Winona Conference Part 2 – You’re Made for Two Realms – What Is the True Church?

All right. Any questions? We’re going to quit if you don’t. Yes, brother. I personally don’t believe that. You know, this comes back to the thing of did Jesus Christ teach by Jewish custom, or was he speaking and teaching out of his experience from the other realm? And you and I have got to make that choice. Archaeology and scholarship have decided that he spoke… we take away his divinity when we talk about… and this was a Jewish custom, so he’s such-and-such. I don’t doubt he engaged in the customs, but His speaking was out of another realm. Let me just tell you why. I can tell you why.

Here’s this little boy named Joshua. He lives in Galilee. His mother’s name is Miriam. His stepdad’s name is Joseph.  Joshua, Miriam, and Joseph, and it’s Saturday morning. They go into a building. It’s got some little bitty windows in it, and it’s got candles. What’s that thing called? I always forget. Menorah. Thank you. It’s in there. It’s dark, it’s musty, and it’s stinky. The floor is cold and damp. There are a couple of hundred people there. And they’re all breathing, and in a few minutes, there’s no oxygen left. It is as dark as it can be; the lights don’t provide any ventilation; they just give a little light. The little boy is sitting down there on the floor, and he’s as uncomfortable as he can be. They’re reading all this stuff to him in Hebrew. Trust me, nobody in that day understood Hebrew. It was a foreign language. They spoke Arabic. Hebrew was not known to the people of that area. He sits there for two solid hours while a ritual is performed. He gets very tired and very sleepy. Little kid, he climbs up on a bench, and his feet hang off. He can’t quite touch the thing. He leans forward. He can’t lean back. He can’t sit this way. He can’t sit that way. He’s got to sit just like this with his feet hanging off. He’s got a backache. And he looks a little bored. And his daddy-in-law pokes him like that.

Finally, after two hours, everybody’s sweating. It’s dark and dank, the room’s 120 degrees, he has been bored stiff and fell asleep three or four times. His daddy made him wake up. He finally gets out in God’s good, clean air, and the sun is shining above, and he says to himself, Gee, I enjoyed that so much. When I become Lord, I’m going to start something just like it. No way, my friend. You and I must understand something: that the Hebrew expression of the Christian faith was soon destroyed, and most of what dominated in the first century was a Greek expression of the Christian faith, which was wilder and looser even than the Jewish expression. And that is our inheritance; as we go back, the first thing we hit is a Gentile express church, not a Jewish one. And the church of the Lord Jesus Christ was the first and only thing mankind has ever known that had no hierarchy, no temples, no special place to meet, no ritual, and no binding creed. And for the first 40 years, no sacred literature. She was a civilization, an organic expression of the redeemed who met in homes, had a lot of fun, and cared for one another out of the unction of the Holy Spirit.

I’m going to just stop with one last point because this is so important that we understand this. This thing called the church flows out of the very bowels of God himself. It is divine. It’s not human; it’s divine. It’s organic. It’s not of tradition or custom. It’s out of the bowels of God. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness, and kindness. Now look at this. Love, joy, peace, gentleness, meekness, kindness. That’s what the community should have, right? Love, joy, gentleness, meekness, kindness. Right? No. Now you’re thinking like Aristotle. The labor of Christians coming together, the thing that is their goal, for which I work and pray, and strain is love, joy, peace, long suffering, goodness, meekness, gentleness. No!

You don’t strain for the church, and you don’t strain for those things. You’ve missed the whole thing. You get preached that we’ve got to love, we’ve got to be gentle, we’ve got to be humble. We’ve got to be patient… yuck… and did you ever get patient? Did God ever…Lord, help me get patience…did you ever get it? And the answer to that is no. Saints, the verse says the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the divine nature. The fruit of God, the fruit of divinity, the fruit of that life within you.

Do you ever watch trees really strain to produce fruit? The fruit of a tree is a study in survival of the overabundance of life, in which every cell in its fiber is saturated with life and has to figure out a way to get rid of some of it, and therefore forms pods out on the tip ends of its branches, whereby it can produce an oversupply of an abundance of life. And there shan’t be any of that in the breadbasket of America this year, because there was no spirit and no abundance of life. The tree will live, but there will be no fruit because there’s no overabundance of life. But the fruit comes out of an overabundance of life and is dropped to the earth, and you and I enjoy it out of the excess of the tree. You don’t have to worry about love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, and kindness; thank God! You don’t have to worry about fruit. All you have to do is pay attention to Spirit. Do you understand me? To know Him. We’re back to the hub of that wheel to touch Him. To experience Him. And then to experience Him with other brothers and sisters. And out of that will flow the community. And out of that will come love, you can’t stop it. That’s the organic fruit of the expression of the divine nature.