The Secret to the Christian Life: How Jesus Lived It (June 1986)

But I want to tell you something, especially if you’re a minister, and I really shouldn’t. But I’m going to. I want to tell you something that I heard that you’ve never heard. I live in a world where Christians meet in homes. And where there usually are very few ministers, the church ministers to itself. And it’s very exciting. And it’s very wonderful. It’s something most believers have never seen or touched. It’s organic fellowship. There’s no ritual to it. There are no rules. There’s no order of worship. There’s nobody in charge. It’s a free and wonderful thing. As I said, very, very few of us have had that privilege. I’ve watched people come into those kinds of meetings in America, in Europe, and in other parts of the world and become part of those fellowships. They don’t have names, and they don’t have a network. Most of them exist in someone’s home. They don’t have another group like them in the whole world. Very loosely knit. Bound more by love than anything else.

Now, I have met people like that and spoken with them all over the Western world and parts of the Eastern world. And I have heard them say something to me, never knowing that has been said in other places. I don’t know how many times I have heard this statement made, but it must be at least a hundred and probably much, much more than that. And here is the statement. I tried one day to go back to Sunday morning church. I went, and while I was sitting in that meeting, I got physically ill.

I’m going to put this as tenderly and as gently and as softly and as kindly as I can. Dear brother, Sunday morning church service has got to be one of the most boring things that ever happened to the human race, and men and women by the hundreds and by the thousands, especially those that get to know the Lord a little better, and more especially those who touched something of an experience of the body of Christ, those people simply cannot abide your Sunday morning church services. They can’t stand them. And now I’m going to offer you my own experience. And I am a Baptist minister who has both preached from those pulpits and sat in those audiences. And I have to tell you, from my own experience, long before I touched this thing called the life of the body or church life or whatever you want to call it, I sat in those meetings and wondered how anyone on earth could endure that hour.

Recently, I was talking to a man I consider to be a really unusual and marvelous Christian. He was a Moravian. And if you know the Moravians, you know immediately you’re speaking of some of the finest Christians that evangelical Christianity has ever known. And I was talking to him in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, at the Moravian Seminary there. And he had been pastor of the Moravian church in that city. And he said, he’d been there, I think, for about 20 years. And I was there on Sunday morning. And he had been a church planter. He had raised up Moravian churches all over North America. Now, that’s a gutsy and rare human being. I was talking to a Moravian giant. And he asked me a question that shook me. He said, ‘What did you think about the Sunday morning church service?’ Now, he had pastored that church.

And I backed up. I was trying to be kind, and I was also being cowardly. I said, well, I don’t want to say anything about the Moravian meeting on Sunday morning in Bethlehem this week, but I would generally say that church services are incredibly boring. And he leaned forward, and he said, ‘You know, what amazes me is not how many people don’t go to church. What amazes me is how many do.’

Now that was from a man whose heart probably had known some of the things I’ve known. I understand that if I had heard a statement like that when I was 25 years old, as a young pastor in East Texas, I would have been shocked, mortified, and felt that that person who said it should have been hung out to dry. But I’m not 25, and I’m not a pastor in East Texas, and I have ministered all over a large portion of this planet, and I have to say from my own experience I would a lot rather sit home in front of my automatic dryer and watch my clothes tumble for an hour on Sunday morning and get real, real excited when those clothes go into spin dry, watch them really turn fast. It would not be as boring as a typical Sunday morning church service. My brother, my sister, if there’s anything on earth that Protestant Christendom needs to do, it needs to rethink the way it worships and the way it meets.

No, our victory in Christ does not lie in checking into a pew on Sunday morning from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. It is a recent practice of the Christian faith, born in Germany during the days of Luther and John Calvin. That kind of service does not trace its way back all the way to the first century.

Evangelism. Well, I was an evangelist for six or seven years and I know what it is like to be an evangelist and I know what it’s like to go from door to door and witness to people you’ve never laid eyes on and do that all day long, and I’m going to tell you something, for the typical Christian, it is the most frightening experience they can have. If church is the most boring experience they can have, witnessing is the most frightening. And I’d really like to liberate you, dear brother, dear sister, and the Lord. I don’t think you have to go door-to-door witnessing. I really don’t think you have to do it. But there’s one thing I can guarantee you. You do not have to feel guilty about that which you simply cannot perform.

Well, let me go a little bit further. Speaking in tongues. All I can tell you is, ask the people who used to do it, and they will say to you, it was not fulfilling. Ask some who do, and they say, ‘Right now, it’s the most wonderful thing in the world.’ I think you could stand on Broadway in New York City. Oh, let’s not make New York City. Who knows about New York City? Let’s stay in your hometown. Stand on the streets. And as the people came by, the main street stopped them. And about every 20th person would probably be a burned-out charismatic who has just gone through the whole, may I use this word, orgy of speaking in tongues and getting caught up in signs and wonders and all sorts of things, until their spirit literally burned out on them. And they will tell you it is now meaningless to them.

I am taking the sacred cows of the Christian faith and looking at them, not in some idealistic way, but in a way that, if you please, laymen who are struggling with their Christian life have shared with me. And I’m also telling you of my personal experience.

What is the secret to the Christian life? Have we overlooked the main point?

Now, we’ve cleared out the debris. I am saying to you that one of these days, all of this may very well wear out for you. Perhaps reading of the Scriptures will not wear out for you. I’d only say that what will we do about the illiterate? But prayer will wear out. Going to church will wear out. You probably never wear out evangelism because you may never get that far. Whatever the obligatory things are that have been demanded of you as a Christian, you are probably going to stumble over them, and you’re going to feel very, very, very guilty. Dear Christian, lay it down; these are not the secret elements to the Christian life. In fact, they’re probably more the fruit of the Christian life.