You Cannot Live the Christian Life — Christ Lives It Through You (July 1988 Part 2)

What am I trying to tell you? First of all, she’s beautiful. That’s the first thing I want to tell you. She’s beautiful. She’ll steal your heart. She’ll take your soul. And if you ever see her and you ever touch her, you just are miserable the rest of your life. And forgive me, those of you who go to traditional church, but I have found one thing common with everyone who’s ever touched the life of the ekklesia, the body of Christ. They have one thing in common. And I am telling you, I did not make this up. I have seen this in cities all over. Everywhere I’ve traveled, people have said this to me. They don’t know I’ve heard it before. If they have touched this flexible, incredible, glorious, sermon-less, ritual-less, human headless wonder, this body, this thing that is 18 hours a day. Touch her. You can’t handle anything else; you just can’t stand it. And this word has been said to me over and over, Christians who said, “I went back to church, and I sat there and got physically ill. I got physically ill.” Now, that won’t happen to you next Sunday. You’re going to go and you’re going to really enjoy it, but sometimes you touch something in this life, and you get physically ill with anything else. And I’m standing here telling you I’m homesick, talking about it, it’s my home. My home is not this world; my home is the church. And I’m trying to tell you what she is. Let me tell you two things. I’m going to use a wagon wheel as an illustration.

Imagine the hub of a wagon wheel is Christ, and we are the spokes. What happens as the spokes move toward the hub? The spokes also get closer to one another until they join at the hub. And if you look really closely, the hub and the spokes are all one. Put a group of people together, not around some sectarian doctrine, not held together by a movement mentality, not held together by some sort of ego-trip – we are the overcomers; we are the overcomers. We’re the Philadelphia church; we are Philadelphia, the last great expression of the Lord before He comes. That’s what we are. Remove all those things. I have noticed Christians get along with one another greatly until preachers come along. Oh, Presbyterian forgets to ask that Methodist if he’s a Methodist; the Baptist even forgets to ask the Methodist if he’s a Methodist. And then preachers come along. Leave Christians alone, and they are not sectarian, and they are not doctrinal.

You remove all those things, and you put Christ at the center, and you just keep on putting Christ at the center and then put Christ at the center some more and then put Christ at the center some more until He begins to overflow in people’s lives and community, church life, whatever you want to call it, the fellowship of believers, just pours out. And the thing I described to you a minute ago becomes natural to the believer to do this, and it takes an introduction of foreign matter to mess that up. That’s what you will naturally do. Bees naturally build honeycombs. Human beings naturally build systems of protection. Dogs naturally get in packs to protect themselves. Birds, I don’t know why they do what they do; I don’t know who’s directing them. Have you ever seen them take off that way and suddenly every one of them turns instantly and goes the other way? That’s just natural to their being. It is natural for fallen men to be material-minded. He is part of the material realm. It is natural for you and me to go down the street singing and praising the Lord out of the abundance of our spirits. Leave us alone and we’ll do it. They did it in Jerusalem out of…they just did it. We have an expression. Our species has an expression on this earth as sure as civilization has an expression. The church of Jesus Christ has an expression. She is our civilization. Our expression is the church, and she expresses her Lord, but that has to begin with this thing of knowing Christ among you all. And you get this help from each other; real, genuine help. Someone knocks on the door at 6:00 a.m., you’re going to get help whether you want it or not. You will never be alone at such a mad hour in the morning, but you will be with someone else. That’s one thing.

The other thing I want to try to explain to you is what the church is. That’s all I’m going to do tonight. She’s a place where you can become a Christian who knows the Lord. That’s my point, and you need her so desperately. I want you to know how much God loves her. He loves her more than He loves Youth for Christ. He loves her more than He loves Campus Crusade for Christ. Why, He even loves her more than He loves Youth with a Mission. He loves her so much that we can say He did not die for you and does not love you; He died for her and loves her. The reason you get saved and you die, and you get loved is because you’re part of her. He loved her and gave Himself for her.

Now I’m going to try one more time. Someone else used a term, I think it is a recent term, and I fell in love with it when I heard it. What is the church? She is a colony from the heavens; she’s a colony from another realm. You remember I used a term this afternoon, shot full of eternity. She should be there. Her conversation should be of those things of the other realm first and foremost.

Now, I want to try to explain to you what this means. I’m going to use an illustration. I want you to imagine that you are a Roman colonel in the year 100 AD. Let’s say it’s 30 AD. Make it 40 AD. 40 AD.  Then you get in the church. You are a Roman colonel, and you live in Rome, and you are an Italian, and you’re a very proud man, and you get orders that you’ve got to go to Galatia to a miserable town called Pisidian Antioch, and you don’t want to go. It’s wild; it’s savage; it’s untamed. They’ve had rebellions there all the time. You don’t want to go, but you leave the beautiful, eternal city, Imperial Rome, the proudest city of them all. You get on the ship, you’re seasick, they let you off, you start up this long, hot road. You’re miserable, grumbling, and unhappy. And then you catch sight of Pisidian Antioch from a hill as you near it, and you smile. The city of Antioch was completely leveled and rebuilt by the Romans. And it was built as a miniature replica of the city of Rome. And the colonel walks into this Roman colony, and he sees people in uniforms like his. He hears the Latin language. He sees people dressed in the same fashions of Rome. He sees his coins being used. He sees the colonnades. He sees the marketplaces. He smells spaghetti. Actually, they didn’t have it yet. It’s his cooking, and he feels at home. He is in a colony of Rome that is a replica, a replica of his home city.

It is 1680, and you are a British magistrate serving the crown. You get a letter. You’ve got to go to the new world. Well, you’ve heard of these Indian savages? They’re running around in the woods naked and you hear about bows and arrows and people getting killed and all of that stuff and you don’t want to go and you get on a ship and they let you off and you walk in a few miles inland and lo and behold, you see a town with windows and cobblestones and steeples and architecture just like London, and inside the windows are the latest fashions; it’s English everywhere. No Indians. You smell roast beef and plum pudding. Everybody’s speaking English, and it’s English currency, and it feels just like home, and you breathe a sigh of relief. You are in a British colony called Philadelphia.

That’s what the church is. She’s a chip out of the other realm that has landed here. Jesus Christ came to this earth. There is only one place He would feel at home, and that isn’t in a modern-day Christian version of a synagogue. He would be as lost there as He could be; consider it…sit Him down in a home full of people who know Him, who fellowship with Him, and know His Lord, and He would say, “This is just like home.” And that’s the church. And right now, she’s your natural habitat, and that’s where you belong—to know the Lord together. Now, you may not understand this, but that’s redemptive. That’s encouraging.

I want to go a little further, and then we’ll quit and go home and get some rest for tomorrow morning. She ought to be beautiful. If I were the Lord, I wouldn’t come back. I’d dig my heels in and refuse. When I was just before my 18th birthday, I met this girl. There were about 3,000 students on that campus. I want you to know, in my opinion, that was the prettiest girl on that campus. I married her. She was gorgeous. I mean, she was gorgeous. You could watch the boys watch her when she walked by.

Now I’m in the image of Jesus Christ. Now, if that’s my attitude toward the woman I marry, do you think the King of kings is wanting to marry a snaggletooth need, freckle faced, bow-legged, skinny, fussing, fighting, homely looking wallflower? I don’t think He’s going to come back till He sees something beautiful down here, saints; I really don’t believe He will. We may be 200 years from that day, but I’m going to get my pick and shovel and do my part in seeing her glorious again the way she was. That’s what I do.

I really would like to take your individuality away from you, so I’m going to close this meeting by taking the New Testament away from you. I’m going to steal it right out from under your nose; you can’t have it anymore. I would like for you…Oh, if you could just see and think corporately instead of individually. Everything’s been thrown at you individually. I’m trying to throw this to you corporately.

Do you like the book of Galatians? You do? Well, you can’t have it. You know how you’ve read Galatians, and it’s blessed you, and God gave me a verse today out of Galatians? I don’t think He gave you a verse today out of Galatians; you just love Galatians. Galatians 2:22. You love that verse. It’s not for you. You can’t have it. The promise is not to you. You can’t have the book of Galatians; it is not yours. Galatians was written to four churches in an area called Galatia. That was not written to an individual.