What If Your Worship Is Pushing You AWAY From God? Grand Prairie DCLC #1

Every age has its fight, its battle to discover ways of knowing the Lord. Let me be radical for a minute. Can I be radical? Can you permit me…but will you open my hate mail and read it? Someone said if Gandhi were alive, he’d write hate mail to you. Boy, Gene, don’t say this. The Bible’s not going to draw you to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ will draw you to the Bible, and if you’ll remember your early conversion experience, you know that’s the absolute truth. He was the beginning of your Christian life.

We got billions of dollars tied up in seminaries. We’ve got tens of billions of dollars tied up in church buildings. But when it comes down to knowing the Lord Jesus Christ, the lack in every age, not our age, but in every age, is enormous. That is really what creates the spiritual community of the believer: the heart hungering to know Him. That is the one identifying quality among us all. That heart search and belief that we can really, truly know Him, personally embrace Him, personally encounter Him, personally know Him, and experience Him. Not only hear Him or talk to Him, but also have an encounter with Him.

Saints, we don’t know the community. We don’t know the spiritual community of the believer. We don’t know about ekklesia until we have collided, spirit-to-spirit. The proverbial snowflake stands a better chance in hell than does a group of Christians who have not laid hold of some means of constantly knowing Him. The spiritual community of the believer is not tied together by doctrine. It is not tied together by the debt of a church building. It is not tied together by strong things that will hold her together. When those rituals and doctrines and forms are removed, and you’ve got nothing but a people, there stands little hope of continuing outside of a burning relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. This is one common element of the spiritual community of the believer.

She’s never been large. She’s always been made up of hungry people. In the last couple of hundred years, she’s been hurt a lot more than she ever was in the past. It seems to be very specific that from about 386 AD to 1820 AD, her persecution and suffering were by the formal church, the world, and secular governments, when religious freedom spread throughout the world, and was not there. Her pain and suffering have been from gimmicks. I wonder if you understand what I’m saying. Do you understand gimmicks? What are you talking about, Gene? Well, let me say to you what the gimmicks are. Okay, well, whatever they are, we ought to quit. But I’ll tell you why we don’t quit. Because if we don’t, if we don’t give up the gimmicks, we’re naked again, and we have discovered that even outside the church, the formal church is seeking but not finding. Okay, I’m going to tell you right quick, so you’ll be warned. I’ve already told you I didn’t know about it.

There has always been the spiritual community of the believer throughout the ages. She’s always had identifying marks. She’s always been made up of hungry-hearted people. The French Revolution scared the pants off the British. British people are very strange. They’re an island nation, and they’re very egotistical and self-centered. Now, the reason I know that is that we are one of her children. Boy, I’ll tell you, if there is an earthquake in China, that’s sad. If there is a famine in Ethiopia, that’s terrible. But if there’s a recession in Great Britain, the Lord is coming. If there’s a drought in West Texas, the world is coming to an end. Do you follow me? Doesn’t care about the poor people in South America, but boy, if it happens here, that’s a sign for sure the Lord’s coming. Inflation, God’s coming back.

Well, when the French Revolution started, it scared the British, and a whole lot of new doctrines sprang up on that day, and they were taken over by Christians outside the formal church, and every one of them has been panhandled in this country. I’ve already told you what they are, and they’re still around. The Overcomer. The Lord’s coming. We ought to be one; that sounds beautiful, but it’s a gimmick. We’re the Philadelphian church in the middle of the Laodicean age. We’re it. This is the group. You want to hear another one? I’ll warn you of this one if you haven’t seen it. If you belong to our group and leave, God will never bless your life again. It started in 1830 in Plymouth, England, and it’s been preached every decade since then as though it had just happened and was meant for your group alone.

I will tell you a new one. Prosperity. I’m picking on you, Dallas. I’m picking on you. Not you. I’m picking on Dallas, but you understand me. What are some of the others? This whole matter of a movement orientation, worldwide movement, Jesus is coming back. We’ve got to do something, even evangelism. This whole idea we find in organized interdenominational organizations: saving the world in one generation. That’s nothing in the world but monument building to a man. The spiritual community of the believer has never been driven by things. She has been driven by a passion for Him and a knowledge and an experience of Him. No gimmicks. She has never been sectarian. She has never denominated. She has always been wide open, even to her persecutors, but since the 1830s, these things have become part of the witness of the spiritual community. I would like to say to about a hundred people here tonight, let’s drop these toys, movements, boundaries, sects, denominating from one another. She has never been that way. That’s not her way. She’s not like that. Let me tell you just a few more things about her. May I? She doesn’t really exist outside of an incredible knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, I was aware of that when I was 30 years old, in Tyler, Texas, at 1620 South Sneed. I laid down the ministry, and no, I did not start selling used cars. I stepped up, and I didn’t even know it. I became part of that witness to Him and to Him alone. I have never forgotten that it was Christ and only Christ, but I didn’t know how to know Him.

Do you have any idea of God’s viewpoint about her? His feelings toward her? Do you grasp the depth of His passion for her? How everything else in His eyes pale in the presence of this girl? Can you possibly contrast that with our mindset today? And not today, but in every age. It is when we come out of this trivial mindset to grasp His passion and become one with His revelation that we begin to see what she really is. How can I begin to explain to you the centrality of the community of the believers? How can I tell you that God created this very creation for her? That’s all for her. That He never died for you and that He never loved you. He died for her, and He loved her, and you just happened to be part of her. That’s how you got in on the love and the redemption. She is the very heartbeat of…you want a verse of scripture? Christ died for the church. Where is that? It’s Ephesians, isn’t it? Thank you, brother.

How incredibly difficult through all the ages, including this age, it has been for screwballs and nuts and radicals like me to drive home to you that it is a body of believers, a fellowship, a community, and not an individual in whom lies His passion. That the New Testament is not for you. I’m going to take two words: individuality and individualism. One of those you have got to keep, and one of those we really need to take to the cross. Keep your individuality. You’re a little strange. Covet that. That’s the uniqueness that God made you. Praise the Lord. Individualism. I’m a Barry Goldwater Republican. (laughter) I know that’s about 20 years late, but nobody is going to tell me what to do. Boy, is it in America, and boy, is it in Texas. A little of that, just a tiny little bit of that, has got to go within this community of believers.

Look, I write books on spiritual things, and I get letters. I get lots of letters, but one of the outstanding features of those letters is the individualistic nature of them all. I wish to know Jesus Christ better. I wish to know Jesus Christ better. It is a reflection of a spiritual miser. Give me spiritual blessing. Let me know Jesus. Now I come to the point: perhaps her most outstanding quality is that her spiritual nature and experience are plural, not singular. Her spiritual experience is plural, not singular; one reason, a little reason, but a reason, the Christian life does not work is that it is singular. It’s preached singular. Even from the pulpit within the building, it is spoken to you without the revelation of the spiritual community of the believer. It is preached to you individually. For shame; this is one of the biggest barriers to getting through the Christian life, which was not meant for you. It was meant for a community. I want you all to know that, whether you realize it or not, somewhere deep down in the deepest bowels of your being, you know that; your spirit will cry out and tell you that. If you don’t know it, you will know it. It is a community.

I don’t like that word. I don’t know which word I would like to use tonight, but I am going to use the word “community.” Listen to me and look at me. I’ll tell you where I came from. I was immaculately conceived, dropped down out of heaven. I have never sinned. I am pious beyond all piety. Now that is the impression I sometimes get from people when they meet me. Oh, you’re Gene Edwards. I feel so funny, strange when you treat me that way. Gosh, you can’t understand. So, I’m going to tell you a little bit about me. My daddy was a bootlegger. The other day, my brother was given…which just happened a few days ago. When my mother was dying, she began writing. She was an incredible writer. I got this biologically. She began telling the story from the time she got married until the day before my birth. Then my mother died, and she left that little story beautifully written with somebody. My mother’s been dead for about 15 years now, and about two months ago, it was given to my brother on his 60th birthday.

Mama tells the story of Daddy, whose name was Blackie, bootlegging out in the East Texas oil fields because he couldn’t get a job. Doggone if everybody else didn’t think, well, that’s a brilliant idea, and they drove him out of business with other people making bathtub booze. My mama got left by my daddy. He couldn’t write or read. He was a Cajun. Mother was in, I don’t know where, Atlanta, Commerce, or she might have been in Dallas for all I can recall. Daddy was somewhere out in Gladewater, and she wrote the police and said I haven’t heard from my husband in a couple of months; is he dead? I’m telling you that story to tell you. She gave a perfect description of him, and they saw a man on the street who matched it, but their information was a little confused. She was afraid he was dead. They thought the woman, my mother, was saying he was a bigamist, and they found this man. They caught him, and they jailed him for bigamy. He was scared silly, but it wasn’t my dad. This man was scared silly because his car was filled with stuff he had stolen right there in the Gladewater area.