Knowing Christ in a Personal and Profound Way (DCLC – July ’87, Part 1)

And I stand back, and I have to ask, I can’t help it, I’m a human being. This is my business. I have to ask myself, have you ever in your whole life touched your Lord in personal fellowship? I have to ask that because it will change you. You, I don’t think you pray that way. Maybe you will. Maybe you will. Maybe I am utterly wrong here, but I don’t think you will. Everything about what I hear being prayed, not everything, but an awful lot of it, is a reflection of an unchanged form that I’ve heard ever since the day I got saved. Where is the intimacy? Where is “I know the one I’m talking to and He knows me; we’ve spent a lot of time together.” Then I get in a prayer meeting. There’s one of these kinds of prayer meetings where everybody’s in a circle and prays. I don’t mean to be sacrilegious, but it’s downright funny to me. It’s just downright funny.

Boy, the things you hear; we’ll get up at 6:30 in the morning, and we’ll pray together, and we’ll seek the Lord, and it’s “Aunt Nana’s got a cut finger,” and “Uncle George is not here yet,” and “Aunt Suzy’s got a cold” and we’re having our prayer request. I’m not down on prayer requests, but I’m tired of hearing Christians having nothing but prayer requests.

Now I want to say something else, and that is all of our prayers are, I don’t know how to say this, futuristic, it’s always “Lord we need you so much please give us such and such, and Lord we need you so much give us such and such, and the next day maybe He gave it maybe He didn’t but the next day we’re back Lord the church of God is so needy. Lord, meet its needs, Lord send a …” Everything’s out there somewhere; everything is futuristic. Where is the present encounter with Him? Are y’all going to let me keep going here? I don’t mean to be negative. It’s taken me 37 years in the ministry to blow my stack tonight. Will somebody please tell all these brothers and sisters this is not the way we usually start a conference? I appreciate that witness. I wonder if I can get two witnesses now. Alright, you’re a witness to it.

I’m disturbed about something else. I didn’t expect this to happen in my lifetime, I just didn’t. I have probably read a lot, if not most of the Christian literature written by no matter who it was in the centuries in the past, and most of it was really poor, but a lot of those dear people got in real big trouble over what they did right, even if it was poor because it was not according to Hoyle. It was not the perceived way you were supposed to be in that day, and they really caught it, and you read those people, and you begin to just love them and care for them. Sometimes you want to say, “Hey, listen. I wish you’d stop being that way and teaching some of these weird things you are,” but man, their hearts are wonderful. And sometimes their personal testimony with the Lord is so wonderful. And these people are not well-received. And we’re talking 1700 years, folks, but there are several little things you can see running through their words. You can see their hearts break; you can feel their tears.

One of the things they talk about is the enormous intellectualism of their day of knowing God by up here or knowing God just, you know, just what you can dig out, memorizing a verse. Knowing God by ink and pen and memory and study. Now they had a way of saying unkind things about them, for which the world and the church, in its gratitude to them for awakening them to this need, burned them at the stake, threw them in prison, sold them into slavery, threw their bodies to the lions, or, later, they simply took them out and killed them. I cannot believe my own age after we’ve been through the reformation and we are evangelicals and we preach a born-again experience, an evangelical experience of you don’t know the Lord and one day you get saved and you do know Him. But there’s this mammoth thing rolling up here on us that I cannot believe. I wouldn’t have believed in 10,000 years that we’ve ever come to the evangelical faith, and that is this, I hope I don’t offend anyone with this, but I’m running scared right now, and that is that God was so living when He lived before creation and then He was in the garden and He was really close to Adam and then there was after that the fall but He spoke to Moses, Noah, and He spoke to Abraham and He spoke to all of these prophets and there were men who met Him and then Jesus came and Jesus Christ walked around with the Father inside Him, fellowshipping with Him. That’s in the Bible, by the way.

And here He is having a living experience with Him, and here then, are the men who come after Him with this living experience they have. They’re reporting a living experience. And then they write letters, and they write inspired literature; they write the New Testament. And then we get the New Testament, and now we are told that God has ceased having fellowship with us, that He has ceased speaking to us, that He no longer personally speaks to us any longer. He only speaks to us through the written word, and that you cannot know Jesus Christ outside of the Bible. And a brother said to someone who was teaching this, “What about an indwelling Lord?” And he got a classical answer. You want to hear this answer? “The only way that we can know that we have an indwelling Lord, the only way we can know is because the Bible tells us.”

Now, if this were a little bitty thing coming up, that would be okay, but this thing’s taking the day, and I’m finding Christians all over this my country who are getting to the point they are afraid to touch their Lord. They are afraid they’re going to do something wrong if they do anything except read the Bible and know about Him from there to here.

Now then, again, if brothers and sisters wish to believe that and teach it, great, but I’d like to say that Jiminy Crickets, I believe he can be known a little bit in here too, that we can fellowship with him and know him and touch him. I really believe that on the basis of firsthand testimony and the testimony of believers throughout the ages, every age.

Now then, I think I’m winding down. Can I do one more? How about two more? Let me do this really quickly because I’m not going to have a chance to do it any other time. This is the word of God. This is the New Testament; we’re New Testament believers. I stopped in a town just a few minutes ago, pulled up to the sign. Here was the sign: Upstairs, New Testament Baptist Church. New Testament Baptist Church. New Testament Baptist Church. That’s interesting. I didn’t know that Baptists could be New Testament Baptists. I know you’re saying, “Well, Gene, you’re being negative.” Just give me a little room here tonight, will you? I need a little room.

Okay, let me talk about the New Testament. Here is a New Testament church. You walk in the back. On the outside, it’s the front, but when you get inside of it, it’s the back. So, you never know what to call it. So, outside’s the front, inside’s the back. If somebody can ever clarify that for me, I’m done. You’re inside it, and somebody says Go back there and somebody 5ft away on the outside says, “This is the front. Go in there.” Alright, I’m walking in the back/front, I’m walking in from outside in, and I’m in and entering a New Testament church, and I see the beautiful stained-glass windows and the pews, and I see the aisle and the pulpit. I see the choir and I see the preacher preaching the word of God. He’s a recent graduate of a seminary. Everybody stands; they got their little bulletin. You know, when those bulletins are done, we get our wives to type them on Saturday night, early Sunday morning. We crank them out on a little mimeograph machine that doesn’t work very well. We hand-fold those things and get them over to the ushers just before the meeting, don’t we? That’s it. That’s exactly what we do, and we invent those things. Were you ever inspired when you invented one of those, brother? And we hand these things out, and here you come in, the long-suffering Christian, and you got this thing, and you’re walking into this New Testament church, and you’re going to have three songs and a prayer, two songs, and another prayer, one more song, and then an offering. And we’re going to pass a plate right under your nose to make you just as guilty as possible. But you have a way around that, you just put in a penny. And then right before that, we had the announcements, or right after we had the announcements, and one more special, and we get up to preach. We’re still a New Testament church.

Now, this is what we’re doing. We’re locked into a little ritual; at the end of the sermon, if we’re Baptist, we give an invitation. If we’re Methodist, we don’t. Everybody goes home. They shake the hands of the preacher when you go out, and that’s it. Go home, eat lunch. By the way, this does not include the New Testament way that you got to church. You had to fight with your kids trying to get their clothes on. They said they didn’t like those high-starch shirts, and your husband and you had a real stem-winder when you got in the car because you were running late, and your husband blamed it on you, and you blamed it on your husband. And you got to church about as unreligious as two humans who could step out of an automobile, but you did go into a New Testament church, for the Bible is the center of the word of God. It’s the word of God, and we’ve got to be New Testament and get back to a New Testament church. You got the picture? Okay.

The building, please, I know my facts. The concept of church building did not exist on this planet until the year 324 AD, when Constantine commissioned approximately 15 buildings to be built. He was a new Christian; he happened to be the emperor of an empire. And they were not called churches then. They were called St. John’s of the Lateran, the Bethlehem grotto, and the place of the holy Sepulcher, and came to be called church. The first person ever to call a building the church, as far as literature, that I can find, was John Chrisomotum in about 370 AD. That is easily 300 years after the first century church. All the shovels being turned over by archaeologists said, “We met in homes.” Previous to that, we met in homes. We met in homes. We met in cemeteries. And we met in rented halls.