Making Christ Central Part 3

(Continued from Part 2)

…is that we’ve got to see the recovery of the gifts, and it began in 1790, and it was very, very effective. Preachers are not fools, hucksters, yes. Fools, no. Are we ever going to recover from today? And so, some of these preachers saw that that worked mightily well over there. There were thousands of people in there, recovering the gifts. So, if it works for them, it’ll work for us. So, by 1810, it was the fad of a half-dozen groups: what we need is the recovery of the gifts. They got to the United States, and it blossomed in the 1800s. It rekindled itself in the 1920s. It rose again in 1948, and I was personally there when it happened as a young teenager. Then again, when the Jesus movement came in…boy…I was right in the middle of that thing. I remember the day that men my age began to preach, “What God is doing in this day is recovering the gifts.” Now, brothers and sisters, I’m sorry, but that’s 200 years now. By the time it got to 1970, it was a tool in the hands of corrupt men who were trying to put together movements, and they had not done their homework. They had picked it up from somebody else. They thought it really was the age for the recovery of the gifts. It was 200 years old, and it was worn out. If God can’t recover gifts in 200 years, He’s not a very big God. I watched thousands and thousands of young people lose their Christian testimony, their experience, and everything else on something that was ancient as a gimmick and a tool that has been used by at least 200 separate movements.

Now, that’s hard to take, but it is a historical fact, and you can’t budge it. That’s number one. Here’s number two. These are some of the things we need to do some house cleaning on. “Gene, don’t you believe in the gifts?” Yeah, I believe…not in the fivefold…is it fourfold, or fivefold? What do y’all do with her? Fivefold? Hmm. I counted 17 of them; I believe in the 17-fold gifts. (laughter) My point is that it was used to draw people to a movement, and it became the central purpose of that movement. Brothers and sisters, Jesus Christ is the center of our movement. Corruptly motivating God’s people and drawing them in for reasons that are outside of Christ. Recovering the gifts is not a motive to bring men and women together. Christ is our only motive. We begin with Christ. We center on Christ. We end with Christ, and the rest will take care of itself. The gifts are organic to our species as surely as my nose is organic to Homo sapiens. The gifts will come when Jesus Christ is made central, supreme, and the living experience of our lives.

We don’t need apostles. We don’t need gifts. We don’t even need the Church of the Living God. Put a group of people in the middle of the Living God. Put them in God in eternity. They will love and desire the church because it is part of God’s nature to desire the church. They will come together. They will fellowship around Him, and out of it will organically come everything that you ever heard or dreamed or saw or believed or read about in the New Testament. I did not get down in front of my baby’s baby bed and pray for ears for my kids. They come with ears. Elders are organic to the species; they are not made nor chosen by man. Workers are organically part of our species. You don’t make them; they emerge out of the body. Leave the church alone to let the Lord Jesus Christ be the intimate, encountering, living, real experience of your life, and all else will come.

Corrupting element number two. I don’t know if you all have ever even heard of this, used it, or what, but I’m speaking from experience and observation. This guy came right in the middle of the Jesus movement to us. And I was, at that time, very ignorant of some of the things that people do in the fundamentalist and Pentecostal realm. It was very cold one night, oh, it was cold, and I didn’t have on a coat. He was walking along beside me, and here came this spiel. “Now, Brother Gene, we’ve heard about you, and we’ve been praying for you, and we love you, brother. And oh, we feel that these are the last times. And God wants us all to be one. And so, brothers, let us be one. It’s the last hour. Things are horrible, and it’s time for God’s people to become part of the prayer to be one. So, we’re getting together to be one.” Well, brothers and sisters, that man was putting together a movement under the guise of oneness…and I have been one with you ever since Jesus Christ ascended. I have oneness with you.  We sat down on a bus stop bench, and he said, “And Gene, we need the restoration of the gifts. What’s your gift?” I was freezing to death. I was bored stiff, and I jumped up and said, “Brother, I don’t know what my gift is. I never have known; I never will. Can we go back in where it’s warm?” And that’s the closest I ever got to being hooked into oneness and gifts.

Alright, let’s get a little closer. This one’s going to be a little painful. I’m going to make the same point over and over again. Brothers, I held a book in my hands and didn’t know how important it was. I didn’t see who published it. I didn’t see who wrote it, and I didn’t read it, but it was written before 1800. It was the first book ever written on the concept of the overcomer, and it spread throughout England in the early 1800s, even before the Brethren rose. And it captured England. England was going to go into the fiery pits of a French-type revolution. People were going to have their heads sliced off, this, that, and the other. Everybody in England was expecting the Lord’s return, and it was the day of the overcomers. And it worked. As I said, we preachers are not stupid. We may be hucksters, but we’re not stupid, and the same thing happened with the overcomers that occurred with the concept of the restoration of the gifts. It worked, and just about every group that there was, including Baptists and Congregationalists…I have heard Southern Baptists get up and preach on the overcomer, and the overcomer is somebody who moves his letter. “Now, would those of you who are going to move your letter, please come forward and be overcomers.” Are there any Southern Baptists here? Ex-Southern Baptists? Do you remember what you used to say to get people to move their letters? You’d promise them heaven and threaten them with hell if they didn’t move their letter. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? Moving your letter from one church to another? Well, brothers, again, it has been picked up by at least 150 different movements, and much of it is simply because we’re ignorant of history.

We need to write down some of this stuff. One of the most important things we could all learn is not doctrine, but where doctrines came from. And if we could learn where doctrines came from and where practices came from, rather than practicing our practices and teaching our doctrines, and learning where they came from. We would leave most of them alone. Something new has been invented, and it was invented by the Brethren, the Plymouth Brethren, John Darby’s folks. They came under a lot of fire and criticism, and they began to promote an idea that is so powerful and overwhelming. It is used everywhere today. You can’t deal with it. You can’t get on top of it, under it, around it, or through it. And what they said was, “God raised us up; we have never read anybody else’s literature. We use the pure Word of God and nothing else. We have been taught only by the Lord and by the Scripture.” And that was the biggest lie a man could perpetrate. John Darby and those other men had read many, many books, and they had been greatly influenced, believe it or not, by some Christians writing in South America. That was back in 1820, and they pushed that and pushed that, “It’s nothing but the Word of God and the pure Word of God, and we believe only the Word of God, and the Word of God, and the Word of God, and the Word of God, and the Word of God.” They took Scripture and moved it almost to idolatry. They lost and left an indwelling Lord, and it still pervades. You Pentecostals and Charismatics can really warm up to this. They literally lost a living God.

Let me tell you a story you won’t believe. In one of the great, well-known seminaries of this country, a young brother went for some courses who came out of our fellowship, and they were preaching the Word of God, the Word of God, and they meant the New Testament. They weren’t referring to Jesus Christ, the Word of God. “And it’s only that, and nothing else, and we can find nothing else in anything but that.” He went up to his professor and said, “What about an indwelling Lord?” And the professor’s answer was, “The only way we can know that we have an indwelling Lord is because the Bible tells us we do.” Now, that, to me, moves God completely out of our universe and leaves us with printed material, and that’s all.

Brothers and sisters, meanwhile, back over there in the fundamentalist camp, we lost a living personal relationship with the Lord, and they used that as a gimmick to hold off their critics, and it worked. They literally stopped the mouths of their critics by constantly hammering on the fact that they were Bible-centered and nothing but Bible-centered, and that still floats around to this day. I have seen it used…as beautiful as it is, as lovely and as great as it is, and I do not question the concept, but it has been corrupted to the point where it is used as a way of gaining people to a movement. There ought to be nothing that we ever say that says we are God’s people chosen for this hour alone. I said it in a book; I’ll say it to you. That’s left to the people who live in the year 2200 to decide whether we are God’s people. What we do is we be faithful.

I will say it again, brothers and sisters, my dear, dear brothers and sisters: Jesus Christ and His beautiful bride, the church, is enough to magnetize, hypnotize, mesmerize, and draw anybody on earth to Him without the garbage thrown in. We have got to get past these corrupting influences. They are killing the testimony of Christians outside the organized church. It has been a beautiful, beautiful testimony for 1,700 years. It’s time to leave the corruption that Plymouth Brethren and the early Pentecostals put into our minds. That needs to go, and Christ should take its place. I did my best, brothers. I did that with a clean, pure heart. I did not do that. I don’t know what time it is, but I’m coming to my final point now. That’s some of the corruption we’ve got to get past.

There’s a book out on the stands right now. It says, Beware the Naked Man Who Offers You His Shirt. I don’t know what it means, but every time I see that book, I think of Christian Movements, offering you things that we never live up to. For those of us who are outside the organized church, we have one job: to know the Lord, and then to lift Him up. And that’s what my last point is.