Making Christ Central (Part 3): The Secret to the Christian Life – Knowing Him Deeply

I don’t want you to go to sleep on me because I’m speaking for so long. I live in New England, and they tell a story up there about the days of the Puritans. This particular church had this very dry preacher, and he droned on for two hours. A lot of people were falling asleep, so they came up with this marvelous idea. They appointed this man on Sunday morning to carry this long stick with a very sharp point at the end, and his job was to walk up and down the aisles. While the preacher droned on this dry sermon, this man walked up and down the aisles, and if he saw anybody nodding, he took this long stick with this sharp point, and he went over, and he jabbed the preacher. I want to quit before you get an idea like that.

Well, it’s a beautiful thing to stand here and say Christ should be our center. But again, historically, we’re dealing with a major problem here. The Roman Catholics had what they called their mystics…Roman Catholic mystics. No one ever knew what the word meant; still don’t know. They were… They don’t. I don’t know what it means either. There was a small group of people in the Roman Catholic Church who always seemed to love the Lord more than the other people, and they were kind of spooky people, and the Roman Catholic Church gave them room. They usually ended up putting them in prison, burning them, or killing them in some way or other, but there was a traditional place for them, like John of the Cross and St. Teresa and so on.

They were usually clergymen, and they had a teaching in the Roman Catholic Church that only very special people could be this way and know the Lord so well, intimately. I like to use the word intimately here. The rest of us took wafers and drank from the communion cup, yeah. Well, Martin Luther was in the St. Augustine Order of Monks, and he made this statement. He said, “We,” speaking of the Lutherans and the Protestants, “we are not going to have the mystics among us. We’re going to be centered on the Word of God,” which was absolutely a disaster. The Roman Catholic concept of this deeper relationship with the Lord was really corrupt and came out of Platonic Greek, Platonic mysticism. Plato was a mystic, and they were very, very strong in Neoplatonism, a hierarchy of spiritual development.

And to this day, Neoplatonism is the ladder by which a Roman Catholic ascends to finally something they call “union with God.” The Protestants ran as far and as fast as they could from that, and in so doing, probably lost any hope of ever really understanding the New Testament. And it is a mental thing. See, the St. Augustinian monks were very much mental, and they believed Augustine said that the soul is the highest, it’s the way you reach God, and the highest element in the soul is the intellect. So, the best way you know God is to cultivate your intellect, and that’s what a seminary is there for. The seminary is built on the concept that if you raise the intellect, you’ll know God better. Consequently, the Church of the Living God simply doesn’t know one thing about… I love to make outrageous statements. That probably is not accurate, but I’m going to say it anyway. We don’t know one thing about knowing the Lord well. It’s an ocean we have not traveled on. We have not sailed that ocean.

I don’t want to talk to you and leave you with the impression this is something we’ve got a corner on. This is a world we have not even scratched. Protestant Christianity is intellectualism, pure and simple, from top to bottom, and the Pentecostal charismatic movement is a reaction to that. Now, one is too much in the mind; the other one’s mindless, and I want you to know which way I would pitch my tent in a minute. Brother, I’ll go with the Pentecostals any day. We have more fun. They are the blondes; we have more fun. Um…

But there’s this great big gaping hole in how to know the Lord. I will be in Orlando bringing the last messages I’m going to bring in a long time, and I’m going to do exactly what I’m doing to you right now. I really…y’all are not going to understand me. I know it’s going to upset you, and don’t upset me. Listen to whatever these guys tell you when I leave. Don’t pay attention to me, but I wouldn’t give you two cents for our prayer lives. I wouldn’t give you two cents for our prayer lives. For one thing, one proof and test that it’s not getting anywhere is that it is so dull. Oh, we’ve got to pray, and we’ve got all these verses, and we get down on our knees, and why won’t they ever give us a carpet to pray on? Why do we have to sit on, lie on, or kneel on floors without carpets? Is that something in the Bible, that our knees have to hurt, or that we have to kneel to pray? The fact that the word “prayer” exists in the New Testament does not necessarily mean that what we do today is prayer.

I know you’ve heard of intercession, but what we do today in the way of intercession does not necessarily mean what they did. Neither does it mean that we all have to do it all the time. In fact, I think the most remarkable thing, the lesson most of us could learn, is this: that in the church of the living God, everything is seasonal and nothing is permanent. You cannot hold on to anything in the church forever. It will get boring and lose its place, and that includes preaching. It even includes meetings. I think one of the most spiritual things we could do is get together and decide that for the next six weeks, we’re not going to have a single meeting. You don’t have to meet to be the church. If she is the church, she will go on organically, being the church without meetings. I have seen this done dozens of times. Go for months without meeting, call another meeting, everybody’s there, you haven’t lost a soul. Giving hasn’t dropped, and everybody’s rested and refreshed. I would recommend it as a very radical but beautiful thing to do. Anyway, I’m making a point here.

I really don’t see much in almost all of our concepts of prayer, and I don’t know about what we ought to give it up for Lent. I want to talk to you brothers, back here. I’m going to tell you something. I get invited to lots of places. You wouldn’t believe that, but I really do. In the organized church, I really do. They are so gracious. I have preached once in front of almost everybody. I have preached twice…nowhere. Again, and again, and again, I have talked this way to ministers, and I have yet to have my first minister come up here and come to me and say, “Brother, I want to know more.” Not one. Isn’t that incredible? Now, God’s people do, but not ministers; isn’t that incredible? I have been invited by some of the most outstanding men in the organized church to share with them what I know about the Lord Jesus Christ and to fellowship with and walk with Him. I preached to them, and not one person showed any interest. Now, I’m going to get out of here on a thin limb, and I trust the Lord will forgive me, but my life and ministry have been centered on one thing, and that’s the Lord Jesus Christ. And contrary to what you’ve heard today, in the fellowship of the believers, I only have one message, and that is Him…and knowing Him and knowing Him real, and knowing Him intimately, and knowing Him well. I am not speaking about stuff I do not know. I am speaking about things that most Christians have no knowledge of whatsoever. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing. And only a few of God’s people even seem to care to know. Some way or other, we think, yeah, he’s really preaching it now. Well, praise the Lord.

Yeah, Christ is the center, and nobody stops to say, how can you do that for 30 years and never repeat yourself? And how can a people really know Him that well, personally? As I walk off the stage this week, these are some of my closing words. I am stunned that men and women do not wish to know Him well, when He should be the only thing on earth. I’m not talking about speaking in tongues, and I’m not talking about visions, and I’m not talking about prayer. I’m talking about just the most intimate, unbelievable relationship with Him that a human could conceive of. I am talking radical, I am talking extreme, and I want you to understand that…really clear…that He can be known better than almost any of us know Him.

We are dealing in a world here, that ocean we have not sailed on, neither Pentecostal, Baptist, nor anything else in this world. It should be where the brothers and sisters outside the organized church are leading, and we, of all people, ought to be the hungriest and the most seeking to know Him. I will tell you that your meetings will eventually die, and they will get boring, because a meeting is not intended for you to come to get. It is a place where you give. And what do you give? You give the Christ that you have encountered this week, that you have walked with, intimately laid hold of, and known. You have intimately, intimately, intimately known. The whole concept of Christian meeting, and how we meet, and why we meet, and what a meeting is, needs to be turned totally upside down.

Now, I was sharing a moment with John this morning because he said I could blame it all on him. The next book that will come from my pen is entitled The Secret to the Christian Life. I’m going to take about three minutes to share its content with you, but only to tell you that we’ve got a new world to look upon here, folks. Something beyond tongues. Do you remember? You be careful, sister. Beyond Bible study. Beyond prayer. The Secret to the Christian Life. The book will make the following points.

When you’ve got saved, what did they tell you was the secret to the Christian life? Probably: read your Bible, pray, go to church, tithe, fast, witness, and speak in tongues if you’re from that group, and don’t speak in tongues if you’re not from that group. The secret to the Christian life is that. That’s basically it. Did I leave anything? Tithe? Move your letter…for the Baptists? The secret to the Christian life is that it doesn’t work, you know. So, I have to start asking questions. Where did the Christian life originate? Where did it come from? Who was the first Christian, and how did He live the Christian life?