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

Now, let’s go inside this very New Testament church building. The stained-glass windows were given to us by Bishop Suger in the year 1200 in the city of St. Denis, France, the building of the first Gothic Cathedral, which is where you got your staple, too. That’s when it came. The pews are more interesting. When Constantine built those buildings for Christians to assemble, he forgot to put benches in them. Christians came in and didn’t know what to do; I suspect they sat down on the cold marble slabs. Probably some Greek priest, Roman priest, pagan priest turned Christian told them to get up and stand up. They couldn’t sit down on the floor there.

And so today, the Eastern Orthodox Church never has a chair in its buildings. Did you know it? They have to stand through the entire meeting. And that’s why the Eastern Orthodox Church never grew. The Roman Catholics, on the other hand, were good Italians, and anybody would tell that they were, bought in their benches so they could sit down. In the year 1540, the Protestants took over Saxony and a lot of other places. They did it very religiously. It was a great revival brought on by the sword. It was about that time that the chair was invented. I know that’s hard to believe, but it was almost contemporary with it. They put some backs on those things. So now we have a New Testament church building with New Testament-stained glass windows with New Testament pews. The choir never existed until the year 400 AD, and it was taken right out of the pagan temples of Rome, specifically.

So now we have a New Testament church building with New Testament pews with a New Testament choir, and this thing that sits up there in the front of your church building was called an ambo. In the pagan temples of Rome and other parts of the Roman Empire, it was a place where the pagan priest made announcements at the end of the pagan meetings. It was brought in by Constantine into the buildings, and they had two of them in there. One was a place to read, and the other was a seat to sit down. The first preachers in church buildings sat down to speak because orators had spoken sitting down. And the sitting down came and stayed until I don’t know exactly when some of the priests began to take their pulpits, their ambos, and put them up on arches, and they spoke from there, and then Martin Luther came along. He said, “Clean out the whole front end of this place.” And he took the ambo, now called a pulpit, off the pillar, brought it, and stuck it down front, and behold the sacred desk from whence we declare the sacred word of God.

Origins are pagan. We got a pagan choir. We got a pagan pulpit. We got a pagan pew. We got a 12th-century stained-glass window, and we have a fourth-century church building, but we are in the New Testament. The reason we’re New Testament is because we have a pastor. The pastoral concept was invented by Martin Luther in the year 1430 in Wittenberg. And I can show you the documents to prove it. There were seven pastoral duties of the Roman Catholic priest. He said, “We’re going to change these a little bit; they’re going to be seven pastoral duties of the Protestant priest.” And they began to be known as the seven pastoral duties, and the word pastor caught on. Do you want to hear about the seven wonderful New Testament duties of the Protestant minister as they were born in Wittenberg? You know all about the funerals that are performed in the New Testament, don’t you? You’ve heard about all the wonderful things, the funerals in the New Testament? You’ve heard about preachers standing up in front of people who are Christians as dead and preaching at their funerals? The funeral concept came into the Christian faith because the same orators who spoke in Roman courts and coliseums and temples did the same thing. When they were converted to Christ and became Christian preachers, they brought the same orations over the dead, and that’s how that got into the Christian faith. It is a pagan thing that our brothers and sisters in the first century and the second century and the third century never did, but today we have a Roman custom of bringing an oration over our dead.

Quickly, the others are visiting the sick. You know where it says in the New Testament that our pastors are supposed to visit the sick, and you little old ladies who insist on the pastor going out, and you know, tapping you on the hand, telling you how sweet and saintly you are, and how much you’re loved in the community. You drive me crazy with that demand in my life; please don’t do that. This is a terrible thing to have to do; we really don’t want to go visit you. You might as well be told honestly, and it is a concept that has nothing to do with the Bible.

We marry young people. Well, you know how many ministers in the New Testament married the young; it’s on every page. They came to us out of the Roman Greco-Roman pagan world, got into the Roman Catholic Church, and we Protestants came along and took it over. So, we visit the ill, we bury the dead, we marry the young, and there are three others, and I never can remember what they are, but they’re all clearly centered upon the word of God, just like everything else we’re doing is.

Now, you know what disturbs me about that. Oh, one other thing? The thing that really makes us New Testament is because our minister went to the seminary. Here we go. Jesus Christ raised up 12 men by their living with Him. Paul of Tarsus gathered eight men out of the churches he raised up and had them live with him for four years and taught them how to plant churches and live with him, a very godly man he was, I’m told – I read that in the Bible, and that’s how they raised up workers. Seminaries were invented on December 13th, 1545, at the Council of Trent and did not exist previously to that. They were brought over from the traditions of the medieval age, in which men were taught, first philosophy, then rhetoric and oration, principles of oration, and then theology, which was a combination of Christian teaching and Greco-Roman philosophy, oh, give me the word, the word is dialectics. And brothers and sisters, will you please look one more time at that wonderful New Testament church?

Now my point is that first-century, second-century, and third-century Christians met in homes. They didn’t have pastors. They were 1400 years before that. Oh, the word appears, but it’s not what we think of today doing those things. There were men who came in and raised up those churches, but they left, and you functioned. You actually got to participate in the meetings. Now, isn’t that an innovative idea? And the elders who were around, those elders did a little bit in the meetings, but they didn’t preach you to death in the first, second, and third centuries. The church was primarily an organic expression of a particular area in which people having an enormous daily experience of the Lord Jesus Christ came together and shared with one another the experience they had already had of Him, in a loose, informal, organic atmosphere.

Now, in all of that that I have just said, what we’re doing today doesn’t bother me one bit. It’s okay. That’s fine. Just let me have the privilege of telling you where it came from historically, please. And if you have problems with that, please look in your heart and ask yourself if you’re not stuck in a rut so bad that it’s giving problems to the ongoing of the Lord’s kingdom.

Now, that’s not my problem either. My problem is really deep. My problem is, and this is a problem I ask myself, and I had to ask myself this when I was 29 years old, knowing all that I’ve just told you, how can I, how could I do this? And I can’t answer this for myself. How is it possible that I, Gene Edwards, can read the New Testament, read this organic living thing, preach it, read it constantly every day of my life, saturate myself in it, and have gone to the seminary for four and a half years studying it? How can I read all about this moving, living thing and find in it a seminary and raise money for that seminary on the basis of a seminary being in here? How can I preach a funeral and never blink an eye? How can I marry young people? How can I mount that pulpit? How can I put you in rows and tell you to sit there and hush? And if you say anything, you’re not decent and you’re not ordered. Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s not done in decency and order.

How can I, a minister, an ordained minister of the gospel who’s supposed to be able to read Hebrew and Greek and know the New Testament backwards and forwards, find all these things in here and never have any problems with this? That’s what I don’t understand, and that’s what really bothers me, and I’m bothered tonight. I’m bothered about the everlasting sermon that gives you no place to participate. I am bothered about this tremendous gap between the New Testament and our ability to see what we do today and find it in the Bible; that really bothers me. The way we pray bothers me. The way we never get to function. And one of the saddest things in this world, one of the saddest things I’ve ever known is to say to brothers and sisters who are Christians, you have a you got a right to function and tell you how to function and what to do in your functioning and tell you that I’m not going to be in the next meeting, it’s yours, and to walk out and see you come in there and stare at one another and not have the foggiest idea what to do. I cry over that. That’s sad. Please say amen. That is sad, that puts you in a group together, and you don’t even know what to do, and there are so many wonderful things Christians can do together in a meeting if we could just lock the preacher up in the closet.

Now, I’ll tell you something else. If you can leave him there for four or five weeks, bring him some soup every once in a while, but if you can leave him alone for, say, six, maybe eight weeks, and just keep on coming back, you will begin to instinctively know what to do. It’ll take a little time, but you’ll do it. And I’ll tell you quite frankly, some of what you’ll do will be so tragic because it is so anemic because you don’t have a depth to your experience of the Lord. And it gets really pitiful, but if somebody would show you how to know the Lord in a rich, deep, and living way, those little gatherings with a preacher locked in the closet and you with nothing in the ways that guide you in a way of ritual can become probably the most glorious thing you will know about the side of heaven.