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

Well, Gene, we can have Revelation. I can have Revelation – to the churches, to the seven churches in Asia Minor. Right? You can’t have Revelation. Sister, you’ve got a heart for the Lord. I want the Lord. I’m never going to know Him according to His focus, according to His view, until I know Him within this eternal community. That’s what my spirit is longing for, and that’s what my spirit wants. I can’t say anymore.

I’m going to close by telling you a story. You got anything you really need to say? I’m opening it up. If you really need to ask or tell me something, don’t go home with one of these crazy ideas in your head. I’m speaking radically, but it’s to make space for Christ in your life. I’m going to tell you why I’m here. Now, you’re going to find out. It is because of an experience I recently had, and I think, as I’m starting to tell you this, the only thing I’m afraid of is that I’m afraid you will think you understand what I’m talking about. I promise you, unless it is an extraordinary thing, you haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m talking about.

I am in the business… well, first of all, I’m not in much of any kind of business. Most of my life is spent lying down. I’m not lazy. I just can’t get up. My health has slightly improved recently, which is why I’m daring this little trip I’m taking right now. I’m doing it because of what I’m about to say to you. I have known since I was 30 years old that Christ was the center, and I have sought to make Him the center. No gimmicks, no games, no tricks, no nothing. If I cannot motivate people to Christ as by Christ, I have no reason for preaching. And by the way, she’s a flimsy, frail church when she’s built on nothing but Christ. It is incredible. Give me a good old doctrine. Give me something to hate. Give me something to believe. Give me a goal. You know, you can hold anything together. Give me a building. Give me a movement, but boy, when you got nothing but Christ, she’s fragile. She is just as fragile as she can be, because of our innate need to chase something else. My business is the Lord and His house, but I’m still learning the depths of what that means. I’m getting old now; you wouldn’t know that just looking at me, would you? I’ve always known you started with Christ, and you worked out from there. You didn’t have anything if you didn’t start with Christ: the experience, the embracing, the encounter, the knowing of Him.

It’s just been driven home to me in the last few months that as I met with a group of Christians and we began, let’s say we just began raw beginning. We began by meeting, singing, praising, and worshiping. Now, that sounds so reasonable, but I’ve had to step back and look at that, even the very basics of Christian fellowship, and realize that I made a mistake. That worship does not draw me to Christ. Christ draws me to worship. Singing and praising do not draw me to Christ. Christ draws me to singing and praising. And you know that has come to me more or less as a shock, because I just never thought about that. I never realized it. I’ll tell you now where it came from. It didn’t work. Now I’m going to tell you why it didn’t work, and my particular situation is very unusual.

People read my books, and they sell their homes. No, I don’t think anybody ever sold…I don’t know… maybe they did, but they get in their cars and leave California, where it’s always 72 degrees, and they cross the great desert. They come across the Continental Divide. They cross the Mississippi. They go through the tulip fields of Georgia. They pass on the great monuments of Washington. They go up past the great cities of Boston and New York, and they come to a place that Eskimos stick their nose up at. They come to Maine. They step out of the car and say to me, “Work magic.” And here is what I’ve discovered about you people. Every one of those people who step out of that car has got an agenda. Do you understand what I just said?

“I want relationships.” “I want caring.” “I want evangelism.” “I want prayer.” “I want to see that this is for real.” “We want to pray and see every human being in Portland, Maine, converted to Christ in a great revival.” By the way, just for the record, so you’ll all know everywhere I’ve been, you should know this: in every city I’ve been on this earth where I’ve met Christians, someone in that city has prophesied that there’s going to be a great worldwide revival, and it will begin in that city. That’s going to be quite a trick.

So, there are those who come with this agenda: Portland, Maine. God told us that it’s going to begin in Portland, Maine, and Gene, you’ve come, and we know you’re the answer to this prayer. The agenda just goes on and on and on. I don’t know enough about God in the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament, Greek, and Hebrew to keep up with the different things people can come up with in their agenda. Have you ever read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together? Has anybody here ever read that? Thank you, brother. You gave me the book. Yes, you’ve read it. He makes this incredible statement…thank you, John. I’m in debt to you…He states that when people come into this community, every one of them comes with a “dream wish”, and that dream wish is literally the destruction of that fellowship. The very first thing you have to do is lay down that dream wish. I had to absolutely stop in Portland, Maine. Too many agendas, too many dream wishes, too many demands. It wasn’t going to work. I’m never going to do it again.

Well, you know, crises have a way of teaching you lessons that later become the most valuable thing in the world to you. So, I said I was going to start over, and this is what I’m starting over with. I’m going to meet with whoever wants to meet with me on Tuesday night. Now, if you have 10 kids and you both can’t come, we have no way to take care of them. I’m going to meet with you on Wednesday night. So, the husband can come one night, the wife the other. That’s all. Tuesday night and Wednesday night. That’s it. I sat down with those Christians. No singing, no worship, no praise, nothing. None of the outward things, nothing. I sat down with those people and said, “I am going to show you how.” And this is what I’m afraid you think you’ll understand. I’m going to show you how to know Christ. I’m going to show you how to know Him, not in this realm, but to meet Him and encounter Him and know Him in the other realm. You’re going there to know Him, not here.

And that was all—nothing more, but nothing less. I sat down on the floor, leaned up against the sofa, and met with those brothers and sisters. I’ll tell you what I talked to him about in the first week: how religious they were. Watch. Come into the room; everybody’s chatting, having fun. They see me, and everybody gets holy. I clear my throat, start speaking, and everybody’s whispering. That’s why I talked to them the first week. They came back the next week, and now they talk all the time; it’s just an incredible difference, just how truly informal it is. We go through this phase of being humans, and then we are suddenly church. I met with some dear brothers and sisters who decided they were going to start meeting, and they dared not call it a meeting. So, they had lunch together, and they said, “This is so wonderful. Next week, let’s have a reunion of everybody who is here this week. We’ll have a reunion.” They’ve been calling it a reunion, and they start with a meal, a picnic, or something to keep the religion out.

Now, trying to get the religious out and the spiritual in, especially something of this depth, proportion, and magnitude, is no simple trick. Forgive me, but it isn’t easy. Then I began to talk to them about knowing Him. I asked for only one commitment, and this was it—that one morning a week, they would get up. Each one of them would get up alone with the Lord. One morning a week, they would get up with one other person with the Lord, and sometimes another meeting, either to share or to get up in the early morning with someone, and then come to the meeting. I was in, and that was all I was asking of anyone.

Now, before this weekend is out, I hope to touch on what happened and try to express it to you. But I want you to know that whatever it was, my subject is the spiritual community of the believer—this business of knowing the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, out of these awkward circumstances came, for me, a new experience with brothers and sisters. We had no singing, no praising, no worship, no nothing. We went in there with nothing but to know the Lord in ways that most Christians never even knew existed. Some of you know that every summer we have held a week-long conference on the deeper Christian life in Portland, Maine. When I met with Christians there that week, I tried to share ways of really getting to know the Lord Jesus. I will not, I do not, never have, and never will share any of this in an individual setting. If I can’t do it corporately, I won’t do it. Because to me, that would be giving up my franchise. You won’t find it on any tapes I preach. You won’t find it in any books I’ve written. It will be communicated human-to-human and within a corporate setting. I will not do it any other way because it was not given to me that way, nor was it given to the spiritual community of the believers for the last 2,000 years any other way. That’s the way of the Lord.

In other settings, I had taken two years to do this because it was a true community “church life” setting, but we were doing all these other things. We were worshiping the Lord, singing and praising Him, preaching and teaching, and all this. This time, it was just Him. Nothing but Him. I remember that about the third week, I had given them something to do. They have to get up early in the morning. Boy, do you know the difference between ignorant and ignorant? Have you gotten too far away from your roots? Do you have a country mother and daddy? Do you know the difference between ignorant and ignorant? Ignorant here. Ignorant is down here. These people were so spiritually ignorant that they were ignorant of their ignorance. I never saw anybody who knew less of the Lord, and boy, they would come back from their mornings and say, “I don’t understand what’s going on, nothing’s happening.” Nothing.