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

Okay, can I stop there? I think I can answer. There is no form of the first century. I want you to look at my nose. Do you have any idea how hard I labored to get that nose? This is one of the great projects of my life. My mother and father, when I was born, got around my crib and prayed every day that a nose would come out on the front of my face. You understand? It didn’t happen. It was organic to my species. And this is where this New Testament church business does not work. We’re not dealing with an organization, a concept, a theory, or a theology. We are dealing with a form of life, a biological classification of life. There is something within you that is organically, naturally, biologically drawing you to a spiritual community of believers to know Him together. It is a drawing of the divine.

I am very burdened to pursue this, that you might understand the divine nature of the church. Let me try to illustrate this. I was on a 10-hour flight to Japan. I don’t fly to Japan all the time. I only did this once. This is not one of those stories to impress you, but it happened on my way to Japan. I’m sitting there with a Life magazine in my hand, reading about how they would travel to other parts of the universe in space because man dies getting there if he can’t go faster than light. So, they were going to manufacture these great machines, put embryos in them, and then, after millions and millions of years, the machines would be timed to start working, let the embryos begin to grow, and then have machines there to take care of them, and they’d grow up.

I put the article down and fell into a discussion with the man next to me. The question asked in the article was, “What would man be like if he had been mothered by machines on the other side of the universe?” It turns out this gentleman was the dean of the sociology department at Yale. And he said, “Those people would naturally be monogamous, and they would fall into a family community. They would fall into their family and community because it is biologically innate to our species.” Just like it is biologically innate for wolves to be monogamous. What else is monogamous? Elephants. Are they monogamous? Eagles are monogamous. Several birds. Doves. Hawks.

It’s in your genetic makeup to desire ekklesia. It is in your genetic makeup to go house to house praising God in simplicity, full of grace. It is your genetic nature to be drawn to a living room…and dislike the pew. (laughter) It is your genetic nature to wish to live with the brothers and sisters and love and care as long as it is the species of God, His nature in you that is being fed and growing. This is her expression. There’s no New Testament church. There’s only the record of a biological, innate, organic drive to be this people. Our job, as part of this community of believers, is not so much to do many things; it’s to drop so many things, and then she comes up out of the soil in her simplicity, her beauty. Her engine, her one and only engine, is Him. It’s not fasting. It’s not prayer. It’s not…it’s not being nice. It’s not stopping sinning. It’s Him. Then she just naturally expresses herself in the way that I have touched on tonight. I’m telling you, brothers and sisters, if you open the pages of history, she’s always there. She’s the witness to the bride of Christ, and she’s always been basically the same in her expression.

Now, I know you do not often hear things like this. I know you don’t often hear things like this. For some of you, it may be very foreign to your ears, but I want you to know something: a first-century believer was obsessed with two things – Christ and the community of the believers. You couldn’t have sold her an interdenominational movement, Bibles to Russia, or a prosperity gospel. You could have sold her all these trinkets. She was possessed with Him and with this community, and it was the magnetism of this community and this girl that so radically changed the world.

Well, we’re going to stand up and sing. Some of us will come back here tomorrow night. Yes, brother Mike. Audience: I don’t know whether it’s a question or what the Lord has shown me that you’re saying that the organic nature that was within us, particularly that was birthed in us when we come to receive Him, is the organic nature of our Father.

It is his own biological… Audience: His spiritual biology. Our heavenly Father. It’s not human. The universe is to have a family. The church does not belong to the human race. The human race is lost. The church belongs to a different species.

Now, if you can understand this, Jesus Christ was not the same species as a lost man. If you would…if you could understand this, He had organs inside of Him that lost man didn’t have. He was biologically different, as is an eel and an electric eel, if you could understand that. He naturally gathered people around Him. Did you notice it’s the organic nature of God to be in community? And when they got saved at Pentecost, what came out of it was not an organization. It was a spontaneous expression of 3,000 people who had divine life in them, different from this world.