So You Think You Are Normal? The Damaged Soul in Church Life

Then, amid all this, there are the children caught up in the problems that all this creates. Problems within their home, and then the problems that come through community living. You say, well, then we shouldn’t live in common, or we shouldn’t live in community, or we shouldn’t even…we Christians should get saved and never see one another again. Well, it’s fine. Let them have their problems with the kids who live in the neighborhood. It’s all going to come home one way or the other.

There is the sloppy brother who insists that everybody should dress sloppily, and there is the neat Christian who demands that we all dress neatly. There is the brother who believes that we should all get up in the morning and make our beds, and there is the brother who is trying to get up every morning and make his bed, and he’s having a nervous breakdown conforming to such things. Then there is the brother who will grab his sheets, pull them back, throw his mattress on the floor, and glare at the brother who thinks we should all make our bed and say, “There!” See!

I told you about the brother who joined us and who didn’t believe in money. And honest to goodness, there comes a moment, no matter how balanced you are, how well you know about the needs and problems of people, you will become convinced that there is something wrong with this group of people, and it’s just not so, because that group of people is any place in America. Now you wonder why the church is having a hard time. Why are we having a hard time having church life? And we’re trying to address these problems by throwing a Bible at them and telling them to get up, read, and pray for 10 minutes every morning. By the way, there’s a solution to all this. It’s really simple. There’s a solution to all of this. Men who aren’t very wise, Christians called to be workers, begin to see this in their 20s and 30s, and when they reach 40, they have a revelation. There is a way to solve all of these problems. It’s very simple. It’s called authoritarianism. You can brush every one of these out of existence in a matter of minutes. All you need is authoritarianism, and that’s why we have authoritarianism, because they believe that only the Bible, reading the Bible, and praying and loving Jesus is all you need, and when that doesn’t work, then they say, well, then the only other thing you need is submission. And therefore, we’ll have authoritarianism, and some do not stop at authoritarianism, but they move to totalitarianism.

And there is total conformity. Everybody has to think like, act like, feel like. Most of them, and it always is, are built in the image of the leader who unwittingly believes that he is the norm and, in some way, lives out a messianic role among them. Yes, you can cure all of this with legalism. Just pass laws against…you shall not divorce. You will not have a nervous breakdown. You cannot scream, nor can you cry. It’s against the rules. Legalism—you start there, you move to authoritarianism, and from authoritarianism to totalitarianism. These things solve the problems of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, and don’t think they don’t. That’s where most monastic movements started, and that’s where most convent movements started. They started with a strong-willed human being who got fed up with all these problems and just called for total conformity. And of course, you know, that’s what Jesus really wants out of all of us, is he just wants us all to wear military uniforms and obey somebody. If we do not yield to authoritarianism, and if we live, giving brothers and sisters the right to be uniquely themselves, and we can’t give it to them because God gave it to them, gave it to them in their mother’s womb, then we, if we are not going to take away from people their God-given dispositions, then we had better start addressing the problem of the soul and the healing of that soul. Say amen. Amen.

So, you want the deeper Christian life. Then you are going to have to have a little help. I just…I fall back and laugh at that little group that just got started and has the answer. I want to say again, you go take your “the answer”, and you go get your people, and you go live together in common. Come back in 10 years and tell me all about your “the answer”. Let me see how your “the answer” covers these problems. It can’t be done. There is no “the answer” because God won’t allow there to be “the answer”. It will reduce to being a method: a method you can literally put in a capsule and dispense. It can’t be done. Men have been trying to do it for 2000 years. The needs and differences of God’s people have always been greater than all the spiritual truths combined. Every one of us has a different need, and every one of us needs a different answer.

In the church of Jesus Christ, it better be elastic enough to fit it all and demand nothing from anyone. We’ve got this real bad habit. I’ve got the gospel. This is the way. Here is the secret. And when someone doesn’t get healed by it, we blame, not the message or the method, but say he didn’t have enough faith, or he didn’t do this, or he didn’t do that. Brothers and sisters, that’s not fair. You ought to be honest with yourself and come back to your message and your method and say, “Didn’t work, did it?”

The church of the Lord Jesus Christ has to be a many-splendored thing because God’s people are a many-splendored and damaged thing. I know I have hardly scratched the surface. These are the things that God’s people throughout the ages have written about when they talked about the enormous wickedness of the heart, how evil we are. These are the terms being used, and how weak we are toward God and toward sin. These are the things we don’t ever want to tell people about when we say the fallen, depraved nature of folks. These are the things we’re talking about when some single brother goes out, and he prays to the Lord and says, “Lord, give me the cross” …which he should do…and he begins saying, “Oh, I see how wretched I am. I really see how wretched I am. Oh, I’m just a wretched person.” You will see how wretched you are, beginning at about 40, and it will grow from there. We begin seeing the first glimmers of it in our early 30s, and the most incredible thing is that we always forget it. We start blaming it on circumstances. Somebody else did it. Something’s wrong. Someone else is causing this. We don’t really realize that it’s the Lord finally showing us what we’re really like. And I want to say here, the church—I think it’s the responsibility of the church to carry on an ongoing preventative maintenance. I’m convinced brothers and sisters ought not to marry until they have been exposed to the true marriage of problems, have been shown how to set up lines of communication, and have been taught how to communicate. And that they’ve been taught to seek help when they’ve got a problem.

I can take that as one small illustration: that in the church of Jesus Christ, there’s going to have to be constant, ongoing preventive maintenance. That’s theorizing, because we haven’t even gotten started. We haven’t even addressed this problem. We’re going to sweep it under the rug…read your Bible and pray. And then about that time comes the next nut. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be calling these people nuts, but at that moment, that’s how I feel. Because I think, boy, you’re really naive, my friend. And that’s the brother who’s sitting in the back of the room, and he raises his hand and says, “Oh, brother, these things aren’t going to happen. If we trust the Lord, won’t the Lord take care of us? Why are we worried about these things? If we trust the Lord, won’t the Lord just take care of us? The Lord’s not going to let these things happen to us.” I don’t know what to do with him. I don’t know what I want to say. I want to sit down and cry. That’s why I’m worried, though. The brother who just believes that God is going to take care of them. The Lord’s not going to let us have heresy. The Lord’s not going to let anybody come in here and spook this group. The brothers and sisters will not argue or fight with one another. The Lord’s not going to let that happen.

The Lord let the children of Israel live in slavery for 400 years, in Egypt, without once appearing to them, speaking to them, or even getting around them for 400 years, and you think he is going to stand there, and nursemaid you through the minefield of daily life, and never let anything bad happen to any of us that will just trust him? Then just pick up your New Testament and read it. He just doesn’t work that way. Is what I’ve said realistic? Ask a policeman. Ask a policeman. Ask a social worker. Ask a counselor, whether he be Christian or pagan. Just ask him. Sometimes I think even counsellors think they’re just getting the problem people in society, and all the rest are normal. Ask me.

The soul is damaged beyond all belief. Your soul, and I’m going to repeat this. I know what you’re thinking. Boy, oh boy, oh boy. Don’t let me get around that man, and don’t let me get around that group. I don’t want to be part of those 100 people. I don’t blame you. I think the smartest thing you could do right now is get under your bed and don’t ever come out. You make three friends, you’re in trouble. Make three permanent friends, and you’re in trouble. Make a hundred friends, and you’ve got… You might as well be a juggler trying to juggle about a thousand different…whatever they juggle. It can hardly be done. But I want you to know…I know—I know you’re thinking, this just can’t be. Good. You go find the hundred people who are not like this, and one of two things is happening: either you’re not really trying to help those people, or you have a seeing-eye dog, and you simply cannot… you’re blind and cannot see. It’s not my 100 people. It’s not his 100 people. It’s not their 100 people. It’s any 100 people who have all of this going on and more, and let me assure you that I left the worst things out. I didn’t even mention them or breathe them.

I read something recently that I would like to pass on to you in an effort to, one more time, try to get your attention: how needy we are, how needy we are, and we ought to be getting help with our needs. It’s two stories. It had to do with a military leader in World War II. His name was Eichmann. You may have never heard of him. He was responsible for the death of the Lord’s number of the Jewish people, and not just Jewish, but Europeans who were gassed and burned in the great disaster of World War II. After the war, he fled to Argentina, and he was captured there by a Jewish underground and taken to Israel to be tried. He was a slaughterer of hundreds of thousands of human lives; at least he instigated it, he ordered it, he oversaw it, and he supervised it. And a man who went to that trial to bear witness against him said that when he walked into the room—or this is what happened to him—he walked into the room and he saw Eichmann, he passed out. And when he was revived, the journalist and the media later interviewed him and asked, “What happened?” Was it the stark reality of facing this monster? Was it the memory of all the people you’d seen for today? Was it your personal memory of having met him and what he did?

He said, “No, not at all. When I saw him, I fainted because he looked just like me and everybody else.” That is the greater indictment. A commentator who was reviewing what Eichmann did, and we’re talking about the torture, the maiming, the murder, the incineration of countless thousands of people, and when the newsman reviewed these events, he said, “What of Eichmann? Was he demon-possessed?” And by the way, that’s what a lot of people finally begin to get to thinking about Christians when they begin to see their problems and their naivety. Anyway, he said, “Was he demon-possessed? Was he mad? Was he evil? Or even worse, even more frightening, was he normal?” Well, I don’t even dare answer which one of those is true, but I am telling you that what I read to you today is the normal expression of the soul. This is you, and this is me, and we come for redemption and full salvation. Paul said that we might be sanctified; that is, made holy, “holified”, in both spirit, soul, and body.