The Ephesians Story (Part 2)

Dear brothers and sisters, it was born in Galatia, love for one another more intense than can be described with the human tongue, and that which your spirit hungers for and will never rest until it finds. You’ve got an instinct for the body of Christ and nothing else on earth, no seminars, no revival, no sermons, no parachurch organizations – nothing – will ever satisfy except that dynamic thing that happens when a group of brothers and sisters, centered on and experiencing Jesus Christ, come together and fall in love with one another.

Here is the great imponderable. Those two nitwits, better known as Barnabas and Paul, had the insane notion that at the end of four months they could leave these heathens and that the ekklesia would survive, without a seminary, Bible school, Bible song book, church building, or a parachurch organization. And they walked out. They didn’t walk out and come back next week; they walked out for up to two years. They trusted laymen. They trusted laymen. They trusted laymen. They trusted laymen, only they weren’t laymen because the two church planters weren’t clergymen. I want you to remember the Roman Catholic Mass. Is that what they had? John Calvin’s Sunday morning church service, which you have been so blessed with for 400 years. The Eastern Orthodox way.

There are several ways I’m not going to mention. And in our day, you know, we’ve had this revival of worship. Boy, I hope I can get those next two sentences out without anybody getting up and walking out on me. You’ve had this movement of worship in the church. Saints, we aren’t going to get nowhere till we get two things out of the way. Ritual in the way we meet, and somebody preaching to us to death every Sunday. And you can revive worship, and you can bring in any program you want to on this planet, but until those two things crumble, we will not know, in reality, the body of Christ. It isn’t possible. And everything else is patchwork.

They left these people without a minister. And please, brothers and sisters, read your New Testament. They left them without elders, and now you have the genius of God. These brothers and sisters have met, and they have been helped by two church planters, and that is an unmovable principle. But here’s another one. The church planter leaves. He departs after giving help, and he doesn’t appoint elders.

These people are thrown on one another and the living God to figure out how to meet, and I’ll bet a nickel to a hole in the donut I know what you’re thinking. Hot dog! Let’s get 15 people together, and let’s get together, and we’re going to meet. You’ve left out two ingredients that you cannot get along without. And that is the proclamation, the centrality, and the experience of the Lord Jesus Christ proclaimed to you until He becomes a burning revelation in your life, and number two, the help of that guy who leaves after four or five months. And without that, I’ll tell you exactly what you’re going to have.

Let’s say there are 20 of you and you’re all going to meet in the home, and you get in there, and you’re going to find out how to meet. You’re going to do just like we did in Tyler, Texas, in my living room. By the way, we were meeting in someone else’s home, and she got terrified and told everybody, “No, no more of this. This is getting serious.” You know, she was a great nationally known Bible teacher, but then she realized she had something by the tail she had to let go of. And I was gone, and these Christians had the audacity to break into my home one Sunday, climb through a window, open my house, and start meeting in my living room. And that’s how it ended up in my house; I would have never tolerated it. They were even afraid to meet in their own home. This was a long, long, long time ago. I had black hair. That’s how long ago it was.

We sat down in that living room, and we stared at one another, and there came the sound of death’s own silence. And you’ve been in that meeting; I know you have. And probably someone says, ‘Can we turn to number 33 in the Baptist hymnal and sing Amazing Grace?’ And everybody sits there and wonders if they should sing Amazing Grace. And then they open it. “Amazing. Grace, how sweet the sound is.” We get through that dirge and another five minutes of silence while we sit there. We are saved, but we do not know Him. We don’t really know…we haven’t been flabbergasted by Jesus Christ. We haven’t been overwhelmed and steamrolled by a living, triumphant, enthroned, ascended, ruling, reigning Lord. We have not seen Him.

And number two, we ain’t had no help. And that’s where the home church movement is headed. Here are people who have a little help, and they’re together, and they meet together, and here’s what comes out. What comes out, Gene? I don’t have the foggiest idea what came out; all I can tell you is this: it matched those people in that area with that language and that culture. It matched them. And in the United States of America, fellow Americans, you nor I have never seen, I’m speaking generally, very generally, you and I have never seen a natural, organic American expression of the church of Jesus Christ. All in the world we have ever seen is what John Knox got from John Calvin in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1540, in a conference that he took to Scotland, that came to America on the Mayflower and has been perpetrated off on you and me. That’s all we know about the ekklesia when it gathers. We don’t know what Americans do when left on their own in the presence and the glory of the Lord when they themselves come together under His headship.

All I can tell you is this. Please listen carefully. When another…and we’ll take the town of Iconium…when another Iconium came in and sat down in one of those meetings, he felt at home; even though he was a heathen, it fit him. And in Lystra, it fit him. And in Debre, it fit him or her. And I’m speaking, of course, from Corinth. Here is the overriding principle of the church of Jesus Christ when it meets, and it is this: that when you walk in, you ought not to feel like you are a foreigner. Nor should you say these people are foreigners. It should match your culture, your language, your national heritage, and your people, and that can’t be done except by discovery. By discovery. It is discovered by the body of Christ. And it is unique to that city. I can go to any Baptist church on this planet, and I can tell you exactly how we’re going to meet. I can go to any Methodist church on this planet, and I can tell you how we’re going to meet. We met that way 250 years ago, and we’re going to meet that way 250 years from now. And you can go to any Presbyterian church, virtually any on this planet, and if it’s a mainline Presbyterian church, you’ll know how it’s going to meet. But boy, when you went to Lystra, you didn’t know what you were going to run into if you were from Derbe.

And saints, that’s how they did it on their first trip. Those two church planters came back and gave them to the elders. So, Gene, the church did have elders. Yes. And after that, they developed a ritual, and five elders came in and walked in and sat down in the front row with briefcases, suits, and skinny ties, and announced all the songs. Let me tell you something. My instinct says that if the elders that those two men appointed had tried that, the Lord’s people would have killed them, strung them up because they had gained freedom, and those elders didn’t want to take that freedom away. Besides, you have to understand what an elder was on that day. He was one of the people who six months or a year or two years ago wasn’t an elder. Now, this brother is an elder, but this brother knows him really well. He knew him before he was an elder. He knew him when he was struggling. This brother doesn’t have all that prestige that comes with that spooky word that we have turned into a system. Even the elders are organic saints. And I’ll never get this over, certainly not tonight.

You see my nose? I want you to look at it really well. You will notice, please, keep looking. This is no ordinary nose. I belong to a species in which there are no noses. This was built by a plastic surgeon. You think I can get you to believe that? Do you know how I got that nose? I got it by being a human being. That’s how I got it. It’s organic to my species.  And brothers, why in the world have we been seeking after the gifts? I do not know. Why don’t you seek after a nose? These things beautifully and naturally develop within an unhindered group of people who are not being controlled and who are not trying to develop a New Testament order. There was no New Testament order; there was something that was instinctive to our species. It’s recorded in a book. You do not copy it. You leave it alone, and it comes naturally to the body of Christ. Anybody who can understand that, would you please say amen?

Can you possibly understand how much we could be liberated from if we knew that a body of people left alone on their own, who have discovered and experienced Him, can and will discover and experience a way to meet, and those things that the church needs will naturally come forth?