Needed, A New Way to Meet #2: Rediscovering the Biblical Church

Can I dare say those things were not of the Lord? No, I live today, and I’m a steward of today. I cannot go back to Azusa Street and Smith Wigglesworth and be a steward of the mess they made. I will tell you that the charismatic movement got off on the wrong foot, and I am shocked that they have never taken steps to do anything about it. It was born with some horrible flaws. The same thing is true of Fundamentalism, which is also a recent movement. It still carries the character and nature of its founders: a very raspy, hard lack of compassion. I am steward of my day.

Now I would say the Lord is in it; I really would. No, I would definitely say that. I think in each situation, you get something, and then we throw in the rest. When all these customs came, what they left out was unbelievable. For instance, when they came to the New Testament, they arranged it the way Luther arranged it. They saw that as a book to straighten out the errors of the Roman Catholic Church. At no time did any of the Reformers ever attempt to build a model of the first-century church, or even to understand what happened in the first century. They took verses and passages and dealt with them.

We are all, to some extent, captured by the day we live in, unless we decide to take wings, fly outside our own matrix, and stand somewhere else. Those men did not. They dealt with the errors and problems of their day in that emergent, urgent situation. Our problem was that we deified what they did. I think that if there’s anything I’m going to be trying to say to you this weekend, it is that the Church of Jesus Christ needs to be extremely creative, imaginative, and innovative, especially in this thing of meeting.

I want to talk to you this morning about the nature of the church, and the first thing I’d like to say is that the church is not meeting, and let’s get this really nailed down because it drives us. We’re going to have church. We’re going to have meetings. Church is not meetings. Church meets, but it’s not meetings. The church isn’t something that happens on Sunday morning. There’s some way we could depart from that. It’s so difficult to get past that concept. The church is more fun than Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity, and Youth With a Mission. I’m sad in my heart, sad that the church, among ministers, pastors, preachers, and theologians, is almost nothing anymore. All the good things are somewhere else.

Let me tie this together in one simple sentence. People don’t like the church. Unbelievers don’t like it, and Christians don’t like it. How incredibly sad. Then what is she? Let’s think in first-century terms, or in terms other than our present-day surroundings. She is divine. That’s what she is, and if you take that away from her, you don’t have anything. If you do not give her a constant flow of divinity, you are starving her to death. She lives on divinity. She lives and feeds upon divine life, just as Christ lived on the life of His Father: “Without My Father, I can do nothing.” The church can rise and say, “Without Christ, I am nothing.”

She is first divine, and more than anything else, you have to say she’s got to have an inflow of spiritual life. So, whoever is a leader, his first or her first responsibility is to bring a flow of the divine into our lives and to show us how, on our own, to bring this flow of life into us. You know, Ephesians speaks of building up the church. The prophets, the evangelists, and so forth build the church up so that she, in turn, might edify herself and build herself up.

This is that same thing again. You’re constantly seeking to work yourself out of a job. The worker’s purpose is to work himself out of a job. To give it back to the church. To give it back to the church. To give it back to the church. Give the church back to Christ. You begin building from that viewpoint. I say to anybody in this room who feels called to do anything, your purpose is to give the church an ability to operate without the gifted ones, not for the gifted ones to dominate her.

Now, I used to live in Tyler, Texas. I used to be a member of a church there. That church had two ministers, I think, and I may get a little off here, but I don’t think so. I think one of them was a pastor there for 30 years, and the next one, his son-in-law, was pastor there for another 30 years. Now, that’s without any criticism, but that’s two men, 60 years, and I often thought if they had walked out, either one of them, at the end of their ministry and said, “Now I’ve done it long enough, you take over,” what would they have done the next Sunday morning? Well, the church would have fallen apart if it could not have called another minister. If somehow they had been forced to abandon all leaders and report into that place on Sunday morning, they would not have known what to do. If they’d attempted something, in four or five weeks, most of them would have gone off and joined Second Baptist or Trinity Baptist or Calvary Baptist or Tabernacle Baptist somewhere. Thirty years’ worth of work, and it was all just preaching at, and preaching at, and preaching at. The church still could not function on its own.

I have to give you Christ in such a way that you can know Him and encounter Him without any workers present or any gifted ones present. Her nature, her taproot, is divinity touching the divine. Now, if that’s speaking in tongues, then speak in tongues, but that’s the only thing I can think of. It’s not singing. It’s not praising. It’s not worship. I am speaking of touching your own Lord and receiving from Him His life and nature into you in such a way that you can come and report an actual living experience. The latter part of the 20th century happened to you at a particular place at a particular time, and you walk in and report it: that God is alive, you have met Him, and this is your report. My job is to bring you to that.

At one point in my life as a young man, I made a very simple commitment. I acknowledged a very simple fact. I acknowledged it for myself. I want to acknowledge it for all Christian workers, virtually all of us. We don’t have the foggiest idea how to tell you how to know the Lord, either individually or corporately. If I could pick up five ministers, bring them in here, and say, “Your only job is to show these people how to encounter Christ individually and corporately,” I know they’d crack open a book on prayer and teach it to you. But if you keep saying, “Give me a handle, give me a handle, give me a handle,” I think eventually you’d drive them out of the room. Our seminaries don’t teach it. Hey, saints, it’s never been well known in the last 1,700 years. There have never been many people who could point us to Christ and how to know Him well. It never exists in abundance.

I don’t know why we think…where we think the magic happens…that we get called to preach, we get out of the seminary, and somewhere in there, magic took place, and we now know God well. Now, I can move that out of the religious system. Some of you get into a meeting; you get ordained as a deacon. Pretty soon, the guy who’s there leaves. Four or five elders run the thing, and then one day you find yourself the one ministering to these people. Ask yourself: stop bluffing. Stop bluffing, brother. Can you really, truly show these people Christ and walk out of this place at the end of a short period of time, and that church go on? Jesus Christ did that. The apostles did that. They did that because they recognized the church as a divine entity, and they showed the church how to hook onto, fasten itself to, that source of divinity.

What is the church? Okay. This is number two. It is therefore… It is therefore… That was number one. This is number two. Therefore, it is the place where Jesus Christ feels comfortable. It is a place where Jesus Christ feels at home. There’s only one place that God feels at home, and that’s in the Godhead. Christ walked constantly with His Father. The Father had a constant, unbroken fellowship with His Son. The most tragic day in the life of the Father and the Son was the day that fellowship was broken. It only happened once. It only happened for a short, brief time, and it was so that death might be put away. It was done for a purpose. Brothers and sisters, there is a place where you feel at home and where God feels at home.