Church History Conference Part 3 – The Christian Mind: Older Than Creation and Found in Christ

Well, we went through the second and third centuries and found that we have reason to believe the Christian faith did not so fallen away as was presupposed. Then, around 380 AD, after a great deal of corruption beginning around 300 and just this incredible falling away from 300 to 400, we see a clear post-Constantine effort to return to the things closest to the heart of God. The reason I don’t give them a definition is that I could not define the eternal purpose of God in less than 10 hours if I had to.

I was thinking the first night that Lance spoke, if he had turned to me and said, “Gene, what is God’s purpose? What is He restoring?” Boy, I’m so glad he didn’t ask. But I would have given him an answer. His final words in that message were that if there’s anything we’re coming back to, we must come back to it, which is the church and oneness with the Lord, and those last words would have been my words. It’s too big. It’s too big to comprehend, but maybe men, just by spiritual instinct, knew in their spirits and hearts that something was amiss, and they stood against the western way of seeing the Christian faith. They were the Priscillianists, they were the Paulists, if we can really believe that the things said against them were not true.

People with hideous names like Bogomils and the incredible Waldensians. We told you the other night that their works were destroyed just a few years ago. A new book, a new piece of scholarship, was published on the Albigensians. I read a passage in there that I could not believe, by a man who was a scholar. It would just be outrageous. Please listen to this. I think this is pretty close to verbatim. He said they were terrible people. He said, “Now it is true that in all the writings and in all that is left of their testimony, they seem to be evangelical in their faith, and wholly grounded upon the word of God, and we have never been able to find in writing any of their heresies, which only goes to prove how subtle they were in their heresy. Now, that’s by a modern scholar. The Albigensians. Then the Unitas Fratrum, those ancient brethren, the Anabaptists, coming on up into a more modern era, the Moravians, and for a time, the early Wesleyanites, and the Brethren. This morning, our hearts broke as we heard again of our dear brother Watchman Nee. Boy, what a heritage. Every one of these fighting so valiantly for the precious things of God…and the next page is blank.

The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox lines will go on forever. The Protestant line will go on. It’s interesting about the Protestant line: it evolves and evolves and changes and evolves, but it is what is called “evolving randomly”. It has no direction. It is evolving randomly, and I agree that a large part of Protestantism at this moment seems to be randomly evolving towards some sort of pseudo-psychological Christianity, in which we take secular things and read into them. God only knows what fad or fancy will blow it again. That is not our heritage. Some of you have come as children of brothers and sisters who grew up outside the religious system. Some of you came into the Christian faith as Peter did, just out of the fishing business, and some of us, and that would be me, came like Paul out of a theologically trained background. But we all got here, and we are together.

Yesterday, I spoke to you about what I think the first ingredient must always be: to come into Christ and be lost in Him. Utterly lost in Him, until there begins to grow up in us that spiritual mind, the mind of Christ. I would really admonish you always to know your history. I really encourage you to know your history. I am so grateful. I don’t know if you realize what you’ve gotten here and what Stephen has given you in something of the history, and the often-bloody history of our inheritance. We are standing on the shoulders of giants. We are held up by giants, but we will always begin, not only turning back to them, to see where they left off, but we’ve got to leap back to that first century, and back into eternity, into the very mind and heart and spirit of our God. If we do not know Him in a personal encounter, we will just intellectualize some sort of change, and he won’t be in it. Brothers and sisters, he will not be in it.

The next page, where will it be written? Well, if I were a betting man, I would bet on the southern half of Africa. That’s where I would bet. But that is not where I want it to be. I know where I want. I want it here. Could I get a little bitty amen? So rather than going to the Paulicians and the Paulists and the Bogomils and all those people, I want to speak very simply here for a few minutes out of a personal burden. I didn’t have to write these things down in notes. Didn’t have to reflect on what it is I wanted to say to you. Everything I am saying to you now, I could have said to you when I was 29 years old, the day I came out of the religious system. The question has often been put to us: why does it only last one generation? And it seems so futile even to try again. Is there no hope, and even if it is 50 years, and my own feeling has always been, great, for 50 glorious years, let’s have it! A little bitty amen.

But I think some things are awaiting you. I don’t know who you are. You may be listening to me on a tape. You may never hear me. Right now, you may be beating drums somewhere in a native village in Africa. You may be an Eskimo. You may be a Mexican or someone from South America. You may be a Frenchman. You may be a brother somewhere in Indonesia. You may be a missionary in some forsaken hole that none of us could imagine. I only pray to God that you’re there. I’m going to talk to you about things I care about so deeply. Some of them will sound so practical that you may consider them shallow, but they’re in my heart. I am perplexed…this is number one: we Christians outside the religious system, or whatever you call it, those who are seeking and part of the restoration, the recovery, a Lord’s testimony, we have a little literature in existence that is good and rich. Most of it is generally addressed; it’s on deep truths. We have virtually nothing in print written to us on practical issues that is addressed straight to our particular, peculiar needs.

Now, I have to admit to you that some of these things will reflect my own heart and ministry, but brothers and sisters, I would not be faithful to God if they did not reflect a little bit of my own burden. I just got a copy of a new book. I wrote it. It’s called… It’s the only one I’ve seen so far; it arrived this week. It’s called “Preventing the Church Split.” It was written to Christians outside the organized church. Now, you tell me we don’t need that book. Tell me we don’t need that book. I feel certain I get more letters from more people who write me about a little home group they were in, or some great and wonderful thing they thought they were in, and it was torn asunder, and dozens, and sometimes hundreds, and sometimes thousands of Christians are devastated, and this doesn’t happen in denominations, not in a way that we can find a book that addresses our needs. It’s never talked about. We keep it under the hat. Boy, listen. I want to give to the next drive for wastepaper that comes by my door, the boxloads of letters I get from Christians who have been torn to pieces by division in their local gatherings.

Well, that’s one of dozens of things I really would like to see more of, so we can better understand who we are and what’s happening among us. I have a lot of young men who arrive on my doorstep, usually unannounced, saying, “God sent me here to sit under you, Gene.” I want to say, brother, I’ve got five chairs in my home. I don’t need to sit on top of anybody. He stays three weeks and finds out that he’s not going to spend eight hours a day while I lecture him out of my notebook on how to be an apostle. I don’t know why I brought that up, but anyway, we need to know a little bit more. You know, I have two brothers who stand with me in the ministry. One’s 40, and one’s 45, and I think they’re just beginning to understand what they’re getting into. Anybody got an amen out there for that? Does anybody identify with that? They are just now beginning to understand what they’re getting into.

I left out a few points the other day as we moved along. This is another one that really burdens me. When we took over the Roman Empire, these Christians in the fourth century, we took over a great deal of its mind. One of the things that we took over was the universality of ministry or movement. The Romans could only think in terms of universality. I’m talking about the Roman pagans, the Roman Empire. They had this thing they wore on their chest, which essentially said, ” Come what may, I’m not important, you’re not important. It’s Rome first and foremost, and their idea was that whatever they did had to go out throughout the entire world.

First-century Christians did not have a movement mentality. First-century Christians, even though they preached the gospel wherever they could go, did not have a movement mentality. A man was raised up; he did not feel the necessity of gathering around him hundreds and thousands of workers, and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, so that his work, and his work alone, might go out and do the work of God upon this planet. I believe we got that somewhere in our western culture, and it is embedded in virtually every man who seems to have the capacity to do anything. I wish to God we wouldn’t do that, and I would like to offer, in its place, the example of Paul of Tarsus, who must have really believed in God and must have really believed that his own ministry was gold and silver and precious stone, and not wood, hay, and stubble.

That man founded no more, raised up, planted, whatever your term is, preached the Gospel in the town of pagans, and raised up the church. He could not have raised more than 15 or 16 churches in his whole lifetime. And he left eight workers upon this earth. Eight workers took his place; all Gentiles, except one, who was half and half. Then he died, and he believed that if the work of God was pure and good in their lives and in those churches, it would spread after his lifetime. Why do we feel we have to see our kind of churches planted in every town on the entire planet in our own lifetime? What kind of empire builder mentality is that? Brother, do a good small work. Curl up your toes and die, and believe the men who come after you will organically carry on that work, or it won’t be carried on, and that will be proof that what you did was tin.