Introduction to the Deeper Christian Life Part 2 (July 1988)

Now, in the last two years, every time I get anything on my face, like a bump or anything, when it’s over with, the spot stays. It never happened before. I can only imagine what I’m going to look like in a few years. I have been developing spots on me. It’s blemishes. It’s a blemish. Something is wrong with me. Blemishes. She has no blemish. Now listen to this. She has no wrinkles. What does that mean, sister? The church has no wrinkles. It means she doesn’t get old; she stays young. She’s got no blemishes, no imperfections, and she is ever young. That she should be holy and blameless, holy as God is holy. There’s only one level of holiness, just one, and that’s God’s holiness. If you don’t have that holiness, you don’t have holiness at all. Anything less than that is unholy. As holy as her Lord and blameless. May I see the hands of the married sisters, please? You’re married. Would you raise your hand? Now, then, put your hands down. In just a minute, I’ll ask you to raise again. At any time in your whole married life, has your husband perhaps once, just once, has your husband ever blamed you for something? Would you raise your hand if he has? Would you? Okay, we have here about 10 honest sisters and one liar. Can you imagine a woman whom God Himself, the Lord Himself, the Lord Jesus, cannot find one thing He can blame her for? No charge can be laid against her. Holy, spotless, forever young, and totally without blame and glorious. She’s beyond beautiful. She’s glorious.

So, husbands ought also to love their wives as their own body, for he who loves his own wife loves himself. For no man ever hated his own flesh but nourishes and cherishes it. Therefore, we have to say He nourishes the church and cherishes her just as Christ does the church. We are members of Him. We are members of Him. I don’t know how it could be made closer than that. The DNA really does match; we literally share the same body. We are members of His body. For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.

Now, this conference is on the deeper Christian life, but I feel I need to say to you that if you are an average Christian, an ordinary Christian, and I rank myself as an ordinary Christian, Then, brothers and sisters, if you’re an ordinary Christian, the deeper Christian life is beyond you on any count as a lasting part of your life, if you’re a typical ordinary Christian. Now, if you’re a little above that, it may be that you can handle it; you can be there, but if you’re typical, the Christian life for you, the individual, is beyond you by any means.

I want to say a good word for the church of the Lord Jesus Christ tonight. I want you to know how desperately you and I need her. And I’m always reluctant; I’m even now reluctant to say ‘church’ because I know what that conjures up. You don’t really think of her when you think of her as something exciting. I know you don’t. How could you? An interdenominational tax-exempt organization is exciting. Campus Crusade for Christ is exciting. Youth with a Mission is exciting. Youth for Christ, Young Life is exciting. The church is boring. That’s true. That’s true. Well, then, we need to jack up what we’ve got and stick something new under it, because the first-century believers had no such concept. She was the most exciting thing on this planet, and she was the avenue by which ordinary people were able to have a profound walk with Him. Just a few things about her in the first century and in those centuries when she has pulled away from the traditional moorings and has become community over and against ritual.

I don’t know how to tell you this. My own experience in the church is of a people; it is not a meeting. We got tired at times, and we would stop meeting. I think the longest we ever stopped meeting was six weeks. We had no meetings for six weeks. Can you imagine that? Did you know we never even noticed? I’ll tell you something else: every week, our schedule was, if we met, and it was always up in the air, we only knew that if we came to a meeting on Sunday night, we would find out if there would be meetings that week. We never knew. Could you imagine a traditional church running a situation like that? People would have to phone up the church secretary all week long, finding out if there’s going to be a meeting next week.

It never phased anybody if that week we didn’t have meetings, and I don’t know how the word got out to those who were not present. We would go six weeks, come back to a meeting, and you would never know we had skipped a single one. We, as a church, just kept going. A meeting was one of the other things we did. Just one of the things we did, and we didn’t have to do it. And if we stopped that, everything else kept going. And what is that? That’s living in one another’s shoes, that is living together, being with one another in the mornings, the afternoons, the evenings, and at night. It’s 25 sisters showing up in a big glass window to see one new baby born. The hospital hated us. It’s 150 people going to an airport to greet one soul who had been gone for three days. I’m not exaggerating one bit; in fact, we went out to greet a brother at the airport who left that morning, and he came back that night. It was special. He was going off to the Vietnam War, and he didn’t go. We told the Lord he wasn’t supposed to go, and we didn’t know how he was going to be home that night, but we knew he was going to be, and he was. And big, husky, perfect, you know, we knew that brother was not supposed to go to war. We had enough war where we were, and we wanted him there. And you know, the doctors found something wrong with that boy, and he didn’t even know what was wrong with him. He didn’t know that, and they sent him home, and oh, we raised the roof of that airport. That’s the church without having to gather. That’s all the sisters going around and taking one day and cleaning all the homes, and of all the sisters in the gathering, all one day, just swarming in like bees, and then the next one.

Church life: Have you ever heard of a progressive dinner? You have them all up here, where you have an appetizer at one home, you all get in your car, and you run somewhere else or bicycle or whatever, go to another house and have something else, and then another house and something else, another house, something else, another house. I think we were about the fourth house, and here they came, a herd of locusts descending on that house. Everybody was in such a rush. Came in and they were gone. There was absolutely nothing left in the house. It was devoured. That’s right. It’s walking down the street and seeing 15 Christians going arm in arm down the street singing, stopping your car, forgetting whatever you’re doing, you don’t care, and join them and going with them, and you don’t even know where they’re going, and you don’t care. It’s getting out in the middle of a swimming pool or out in the middle of an ocean, 150 people with torches lit and baptizing one soul, and then holding a meeting right out there in the middle of the water for all the rest of the evening and on into the night.

It’s taking care of one another. It’s meeting one another’s needs. It’s coming over to someone’s home and praying for them. No special people, just people. Everyone had some who were closer to them than others. It’s getting up in the morning and walking out the door, and walking maybe a half a block, and you see way down the street three other people. It’s 6:00 a.m., and you turn a corner; there are four other people. You walk past a car; there are two people in it praying. You turn another block; there are three or four other people leaving their homes. And everywhere you look, all over that into town, Christians are getting out of their homes, going to someone else’s home to meet with the Lord. It’s having sheds in the back of some folks’ homes and fighting almost literally to be the ones who get into that shed first to have prayer together to be with one another with the Lord before some other selfish creatures come and get there ahead of you. It’s walking into a room and watching a brother sound asleep praising the Lord. It’s holding a meeting till 1:00 in the morning and walking out of there with a blind stagger and not being able to speak above a whisper for three or four days.

It’s having the sisters stand up in a meeting one night and say, “Brothers, the next meeting will be at 7 p.m. at a particular time.” In this case, it was a fraternity. Go and be there at 7. We won’t be there, but just wait. And you wait. And way in the distance, you hear singing, the lights go out, and you see about 40 or 50 sisters coming down the street, every one of them with a candle, and they come in and they present the service to you. They are the meeting. You just sit and listen.

Church, that’s getting invited to someone’s home. You know it’s special, but you don’t know what it is, and you don’t know who’s going to be there, and you open the door, and as soon as you open the door, you see a beautiful, lavishly spread table with candles on it. And a single brother, and this can be frightening. We’re talking about food here, folks. A single brother meets you at the door with a Welcome. You are our guest tonight. Please come in. And you’re ushered in, and there are two other families there, and six single brothers wait on you hand and foot like the best restaurant there ever was, with the most scrumptious meal you ever ate in your life. And they serve you, and when the meeting meal is over, you know why they did it. They’re just saying thanks. And then out of nowhere appear five or six or seven single sisters and help the brothers clean the place up. By the time you leave, you’d never known a meal had been served. And back in the kitchen, when you leave, they’re all back there, the single brothers and the single sisters singing and praising the Lord. And it sounds like heaven.

People are coming by your home at 11:00 at night, filling the entire yard up, and singing at your home. Let me tell you another one. You get a phone call, and I don’t know, you just don’t expect this. You’re not even in the same town, and you get a phone call, and the phone call is very mysterious. It says at exactly 2:00 in the afternoon, be on your front porch. Don’t step out before, and don’t step out after, but be on your front porch. So, at 2:00 that afternoon, exactly 2:00, we’re about 15 ft. from the doorknob, and at that instant, we start hearing singing, and we run outside to the edge of our yard. We are 100 miles from where the church gathers and two blocks down that street in columns of two or three, and about two blocks on that end of the street in columns of two or three, come over a hundred people marching and singing, and they’re coming to your house, and all the neighbors stick their heads up; they don’t know what in the world is going on. And they arrive at your front yard, fill it up, and say, “You are going on a picnic this afternoon.” And you get in your car, you drive out to someplace, and you spend the afternoon with your brothers and sisters. You hold your meetings in parks. You hold your meetings out in open fields. You hold your meetings in swimming pools and in oceans. And if you don’t like the meeting the way it started, you get up and dismiss the thing, and everybody goes home and shoots the thing dead because it was dying. You have meetings in which single brothers are the only ones who function; single sisters are the only ones who function. You have meetings in which only the married sisters talk. I don’t remember ever one when they let the married brothers be the only ones who talk because they talk all the time, and they’re so religious.

This is the church of the living God, 24 hours a day. There is a couple in one part of the town; let me see if I can do this. They went to Europe, and someone else moved into their home. They came home, and someone else went to Europe. This is for two years. This is not a vacation. Someone else went to Europe. The ones going to Europe took their home. They came back home and took this home, not their own home. You don’t even say this is living in common. This is just love at its high-water mark. This is care for the sick. This is sending someone overseas just to comfort somebody who’s hurting. This is what happens when a group of people has as their wellspring the Lord Jesus Christ instead of worship, Bible study, prayer, or evangelism. Our wellspring for the church is Christ, and these are ordinary people. These are ordinary people, yet they have a relationship with Christ that is extremely unordinary. The kind that only the great Christians have. And there’s only one reason. It’s because they are a body, not an individual.