, O great nations of the earth? Are My ways unjust? No! It is your ways that are unjust. You have denied My existence, pillaged My stores of knowledge, and called yourselves gods of the heavens and the earth. You have exalted your intelligence and your knowing, claiming divinity in your comings and goings. No more, great and wicked generation, who sows to the flesh and cultivates wrongdoing as righteousness. My people lay imprisoned, the poor locked out, the sick and grieving wallowing in the streets of your greatness.

Learn repentance, O great nations, and be healed. Look to the poor, the dispossessed, the vulnerable, the demon-possessed, the orphan, the alien among you. None should have so much and none so little as you deem just and right. Sell all you have and give it to the poor, and I may turn from My great wrath and delay your destruction by years or decades. But continue as you have walked, and your days will end in misery and blood.

The Word of the Lord has spoken. Amen

The Road Ahead (July 2023)

In August of 2021 I posted an update which I entitled, “Signing Off.” If you haven’t heard it and are interested you can listen HERE. As I explained in that podcast discussion, my slow walk of obedience from public to more localized service of God and His Church had begun years earlier and had come to a climax in January of 2021 when I stepped down from full-time pastoral ministry and resigned both my credentials and my membership as a pastor in the Church of the Nazarene, a Wesleyan-American Holiness Denomination. But even after that departure, I had not given up on building an online preaching and teaching platform.

I interpreted the conviction I was feeling which led to the “Signing Off” discussion in August of that year as a call to give up that pursuit. And so, from that point forward I stepped away from my attempts to build a preaching and teaching platform online by ceasing to follow the best practices recommended by those who provide advice for building, maintaining, and extending an online presence.

During that same month, the Lord led me to begin attending a small local church near my home with the instruction that I had to be prepared to lead that congregation. In obedience I began attending, and in early December one of the denominational leaders asked me to serve as an interim minister, despite my then having no credentials. I accepted and spent 16 months as the interim minister there.

I am now a month out of that ministry, and the Lord’s call to sign off has deepened. My next steps are to vacate most of social media. For the foreseeable future, I will continue to maintain a YouTube channel, this website, and a podcast. But as of August 1, 2023 I will be departing from all other social media. My hope for what remains of my web presence is that it might serve as a resource for those who are reading through the Bible personally or studying the Bible in small groups. I am currently teaching through the Gospel of Luke, and I will continue to post those lessons on YouTube and on the podcast.

Though my future, especially in terms of paid employment, is unsettled, I am grateful for the Lord’s conviction and call to follow Him into a different way of serving the Church than I had formerly imagined. I and my family are in the process of joining a local church, and we will continue to serve Jesus as members of that local body. I am also editing my previously posted sermons to remove contextual details, exhortations that were specific to a particular congregation at a particular time, and dated illustrations which were meant originally to make the main point more accessible. What remains is the core message of each sermon along with, what I consider to be, less time-constricted applications. Again, I hope that these efforts along with the ongoing teaching episodes will serve the people of God in the days ahead.

It has been nearly seven years since the Lord first began convicting me that the vocation of full-time paid pastoral ministry had been leading me away from the worship of God—that somehow both that vocation and my loyalty to a particular religious tradition within the larger Christian Church which supported it had become idols which were supplanting God in my life. I have found that the Lord is patient with His calling and conviction. If He had asked me to do all He has asked me to do at one time, I wonder if I couldn’t have managed the courage to obey. But by His grace, He has convicted me incrementally and led me one step at a time. This is the next step in that process, and I trust it will not be the last.

Thank you to those who have encouraged me in the teaching and preaching of the Word of God over these nearly twenty-three years of paid pastoral service to the church. As I said, I will continue to provide lessons from the Scriptures, and I will continue to write both on this blog and in books as encouragements to discipleship in our historic and apostolic faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

I remain convinced that we are in a season of God’s call to the Church to repent. I believe that what we are experiencing both nationally and globally are the Lord’s locusts, allowing us to sample the true nature of the world if God were to remove His providential work of creation and governance. During the last 23 years of vocational ministry, I have added my voice to the hundreds of Christian voices over the last five centuries calling the people of God to return to our first love and to the testimonies of those God has chosen to reveal His Word to His people. May those who have ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches. Godspeed.

J. Thomas Johnson

For those who might be helped by them, below are links to the books I have currently published through Amazon.com. At present, I am working on a treatise on God’s election, God’s Sovereignty, and human free will, which I hope to complete in the next year.