Making Christ Central Part 1

Will you adopt me? This was beautiful, absolutely beautiful. This is the best meeting I’ve been in…I don’t know how long. Sandra, where are you? She’s not even here. She asked me to come by on my way down to a conference in Orlando. She said, “I have a few friends I want you to meet,” and that’s all I knew. This is the largest group of Christians outside the organized church I’ve ever seen in one place and have ever addressed. I usually speak to about somewhere between 7 and 200 people, and that’s about the maximum, and if I put all the influence in the world I have on this planet together, we might round up 300 people.

It’s really delightful to be here with you, really. My goodness, this was just so great. I’m going to make a statement here that may not be clearly understood, because I’m thinking, as I sit here, from the viewpoint of history. Throughout history, the Lord has always raised up groups outside the organized church. In the dark days of Europe, back in the 700s, 800s, 900s, 1000s, every once in a while, groups touched one another, not frequently, but they touched one another, and sort of cross-pollinated people. This is the first time I’ve ever really touched you, and I know it’s the first time you’ve ever touched me, and I consider it an honor. We’re always saying, you know, well, praise the Lord, we’re different, but we’re all the same. And we’re delighted with that, but it’s a superficial statement. I do want you to know…I want to emphasize the fact that I am different from you. I am from a conservative background, not fundamental. I am from a non-Pentecostal, charismatic group. Believe it or not, I am not eschatologically like you. You don’t know this, but you’re premillennial, and I’m amillennial, and if I can get away with saying that and you don’t throw me out of here, it’s wonderful. I’m thrilled that we can touch. I’m thrilled that we can touch, and now I’ll make a superficial statement. Who cares what our doctrines are anyway? Praise the Lord.

Now, I have something else to say to you: last night I came in, and someone said, “We were expecting you to speak.” I almost fainted. I didn’t even know there was anybody here to speak to. Sandra did this and then ran out. I said to one of the brothers, Well, you’ve got exactly 18 hours from this moment, because I’m going from here to Orlando, Florida. I’m going to speak to a gigantic group of forty, and when I finish that, I’m going back home to New England, where I live, and I’m going to get ready to go to Eastern Europe. I’m going to be there for two months, and I really would like to tell you why, too. I’m going to come back; we have a conference every year in Atlanta called the Deeper Christian Life Conference. I won’t even be there for the opening. I’m coming at the end of it. I’m going to share what I’ve seen in Eastern Europe, Lord willing. Then I’m shutting down for at least two years, and I’m not going to speak anywhere to anybody for any reason ever during those two years…at least two. I’m going to write. I seem to be able to speak all right, but I can’t do both of them at the same time. So, this is my last chance to talk to you for a long time, and your last chance to talk to me. I’ve got a lot on my heart, so kick off your shoes. I’m going to do the next two years’ worth of speaking right now, and I think as I speak, you really will recognize that I’m different from you. You’ll get stuff in here you’ve never thought of before, just like if I listened to you minister, you would say things to me I perhaps have never heard or known before.

Let me tell you why I’m going to Eastern Europe. I’m going to five countries: Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. I have a very simple reason for going. I’m quite concerned. I’m going over there to see if I can find some Christians who can translate, and there are very few of them in that country. I want to take the book you may know, entitled The Story of the Early Church. I recently changed its name to Revolution. I want it translated into the languages of those five countries, printed in those countries, and distributed in those countries. And the reason is really simple. I would like to get there before evangelical Christianity gets there. I want to do as much damage as I possibly can with that book. That book stands in direct contrast to virtually everything evangelical Christianity practices today. I want it there to at least stand and say, no, there really is something besides this … smile, shallow, insipid, supercilious, inane, pusillanimous Christianity that the evangelical Christians of North America are right now trigger-happy to get over there and give those people. Before the Bible schools, the seminaries, the church buildings, the pastors, and all that other garbage get over there, I would like to see that book in those languages.

The other reason I’m going is that I’m hoping to visit some libraries, and this is hard to explain, but let’s say it’s the year 700 A.D. That was a long time ago, and let’s say one of our brothers came to a town, preached, they arrested him, tried him, and burned him at the stake. Let’s say they had given them the nickname of the Paulicians, the Bogomils, the Priscillianists, the Lollards, the Albigensians, the Waldensians, or the Anabaptists. Did I leave anybody out? Let’s say they burned him at the stake. Sometime between 700 A.D. and today, some dusty scholar went back and researched that and did a paper on it. I want to go back to that bloody trail, in as many places as I can in Eastern Europe, because most of the Christians who stood outside the organized church from about 500 A.D. to about 1300 A.D. were in Eastern Europe, not Western Europe. I want to go into as many libraries as I can and bring home as many of those stories as I can, because one of these days I would like to write the complete history right on up to, say, 1950 from, say, 386 A.D., when they sliced off the first head of a Christian who said, this ain’t right, up until about 1950…the story of Christians outside the organized church.

Okay, that’s why I’m going there. Now, what am I going to do this morning? Well, let me talk to you about a lot of different things, stuff that, if I don’t say it to you, you may never hear it. I’ll be kind and as gracious as I am capable.  Worry. I think the first thing I want to talk to you about is that we have a right to be here. Secondly, some of the contributions we can make while we’re here, and thirdly, some of the things we need to clean house over. Then I’d like to talk to you about the Lord Jesus Christ, and then it’ll be time for supper. I was saved just before I was 17. I was in college, and I was an English history major. I like to read, and I always thought it would be interesting to gather a lot of material on things nobody else had ever gathered, and I’d give it to somebody to write it down someday, but no one ever showed that much interest. So, I’m going to have to write it down myself.

I want to talk to you about number 1. Are you with me for number 1 here? Okay, here we go. Number 1, I think you ought to know where evangelicals got all the practices, not their theology, but their practices, and this is going to surprise you, because a lot of things we take for granted as having come because somebody somewhere gave some attention to the Scripture and wrote this and started it on the basis of Scripture, there is virtually nothing that the Christian faith practices today…I would even remove “virtually” …that has any foundation or root in the New Testament. It is all out of tradition. Men started things; they didn’t even think about the New Testament when they started it, and we have been determined to find it in the Bible ever since.

That’s right, which has profoundly warped our abilities to understand the Word of God. Because we do not understand the Word of God, we come to the Scripture with our concepts and practices and make it say what we want it to say. Please don’t get too self-righteous here; we’re all guilty of this. If there’s anything we need—and I would come to a word that you may not know or like, but I’ve got to communicate here—is to… our problems are not our practices or our theologies. Our problem is our mindset, and until the mindset is cracked open in a very dramatic, revolutionary way, it doesn’t matter what we get taught or what we practice. We will keep doing the same old junk, and it is very rare in the course of human history that the mindset has ever cracked. In fact, Western history records only two times when the mindset of Western man changed, and in Christian history, perhaps only three times, or four at most, when the mindset of Christians changed, and none of them improved when they changed.

We do not need to look forward to the future about what the Lord is going to do. Some way or other, we have got to lay hold of literally everything, God’s own mind, and that’s a bigger deal than you may think. Oh, yeah, we just need the mind of God. I don’t mean it in a light way; I mean that somebody has got to go back into God, because what was and what ought to be flowed from the living God even before eternity, even before creation.

So, I’m going to take a crack at your mindset and mine this morning and try to shake you up a little bit. I want to tell you where we’ve got all of our practices, and that might help clear the ground just a little bit. Have you ever wondered why we go to church on Sunday morning at 11 a.m.? Well, some of you perhaps know this by now; you’ve been listening to my tapes. Martin Luther loved to drink beer on Saturday night and talk to his friends, but he kept having a hard time getting out of bed on Sunday morning. Services were held at 5 a.m., so he asked that they be moved up to 6, then 7, then 8. He drank more beer and talked longer, and they moved it to 9, and then he drank more beer and talked longer, and they moved it to 10. And they called it Sunday morning mass, and somebody said to him, Luther, you’re going to have to stop this, or it won’t be morning any longer. He said, ” Great, we’ll do it at 11 a.m.”

I was in the jungles of Thailand and met with a group of Christians who had lived in the jungles in Laos and had not seen or been seen in 50 years, and I came to the refugee camp where they were. There were several thousand of them, and they were lost to the knowledge of man. I walked into that camp, and I could tell where they were located because the government had given them big, huge rolls of plastic, and they had built one building in the middle of that refugee camp that was about two feet higher than any others. I walked into it and saw these little bamboo pews, a desk, and a Bible that had just been translated into their language, and it was 11 a.m. Now, if you don’t think we have a problem, consider that. I would like to recommend that we stop meeting at 11 a.m. on Sunday morning. In fact, I would, in order to swing the pendulum the other way, shoot…I’d quit meeting on Sunday altogether. Thank you, all three of you.