How to Have a Home Church (Part 4) – Recovering New Testament Church Life

Well, I’d like to change that and say a spiritual walk with the Lord Jesus Christ is the utterly missing reality of the evangelical church, and I can find almost nobody in the institutional church who knows or cares. The people in this room, even now, I’m reminding you that I am not bringing you here together, and you did not come here together. You are following an extreme radical whose only goal in life is to overthrow evangelical Christianity as it now exists. Everything I breathe, everything I write, every day we work together is to penetrate that terrible barrier that we’re in and break out of this cage, break out of this monstrosity that will not yield.

We’ve got to stop meeting this way. We’ve got to stop being this way. So, to those of you who write, for those of you who may have read my books, somewhere out there is a young man who has a heart to dump it all. He doesn’t care a whole lot about acceptance. You’re going to have to lay down your dreams, sir, of standing in that pulpit and preaching like Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and start building the Lord Jesus Christ’s church on this earth: elastic, creative, spiritual, and unpredictable, and without you present. We’ve got to stop everything that we’re doing this way. If you hear this after I’m dead, some men have taken the torch. How sure am I of that? Pretty sure. Find them.

I’m speaking to a group of Christians here who should be consistently ministered to by the church itself, whether men or women. There should be the privilege and joy of having a worker come in who will give you the Lord Jesus Christ and give you the church in her highest revelation. I want to say one more word about that. You’ve also got to stop believing the church the way she is today is what the church is supposed to be. The highest revelation in the New Testament and Old, other than Christ…and it is a revelation as high as Christ itself. And the reason for that is just really, really simple: you have a hard time separating the two. So to those of you in this room, and to those whom I may never meet, we’re going to stop meeting this way, and it takes a great deal to do this because we are literally standing in the presence of no examples.

All we have is the New Testament. I hope whoever hears this knows that anything you get, you’ll probably get chronologically. It may drive you mad because you’re just dying to jump ahead and say, “Oh, but there is a verse…” No, there’s not. There is no verse. “There is a chapter…” No, there is no chapter. There is no chapter. There is no verse. Someone said, “Are you getting extra-biblical?” The saints in this room have heard this. Yes, absolutely; we’re going to go with extra-biblical. First of all, we’ve got a Bible. There is no such word in the New Testament. That’s extra-biblical. Those maps are extra-biblical. The Morocco letter is extra-biblical. Those chapters are extra-biblical. The verses are extra-biblical. The numbers on the page of the Bible, of the New Testament, and the Old Testament are extra-biblical. I’ll tell you what else is extra-biblical: that index is extra-biblical, and it is in utter chaos. It is not chronological. If you put that together, you can drop most of the other index, and you’ll come to a whole new world.

We’ve all got to stop meeting this way. It’s going to take some pioneers. A dear brother named T. Austin Sparks wrote concerning Pioneers of the Heavenly Way. Dare you contact me after this? Or the men who will come after me? We are radicals. We are not ashamed of what we are doing. We make no excuses, nor have we ever apologized. I think I will add one more word. And do not misunderstand me. I am not a violent person, and yet I’m going to turn around and say we are violent men, and we are taking the kingdom by violence. I never understood that until I realized that most men in the ministry and in the Christian faith are scared; conformists by nature. And those of them who are not afraid and are bold, their wives are scared. You can’t do much with a scared wife, and evangelical Christianity and the mindset that goes with it just constantly draws us. Believe me, saints, once we step out of this small arena, you find Christians going straight back to the safety of the Sunday church. We’ve got to stop being this way. Alright, now it’s on you, not me.

I’m going to say two more words. I don’t think I’ve ever said this. I probably have, but I don’t remember. If someone is sitting in the seminary Bible school and listening to me and saying, “Wow, wow,” be careful. The kid in the room next door is coming in, and he’s going to hear my voice. He’s going to say, “Who is that?” You’re going to say, “It’s Gene Edwards,” and the other brother will say, “Oh, Gene Edwards. Didn’t you know? He beats his wife. He pulls legs off grasshoppers. Goes around at night looking for little children whose candy he can steal from them. He’s a dictator. He doesn’t believe in the Bible.” Let me see what else there is. His churches are all mass conformist. “Oh, no, don’t listen to that. I have so trained these people that no matter what you ask them, they’ll always say something nice about me, and of course, it’s not true. I’m a terrible person, and now I want to tell you something. Sir, that goes with the territory. We have walked circumspectly from the beginning. We have never interfered with the Lord’s people. We have never dictated, ever. We are not that kind of people. We belong to a breed that doesn’t do that but has been accused of it forever.

One simple statement, sir, and that statement is: whatever a man does, whatever he writes, whatever he says, no one listens to what he has said or establishes any need or gives any vision that is outside the mindset of evangelical Christianity, and it is never listened to purely. The only thing that happens after a man makes the statement, does a work, fulfills the vision, and restores is that nothing is heard or said. The only thing that happens is the man himself is attacked. What he has said and done is totally side-railed. So we will have rumors, and we will have rumors of rumors. So, young man, you leave where you are, and the Lord will send you out as sheep among wolves. It doesn’t matter what you say or do; you’ll be ripped to shreds…and you’ve got to start living that way.

Saints, I have tried to discipline my life not to see people’s faults or analyze them. Watchman Nee said, “I have the gift of understanding people and being able to open what they are and their soul and understand.” He said, “I try not to exercise that gift.” My response is, “Mister, it’s a cheap gift. That’s about the cheapest gift there is, to be able to understand someone else’s faults.” I don’t have that gift. Sometimes I am awestruck by others’ capacity to delineate and say he this, that, and the other. I don’t have that. I’m a little bit naive, and I intend to stay that way. I would encourage you to be the same way. In fact, that was, in case you didn’t notice, an apology for anyone in this room who’s ever been hurt by my saying something that was misconstrued or construed.

Now, we’re going to put “how to meet” at the very end, because that’s when we’re going to have to be at our sharpest. We’ve got a very small crowd here, and we’re going to have to do some double duty. I want to start with healing in the church. Are you ready to listen to a few minutes on healing? I’m here for practical reasons. First, we should take care of one another when someone is ill. If anyone comes our way, we should take care of them, but we will not advertise healing, nor will we practice it in a showy way.

Now, I only know one person in this room, and there may be two, but I listen. I only know one or two people in this room who, when we start to pray for somebody, pray a prayer that God could actually understand. Everything else is general and fearful. It’s not, “Lord, heal this person.” It’s “Lord Jesus…” and then a lot of fog. Does God in heaven on His throne know what you just asked for? I have a notion that most of you have some kind of Pentecostal background. I don’t know why the rest of us are afraid to pray for healing.

The New Testament describes two kinds of healing. One of them is instant. The other is that “they began to be made whole.” There is a third: God does not heal some people. Those words we heard this morning were roof-rattlers. There were many widows in the days of Elijah who had great needs, but he only gave food to one person, an unclean Gentile. Elijah and Elisha…we are given as two illustrations.

I wrote a book entitled The Prisoner in the Third Cell. John is in prison, and his men come back to report, “Many were healed.” That’s supposed to be positive, but John says no, “Did you say all, or many?” The word is many were healed. In the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, He didn’t miss anybody. Anyone He touched, laid hands on, or spoke to—those people were healed. Later in the ministry, not all were healed. I don’t believe it’s proper for the church of Jesus Christ not to heal; or, put positively, we should heal. There should be healing in the church…and it doesn’t have to be miraculous. It also falls under the term “care.”