Did We MISS the Entire Point of the GOSPELS?

There has got to be…I come back to the first-century mindset…there was a sense of other realms. Then there’s Pentecostalism, which will give you a high. It’ll give you a wonderful high, but it’s just like getting saved in a Baptist church. You can’t live on that for 50 years. Remember, I’ve been living on it for 50 years. Well, you go ahead and live on it for 50 years. It’s just not enough for me. And it is not the “first-century deeper Christian life.” You know, of course, there should be no deeper Christian life. There should only be the Christian life.

Brother (Watchman) Nee gave us a little. T. Austin Sparks gave us a little. Then there are some of these modernists and liberals who even gave us a little. Then Frank Laubach, and a gentleman named Shoemaker, who lived and died some 50 years ago, who was a liberal. The Roman Catholics are still hard at it, and every once in a while, they’ll come forth out of them a real contemplator, and he’ll write a book, and hundreds will follow him, because they’re just as dry as we are. And they’re so tired of saying mass. They have said, Hail Mary, and hocus pocus meum, until it’s running out of their ears. They’ve eaten that little wafer and taken that swallow of wine, and it just is not getting anywhere. Even some of the Pentecostals are beginning to think that tongues is dry. I could go on forever, but this is the present status of the deeper Christian life up until this meeting tonight.

I don’t mean to make light, but brothers and sisters, we’ve got a long way to go back. We’ve got to skip most of the Dark Ages. Forget St. Therese. Forget the two Catherines. Forget John of the Cross. Be sure and forget Pseudo-Dionysius. And forget Meister Eckhart. Those people are mostly…they’re devout Christians…I’ll tell you; they put us to shame. They’re going to go into the kingdom before we ever did, but you don’t want to work that hard. It’ll make you weird. Then you’re an American, and all Americans know there’s got to be a shorter, simpler, bigger, and better way.

Now I have to tell you, it’s not all fun and games, and it’s not all roses. Anybody who gets interested in the deeper Christian life is really asking for a major disaster in his life. Nonetheless, that’s what the Christian life has always been. It’s just part and parcel of our gospel that has been passed on to us through these 20 centuries.

Well, brothers and sisters, I hope from this room and maybe from other places that I don’t know about, and I’m sure they’re out there, there’s no question in my mind they’re out there, and there are young men being raised up, that we will be able to come back to a more profound understanding of the first-century Christian walk. But I want you to know I’m not as concerned about the understanding of it as I am of the embracing and the experiencing of it. I have a belief that every positional truth can be known in time and in space, every one of them, but if I had anything to say to you, it would be this, “How did my Lord, how did your Lord, live the Christian life?”

If we can find the depths of the roots of that statement, and I mean depths, the cataracts. You know what a cataract is? It’s a group of waterfalls, the cataracts of our faith. If we can plunge and plummet into the depths of His walk with the Father, we will begin to understand the origin and the meaning of this thing called the Christian walk.