Making Christ Central Part 2

In 1st and 2nd Corinthians, this is downright out-and-out chaos. This is anarchy. I mean, this church is in big trouble. You got adultery, you got incest, you’ve got people getting drunk at the Lord’s Supper. It couldn’t get any worse. 1st and 2nd Corinthians make absolutely no reference to an elder…I don’t think it even has anything in there about submission—nothing about leaders whatsoever.

The book of Romans comes next. There is not one reference in there. There are the names of about 30 or 40 believers, and there is not one reference to an elder or a leader. How are you doing back there, brother? There is no reference to an elder in any of Paul’s writings that he wrote to churches. Not one. You find it in the book of Acts, and you find it in the letters he wrote to young apostolates he was raising up. You don’t find it in any of his letters, and every letter he wrote was to a church in crisis.

Brothers and sisters, in his mind, the church was more important than leaders, and he saw the church as able to handle its own problems. Why, in the name of common sense, don’t we ask men to present their models themselves so we can know what in the world they believe? And when they come back and play this verse game on us, we can say to them, ‘Alright, expand your model and put it in there.’ It won’t fit. Most of the things we come up with when the church is in crisis, out of a verse, cannot fit in a model. It will only fit in our Aristotelian dialectic logic, given to us through the mind of Western man; it is not viable in the New Testament scenario. I know you didn’t understand that sentence, but it doesn’t matter.

I’m going to present a model to the kingdom of God, and, as far as I know, it uses virtually every piece of information available in this day and age. I don’t present it as the final word. I present it as the first word. And yeah, I’d like for everybody to read it. I’d like you to challenge me, and I’d like you to write a better one. But brother, have one. Otherwise, your ministry will be like this forever, and you will be leading God’s people based on verses rather than on the beautiful, incredibly beautiful, overall panoramic story of the first-century church. So many things come into focus. I wish we used models. You have a right to know what the first-century church looked like and hold that up over against all those verses you get bombarded with.

I think I’ve said there are two contributions we could make here. The third one I would like to say is that I believe it is our duty and responsibility. I wish somebody would do this. I’d like not to have to do it. I don’t want to do it, but we really need a really good history. Beginning with the Priscillians in 386A.D., we need a history of the Christian faith outside the organized church because it’s the only history of the church there is. The rest of it is just a bunch of foolishness. Those people stood for something, and we need to see their story. We shouldn’t have to start over in every generation. I don’t know all that much about the beginning of your group. I want you to know that none of us in any work we’re doing, none of us at this moment, have available what we need to know about brothers and sisters who went before us. They learned a lot, and they’ve got a lot to give us, and we can avoid a lot of mistakes if somebody would go out there and put together…if we would do our homework on who our forefathers were, we stand on the shoulders of the work of God in the past. We need that; we really need it badly. And by the way, it would do away with half of the need for seminaries.

Okay, I’ve now finished point two. I’m going to ask you, I’m sure I’ve offended somebody out here, and I’ve probably got someone terribly confused. I’m going to stop for a question, but you’d better really have a question here, and then I’m going to go to point three. You got something you want to ask really quickly, clarify? I’m crazy. I’ll let the audience talk to me, even in the middle of something like this. Nothing? You’re all clear then. Oh, boy. I believe that. Okay. These brothers will clean up my mess after this is over. I will be leaving here this afternoon, getting out as fast as I can.

I think this third one may hurt a little bit. If it’s going to hurt you, it’s going to hurt me because I’ve made some of these mistakes. When I left the organized church, I had to find somebody to point me in the right direction and help me out. By the way, I wrote my model when I was 29 years old; I completed it, and I have never, never, from that day forward, had to have some new direction in my life. Not one day, not one minute. What the first century was, and it was, was by the Holy Spirit, and I’m not talking about organization here; I’m talking about what God does organically. In each situation, it’s different, but it is organic. It is natural to the nature of God, and there is a pattern in the nature of God. As surely as God raised up His Son, Jesus Christ, that was a natural, organic expression of God. That natural organic expression did not radically change throughout the New Testament. Adapted, a little different, in each place, but essentially the same.

Not that we would ever organize. The church is not an organization. The church is a beautiful girl. She’s a woman, and she ought to be treated as a living human being. I was mentioning evangelism here… this is just an insert; it is not any particular point. Again, our evangelical Western North American mindset is that we need to evangelize, and this and that and the other. We’ve got all those verses thrown at us. Brothers and sisters, the first-century church, I don’t care what verse you throw at me, or anyone throws at you, the first-century church grew basically and primarily out of the beauty of that girl. The greatest single magnetic drawing power that we have is that girl. Think about it: she’s what drew you. You came here because of her beauty. Is that not true? That’s our greatest single offering to the world. She is our evangelism, and He is her center. Amen. Amen. Amen.

Well, let me tell you some of the things that got us off center. I really hope you’ll be gracious enough not to throw anything at me if I hit a nerve here. I’m doing this. I’m sweet. I’m a kind, gentle person. Trust me, I’m loving and gentle and kind, and I’m not one of these bitter and all that stuff…and if you believe this, I’ve got a bridge I can sell you. (laughter) I’m really doing this as tenderly as I can, but again, we haven’t done our homework. Something very tragic happened regarding Christians who came out of the organized church back around 1800 A.D. In fact, I can tell you exactly when it was. It was 1790, and there has been a corrupting influence among us from that time on that was never true of the church outside the organized church before then. Brothers, we have got to pull loose of this thing, or we… we are corrupting our influence, and we are losing our place in church history by this corruption, and it is the corruption of gimmicks.

Now, I’m going to talk to you about something you’re not familiar with. Please listen to me, and I’m going to ask you to handle this before God. And a lot of this is going to shock you, but it’s true. I’ve had to face this in my own life because, when I left the organized church, I went to others for that torch. I wanted to carry that torch. I bloody well meant to carry that torch. I knew what I was doing, and I had something to say, and I went back to learn what I could learn, both from history and from those who lived in this day who had come out. But they had not done their homework, and we fall…and I fell…into a lot of traps. I’m going to tell you what some of them are.

Are y’all still awake? Okay. In1790 … Oh, let me get off the subject here. Have you ever noticed that if there’s an earthquake in China or a couple of hundred thousand people die of starvation in India? We don’t pay any attention, but if there’s an earth tremor in England or the United States, then the Lord’s coming back. If there is not a depression, but a mild recession, then the end of the world is imminent if it happens in the United States. Do you notice that? Well, it’s very, very old. It’s very colonial. It’s part of our…it’s what the British gave to us in their island arrogance. It’s part of our mind as an American. It’s just that way. We don’t care what happens in China or any other country. Man… let a Roman Catholic run for president, and it’s the end of the world. We’ve really got a lot of immature saints out here. As I said, this is where all the kooks are…right up here on this platform. You have to be a little crazy to do this.

In 1790, the French were in the midst of a revolution that was scaring the throne and the British to… just beyond words. Britain was panicked out, and the Christians were panicked out, and it was at this time that two separate streams began to grow up. I’m going to call them by their historical names, even though you may wish to run hard to say you’re not either one of them. The Pentecostal stream and the Fundamentalist stream were being born. At that very moment, they were literally coming into existence, and both of them reached out and got hold of a mindset, and sometimes the two of them have this wedding of monsters. You put fundamentalism and Pentecostalism together…man, that is a monstrosity. It can’t really be done. You can’t put a thinker and a feeler in one body.