How We Got Into This Religious Mess (Part 2) – First Century Church vs Modern Christianity

What I discovered was…will you please hear me? —Most of the references were in the Old Testament, among a people who could not read and write. And most of the references in the New Testament, if not all of them, are references not to the Scripture, but to the Lord Jesus Christ. Remember something else: that the Scripture, as something that was usable, did not come into vogue until the 1800s, and you’ve got the first 1700 years of the Christian faith, with 99% of all the people on this earth illiterate. And the only Bibles available were maybe one per city. It was long after Gutenberg before anybody could get a hold of an Old Testament and a New Testament, and yet we are preached you’ve got to get into the Word of God as though all of the great men and women who came before us, anybody who has loved the Lord, had to be somebody who could quote the whole New Testament. That’s the impression you get.

Brothers and sisters, whatever happened to an indwelling Lord, and the illiterate ought to be able to know the Lord Jesus Christ, because most people have been, and until this day, most of the people on this planet cannot read and write. And those who do…don’t read. Boy, everything you’ve heard this morning is contrary to anything you’ve ever heard before, probably. This is where we are, and this is who you are, and this is who I am, sitting in this room, and the best way I can end this is to say, man alive, we need a revolution. And we need the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

How long have I held you? One hour? I’ve already been speaking for two hours. That was a condensation. You ought to hear the whole story. I realize I may have opened myself up to some real misunderstanding here, so let me just tell you: yes, I believe the Bible is the inspired word of God. I also believe you can know an indwelling Lord and know him real and beautifully and powerfully.

Okay, I’m going to ask to do a little cleanup. Do you have any questions? Why did He let this happen? Well, this is one of the first questions I’m going to ask Him. You know, the Lord let 400 years go by in Egypt without doing one thing. They just left it. Not a word. Think of all the thousands and tens of thousands of Jews who rose up in chains and died and never heard from God. Sister, I don’t know. I don’t like it, but I’ve got a few years left, and I’m here on this earth. You know what I’m doing here on this earth? Real simple. I’m seeking to change the course of church history; that’s the only job I have…and the practice of the church. Complete change. I know that this, and this alone, is what I know that I’m responsible for the time I live on this earth. I’m not responsible for what they did, and I’m not responsible for what you’re going to do. I’ve got 70 years in here, and I’m responsible.

You know, all of that I said to you to say: saints throughout the ages, there has always been the Ecclesia. She’s been really, really tiny. And I don’t know, sister, but that was the sovereign tale of God. I’ve often said the biggest problem we have with Christianity is we’ve got too many Christians. We’re saving them by the absolute truckloads, folks, and that’s it. Whereas they were, every person who ever got saved was supposed to be part of the assembly of God, the Ecclesia, and that has always been small from the first day out. I recommend that you consider the Church of the Living God.

Question. Yes. Bohm, and—who was the other one? Eckhart was a seven-tier Neoplatonic mystic. Bohm was stark raving mad. He doesn’t fit into anybody’s anything. Every time anybody finds out about Bohm, they go to read him, and they kind of come away this way. I read Bohm and came away like this. His godly life just messed up everything. He was a devout Christian, a really precious guy, but what he wrote… nobody has any idea what he said. I’m willing for somebody to send me a condensation of, and an explanation of, Bohm’s understanding of how to know the Lord.

Audience: How would you quickly summarize the difference between “the bringing of a message” and “the modern-day oration called sermons?”

One of them is 30 minutes long; the other one is an hour and a half long. You can interrupt the hour-and-a-half one. It probably is un-outlineable. But here’s the difference: the sermon is delivered by a man with a captured, captive mind, going through a rut. About the only people who do make any progress—and there’s a good number of them, but they’re scattered all over the world—are people who’ve broken with the organized church, because with it comes liberation of the mind. The same thing is true of God’s people. Suddenly, man, things just are so much clearer. I think that’s about as far as I could go.

John Darby. Right. Well, I think that the first thing I would do is finally get a model and see that a lot of this stuff falls apart when you start looking at 1st Thessalonians, 2nd Thessalonians, in their context. You don’t know a whole lot about the New Testament. You just read it for inspiration. You read Thessalonians today, and you underline everything you really understand, and you won’t have very many marks in there. But you can understand every word of it if you understand its context. Who wrote it? Where did he write it? I wish I had every professor of New Testament in the world in a room and asked everybody—these men, they’ve got more degrees than a thermometer—and I would like for them, I’d like to walk into the room and say: everybody who can list Paul’s letters in their chronological order, please stand up. I’ve got money in my clothes that says that no one will stand up.

Brother, this whole thing is scrambled eggs, and it ought to be laid aside. We need a new mind. We need a first-century mind, not a New Testament mind. That scares the life out of me. A first-century mind…but what we really need is the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ, and that is not impossible to touch. We will begin by learning a Lord before creation and not have such a little Lord. Reformation…they were systematically murdered… That’s how that one ended.

I would say in the United States right now, there are fewer Christians outside the organized church than there have ever been, proportionate to our population. Brothers and sisters, where’s the call? Where is the revelation? Where is that spirit of “Lord, anything for You. Anything that is to You, for You, through You, by You, in You, and from You.” Let’s hope and pray that this will change in the years to come. I’m planning on leaving four or five men on this earth to take my place, and I hope that when they get old, they’ll train some men. I figure in 300 to 400 years, we may have a Christian mindset on this earth again.

Okay, we’re going to end with questions. You got any? You got it.