The Iron Stag

Taking Your Stand as a Christian Man

Burn What Must Die

The age is thick with smoke—some of it from fires God Himself has kindled in judgment, and some of it only fog, drifting illusions made by broken consciences and collapsing institutions.

The Christian man must learn to see through both.

Fog Demands Discernment; Fire Demands Repentance.

The Iron Stag does not charge at shadows, nor does he flee when the underbrush crackles. He tests the air. He anchors his weight. He knows what must be burned and what must be borne.

The first thing to burn is the belief that the suspicion of others proves your posture as aggressor, as though the discomfort of others with your presence means it is now your task to bend your witness.

Suspicion is not verdict; it is the nervous system of a cowardly age sensing the solidity of a man whom it cannot control. When you soften truth to accommodate this unstable spirit, you take the fog of darkness into your own lungs.

Let the Inversion Die.

Burn the belief that you must justify your witness to those scared of the fog. Men and women who get swept up into dissociative ideologies of the screaming wind, into sentimental revolution and global conformity, cover the transparent intimacy of God with a mask of compassion. But charity does not scream, “Love is love!” Turning the other cheek means acknowledging the strike. Choosing to “rather be wronged” (1 Cor 6) means accepting that wrong is wrong, and being bigger, stronger, greater than the world.

The Christian, anchored in Jesus Christ, need not argue with the foggy mirage. You stand until the wind separates the Good Seed from the shadows cast by tares. Vapor cannot harm the stag. Fog cannot harm the forest. This demand for a constant posture of self-justification burns itself out into meaningless ash.

So, burn the belief that the Christian calling means you must provide for the comfort of the hard-hearted. A man need not secure the praise of the worldly to guarantee obedience in the courtroom of Jesus Christ. The duty to protect, provide and serve is real, but obedience to men is downstream from obedience to God. When the order of nature is reversed, allegiance to scarcity has but one God: still more Fear.

He Owns the Thousand Hills

So burn the belief that your authority depends on the approval of others. Institutions may help or hinder as they rise and fall. But the Word of God is never void. The Christian is unified with Jesus Christ, not from systems built on sand, but because the Rock has already fallen on you. So you are crushed, but not destroyed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken. Your affliction is never the end of you.

Always bearing in the body the dying of Jesus Christ burns away the belief that your voice is small simply because the surrounding cult of culture chooses deafness. Silence from the enemy has no power to twist the Word within. A generation of mutes and scoffers does not measure the resonance of the Christian who speaks from the marrow of conviction. The lie burns away into nothing. The false name of the accusation does not rest. That is its own curse: more Fear.

But perfected love under the cross drives away these ghosts and forges weak knees into strong stands. He forges witness as identity, a root built not on the architecture of men, nor bound to the ancestral norms of generational sin, but founded on the One who is both Alpha and the Omega.

The Christian stands because Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. You are paid for! You are immortal.

Now

Christ is firstborn witness to the solidity of Life built on the bones of heaven. The marrow in that body is an identity no tribunal of rage or hysteria can revoke. You are born again to forge confidence: Scripture is your total authorization. The mission is not without Spirit and Power. You are no author of opinions, but a bearer of the oracles of God.

When preferences shout down the promises, when suggestion reveals the shame, when projection rejects the mind of the Living God, the Bible on your lips is the Word within your heart. You do not rise by self-expression, self-defense or even self-denial. You rise sovereign-saved. You are forged by the Maker: iron to sharpen iron, the Stag in the Wood giving calm by presence as the world scurries about in its greedy scorn.

Psalmic prayer, Proverbial living, and Red-Letter wisdom are the outward expression of the inward working of the Spirit. Prayer is the breath of Christian authority. Wisdom the frame of upright decisions. The parables of Jesus are the light by which the measure is grace alone.

This is Supernatural.

Christian presence is a sacramental stabilizer against the unstable cries of the fog-bound. Where there is smoke, there is fire. Where there is presence to discern, a gift is bestowed. The Christian is stillness in a world allergic to stillness; gravity in a world addicted to weightlessness; orientation in a culture that has forgotten true north.

Build on the Rock. This is quiet courage, that which is silent in the face of accusation but never afraid to call a thing what it is. Speak the Name of God before men because Christ commands you to build. Stand in the fire that He placed you in because, when the storms devour the works of our hands, it is to reveal the foundation of gold that ever remains

And Others Will Find Shelter Beneath You

Election is inevitable. You did not choose Him. So, rise like the Iron Stag in the fog-bound wood. Plant your hooves in ground that no man can shake. Build your house on the Rock that does not shift when voices do. Make your stance worship. Trust your stability to proclamation. Deliver your fears to the One who judges justly, who has already called you “friend.”

Dominion is not rage or retaliation. Reign is the still declaration that you belong to the Father. Shame has no claim here. Forgiveness, not divorce, rules supreme.

The wolves and goats will scatter. The fog will make the motion seem loveless. The confusion will break over you like waves on the shore. But as the surf cannot move the stone, so the Iron Stag within you will stand, holding the clearing with presence, a member of the everlasting Body, your trust the truest testimony to His Presence.

Every storm is a passing shower. Every hour is the moment of the Day. Truth is strongest in the company of the righteous, and no fog may put an end to our fellowship.

The forest is no threat. The smoky vapor will clear. The fire, where it burns, will purify. And the Iron Stag will remain, and the voice of the accuser will drift away on the wind.