Foundation Stones (Part 3) – Jesus w/the 12 – The Forgotten Foundation of Christian Life

Open your eyes and see. I don’t like it here. I’m discouraged. There’s money missing out of the treasury. Did you know that there was money missing out of the…, did you know that they had a little? This is in the Gospels. Money was missing. People would give them money to keep the work going. Judas would put it in a sack and there was some money missing. I guess you can guess who took it, but believe it or not, no one was sure. You know, sometimes you’d say, “Here, I got to help this old lady. Will you hold that?” And he’d say, “Well, here you hold it.” Well, I’m going to help her, too. Well, here, that man’s got to be let down from the roof, you hold that thing, and they all trusted one another.

I suppose I’m going to tell a story here. I’m always reluctant to tell stories while that thing’s running, but once we had the opportunity, privilege, and disaster of living in common, we had a lot of money stolen, and the offering box was often broken into. So, we built an offering box that was about that deep, put a slot in the top of it, and we didn’t know it, but somewhere the best I can estimate around $5,000, at that time, that would have been about 2/3 of a year’s salary. One person’s salary. It had been stolen out of that thing. It just disappeared. And we did not know why until about 3:00 in the morning. A brother had some reason to go down in the basement where the offering box was kept. It was tied to a post. You couldn’t have gotten it loose for anything on earth. And there was a brother, I guess he was a brother. He had a pair of tweezers that long. That’s right. And he was sitting there, standing there with those tweezers. You know what he did? He was supporting his drug habit. And there we were, God’s people, working our fingernails to the bone, supporting someone’s major addiction to a terrible drug and had been for months without knowing it.

You know what? That’ll discourage a guy. It’s part of the experience of the body of Christ. It’s part of the experience of the church. If it’s not Judas, it’s Ananias and Sapphira. And if it’s not them, it’s that brother I just told you about, if in fact he was a brother. And you’ve got every kind of problem facing you, ahead of you, and they understood that to be the experience of about 20 people, and you know, for some reason beyond my understanding, with all the good, and all the bad, and all the dark, and all the light, and all the fun, and all the sadness, on balance, they thought it was wonderful. So wonderful that they wanted to give it to a group of people. Was that you, Chuck? Praise the Lord. Chuck, you and I have been through garbage up to our waist. We’ve been through more mess than almost any human beings, most humans could never imagine. You still think the church is neat? Praise the Lord. So do I. I think she’s worth living for and dying for. And they had never even seen her, and they believed it. It was simply an experience they were having with one another.

Listen to me carefully. They were watching Christ fellowship with the Father. They were watching Him behold the Father. They were watching Him hear the Father and respond to the Father, and they were watching the Father love Him, and they were watching Him love the Father back. And they were watching Him obey the Father, and they were entering into the fellowship of being with Him, being with the Father, and something glorious, forgive the use of the word. I know I’m using the word improperly, but the magic of it, the chemistry of it. What a chemistry! Yes, and the wonder of it, the glory of it, the chemistry was wonderful. And they loved it. And they did not want it to stop.

Now that’s the primitive basic thing of the church. It was not people telling people what they ought to do. It was not a bunch of folks being dictated to. It wasn’t submission and authority. It wasn’t do this and don’t do that. And it doggone sure wasn’t Sunday morning at 11:00 a.m. with the doxology and a bunch of people sitting in a pew. It was mostly the life of God corporately experienced and shared. May I repeat that? It was mostly the life of God being corporately partaken of and shared with one another.

That is what they understood. And it had no name, but it was so real and so different than anything else, they knew it to be a living entity that was nameless. Later they would give it the word assemblage, getting together, the gatherings, the ecclesia, and then unfortunately we stuck a very mundane dural word like the church on it. I’m sorry we did that. We should have stayed with the word gathering. This was the gathering. This was the assembling. This was the assemblage. This was the ekklesia.