Foundation Stones #5 – Living by a Life Not Your Own | Christ Within You & the True Christian Life

We are essentially going to get it all the way back to Galilee, but actually, it won’t be called Galilee anymore. It’s going to be in the gentile pagan town. And when I get there, then I’m going to stop preaching to you and I’m going to start talking to you. I’m trying to get your attention now, during August, I’m going to keep preaching to you a little, but I’m going to start talking to you, and making these things real in your lives, and making them practical. We’ve got the headwaters of our faith all the way to Judea, and we even tonight got a glimpse of it coming all the way to Antioch. Now, if we can get it to Ephesus, maybe we can get it to Portland. And if we can get it to Portland, maybe we can get it to Beaumont.

Do you know what workers need? They need Christians. You can’t all be workers, but all workers need some Christians to run around with. You know what else workers need? They need to be properly raised up. And the kingdom of God is dying from the lack of, well, it’s suffering greatly, not dying from a lack of being raised up. You know what a Christian needs? He needs the fellowship of the Godhead. You know what else he needs? He needs fellowship of the Godhead with other Christians. You know what else he needs? He needs some workers to lead him who grew up in church life, who also know how to fellowship with divine life and to fellowship with the Father and the Son and with other brothers and sisters.

May God give us those kinds of Christians, and may God give us those kinds of workers. And I wish you’d do something for me personally. Will you pray to that end? Please pray that the Lord will have that kind of Christian and that kind of man called of God and that kind of a worker, for me and my house. I’m after that kind of a Christian. That’s the only kind of Christian I intend to raise up, and I’m after that kind of a worker.

Will you join with me? You go back to your room tonight, and you pray that God will start raising up Christians that way to introduce them to that kind of a Christian life and that kind of church life and raise up that kind of workers. I wish you’d pray that. It would mean a great deal to me.

….church and the worker that came out of Jerusalem. And we talked about Phillip and Stephen and Agabus and Barnabas and Silas and Matthias. Okay. Before we go on, and what we’re coming to now begins to get very important and relevant to you and to me, I want to take just a moment to talk about the churches in Judea. And I cannot say much because there’s virtually nothing known about them, but we can do a little guesswork.

If you and I all belong to a fellowship of believers and it was very large and it broke up into 15 or 20 groups and spread out in 15 or 20 towns when you went out and visited them, I think you agree with me that you’d probably see a miniature of what you saw in Jerusalem, would you not? I just want to say that’s good and that’s bad. That’s good and that’s bad. It can become a way. For instance, we Baptists, I don’t care where you meet in a Baptist church, at least my kind of Baptist, anywhere in the world, they’re going to meet exactly alike. And that’s sad because the people in Thailand and the people in Formosa and the people in Argentina and the people in Israel, the people in Great Britain, and the people in the United States are not alike, and you have forced a cultural conformity.

Now that was not true in this case because the people in Judea have the same case, same culture as the people in Jerusalem. So, it’s okay, but brothers, you know I just want to tell you something just between us. I don’t have the same culture as a lot of you brothers in this room. My culture is basically European with 200 years of American influence. Yours is basically African with 200 years of influence. I’d guard that difference if I were you. Now say amen.

You know, you’re learning a lot of things here, and you’re learning some songs here, but it’s okay if you go back home and change the way you sing those songs. You do what feels comfortable to you in your culture. Your culture is more elastic than mine. You see, I was really lucky. I got my culture from the stuff shirt cold icicle people called Englishmen. You know the English. Why do you say old boy? How are you doing? Doing just fine. Well, I hear your house burned down. Oh, yes, by the way, it did. And you lost your wife and five children. Oh, by the way, I did now, didn’t I? You know, they don’t get upset about anything. And their culture is the same way they brought it over here. In our meetings, you sit down, you are quiet, and you behave. Well, your great-granddaddies were beating on the log somewhere, going boom boom! boom! boom! boom! boom! boom! Ba! And dancing around in circles and having a jolly old time of it, and you came over to this country and you brought your culture with you to a degree.

Don’t get cheated out of that. Don’t let us Judaizers, you know what a Judaizer is? That’s someone from Judea trying to make a Gentile into a Jew. But don’t let us white men make you into white men with black skin. Huh? Oreo cookie. A black on the outside, white on the inside. I see. All right. Oreo cookie. Oreo cookie. You don’t want that. You go back home and you do it your way with your culture.

Well, anyway, I want to take a moment and just kind of think about Judea. Did you see them leave Jerusalem under persecution, scatter out into these many cities? Did you see them go out and build church buildings? Where do you think they met? Had to be no other place to meet. Met in homes. If the town would leave them alone, they might have had some meetings in the marketplace. Otherwise, they were in homes. Seems as though the persecution did not get too bad out in Judea. The persecutors seem to be worrying about the big towns. They took all the glorious things they had in Jerusalem out to Judea, but they didn’t get the apostles out there with them. There were more churches now than there were apostles. The apostles had to come visit them, but what did they take out there to those Judean churches? They took what they had learned in Jerusalem. And what they had learned in Jerusalem had been learned first by 12 men in Galilee from a man who had learned it in Nazareth. And what He had learned was something He had learned before in God in eternity.

It’s now in Judea. And praise God, organically. Remember our word organically. Organically, there are six new workers or seven out there. There are probably a lot more. Now, they’re going to be growing up in the Judean churches. Something brand new. They never had this in Jerusalem. Elders are going to start. That’s right. Why? Because there are no apostles. You have elders when there are no apostles around. Now I mean when there are no apostles permanently around.

Now those apostles came and visited. But in Jerusalem, they were always there. Elders were not needed. But when apostles disappear, eventually you have to have elders. What do elders do? Well, I tell you what they do. They tell you how to comb your hair and wear your clothes. They put you under the law, tell you how to behave, and they preach to you. That’s right. Unfortunately, I think that is exactly what they do. I tell you what I think they ought to be doing. I think they ought to be leaving you alone mostly. They should be in charge of administrative details, and they should sort of be standing out away from the meetings, making sure that everything is going all right. They should be looking out for dissension in the church and wolves from without and wolves from within. They may even need to minister in some of the meetings, but they should not evolve into the present-day Pastor.