A Deeper Revelation of Jesus Christ: The Secret to a Christ-Centered Life – Part 2 -Gene Edwards

Well, it is called a parachurch organization. Parachurch, to what church? You mean para to a building? Get to know the people who run those organizations. They run those organizations because the church is boring and they’re having fun out there. Traveling to Albania, traveling to places and preaching and raising money and having their wonderful meetings, they are a substitute for something terribly boring. The church of our Lord Jesus Christ is not understood and experienced. I want you to know that when you see Him, you will be ruined toward 11 a.m. on Sunday morning because when you catch a sight of Him, a part of Him is her, because she’s in Him. As sure as Eve was in Adam, she’s in Him.

May the Lord give the day. You go home and pray this…I urge you to. May the Lord open the eyes of American Christians to see the ekklesia and long for her. I brought all that up to say to you, you may go out and say this, but not with my blessing. Oh, but Gene, wherever three or four gathered together in the name of the Lord, there’s church. Excuse me, but I was born and raised in Texas. And there is a term we use that, if you use it outside of Texas, it’s not nice, but unless you people have gotten awfully sophisticated, then this still just means what it means. When you say where two or three are gathered together in the name of the Lord, there is the church, my response is…bull.

That’s a perfect example of our having never seen her. She is a community; she is a civilization; she is a people who are one with one another throughout their entire lives, committed to each other. She’s a live-or-die situation. She has a passport; she has a passport to the Eternals. She is part of the Eternals, and she is a colony on this earth of the heavens INHABITED by people who are sons of the living God and are not part of the species walking around on this planet. That’s what she is: she meets, she gathers, and she cares for one another. And the two or three gathered in His name are people in the church who are trying to figure out whether or not to throw someone out of the church. There is not anything pleasant about “where two or three are gathered in my name; there I am in the midst of them.” That’s a terrible situation. It’s a situation that has to do with dealing with someone who is turned away from the faith. When did that ever become something sweet?

If you want to pray something tonight when you go home, pray that the Lord would take the fat, the dumb, and the happy and work something deep into us, that we could come to comprehend. For instance, that all those verses we quote come out of letters to churches; that we could come to see her and fall in love with her and stop the sermon sipping and the church hopping and come to a full commitment to one another right where we live. Come hell or high water, and be held together by a Lord who is exalted on high, who is glorious, and who is worth the suffering and pain of putting up with one another.

I think I brought this up because, you know, I enjoy reading the saints of the dark ages and the Catholics; that’s all that were around. You can see the corruption in what they write, and then you can see the glimpses, and some of it’s really pure. Not much, but a little of it, but boy, it’s worth me picking it out, putting it in their book for you to read it without all the other mess. Every one of those people got in trouble with the church without exception. They all got in trouble with the church of their day.

It is true, and I must warn you that the best you can hope for is that you will be miserable going to church the rest of your life. That’s the very best you can hope for. So maybe you better go home and say, “Lord, I like it just the way it is. I love getting dressed up on Sunday morning, and I like to go down there, and I got a great preacher, and I love that singing. That choir is great. My dear child of God, if that’s true, then stay there because those of us who can’t handle that are no better than you are. We are no better than you are, and you’re no better than we are either.