The Spiritual Community of the Believer – Grand Prairie DCLC #2

It’s one of the most killing things to the Christian faith. You come in, sit down, and you have nothing to do. This means this is a message. The message is that Christians don’t function in a gathering of the body of believers. That’s the message you get. Now, the first thing he does is get up and bring some very interesting illustrations. If you can hear this man at all, I mean, maybe you’re asleep by now, but if he’s really good and he’s got your attention, you get this. He immediately creates guilt. We live in an age without humility. We have no humility. He says, “Suddenly, I’m feeling very bad about not being humble.” Then he gives us a lot of statistics and data, and we’re getting guiltier and guiltier and guiltier.

We haven’t moved. This is all internalized. Then he begins to deliver to us a challenge of what we ought to be. Yeah, that’s what I ought to be. Humble. Humble. Humble. Then he gives me an inspiring illustration, and I say to myself, “That’s what I want to be. That’s what I want to be. That’s what I want to be.” And he delivers a challenge to be this. I say, “Yeah, yeah. Yeah,” and then he prays. He runs to the back of the auditorium, and I say, “Pastor, that was a wonderful message.” By the time I get to the car, I don’t know what he said. I don’t; he has not told me how to be humble. He has not told me where to be humble. If he’s dead serious about this, why don’t we take the next three months to go after this thing tooth and nail within the spiritual community of believers?

It has desensitized me to the practical application of my faith. I come in, and you can graph it. I go through guilt. I go through challenge. I go through inspiration, and the meeting ends. That’s why I go through every Sunday. It’s a little internal orgy, and that’s all there is to it. Somewhere down in my subconscious, I get the message that this is the Christian faith. I don’t know what he’s going to preach next Sunday. Good night, what kind of an idea might he come up with next week? There’s no continuity. Next Sunday, there’s going to be another sermon about something else, and I’m going to go through the same guilt. Yeah, the proposition and then the hope and the inspiration and then the challenge, and it’s going to all be done over again, and nothing happens except internally. And the buzzardly thing is that next Sunday, that guy will probably climb up in that pulpit and preach on “boldness.” This, forgive me, is not the community of the believers.

Shall I go on? Jim, can I go on? Joe, may I continue? Alright, I have their permission. Okay. It’s alright; the rest of you, you’re out of luck. These are the people who invited me here. I’m telling you historical facts. It took me a lifetime to find them. Nobody’s ever written a book on it. But they are historical facts. Oh, seminaries. How much money has been given, how many professors, and how many of these… seminaries began on December 13th of 1543. Now, that is 1,500 years removed from the first century, and yet, that’s how all men called by God are trained. Nobody has ever questioned whether or not there might be a better way, like a New Testament way, and the strange thing about it is that in those seminaries, we’re taught to do nothing except that which is biblical. I doubt there’s ever been more than 1/2 of 1% of seminary professors who have ever wondered where seminaries came from. Seminary professors don’t know. I looked harder to find the origin of seminaries than for everything else I looked for. I gave up, and one day, finally, I found a man who knew. I went back to those resources, and there it was, and it’s an interesting, fascinating, humorous, absolutely unbelievable story. We don’t have time for it.

I told you last night where we got the arrangement of the epistles, and this has got to stop. Somebody’s got to create a New Testament in which the epistles are put in the correct order, and we can give some idea of church life. Let me tell you something else that’s never happened. Nobody has ever told the entire story of the first-century church in its chronological order. There’s never been a book on that subject. I challenge you to find it. There is one written by a truly great man (laughter) that covers about 20% of it, and I’ve got another 80% to go. But when you consider the whole context of the church in the first century, you simply cannot put our practices today into it. You can’t do it. It’s not there. You can do it with a verse, but you cannot do it with a totalistic context. It can’t be done.

Let me see. I don’t want to miss any really good ones. Have I not covered most of what we do today? Uh, Sunday schools began in this country by Dwight L. Moody. They began in England by a gentleman about 30 or 40 years earlier, I’ve forgotten his name. That’s almost within the lifetime of people on Earth today. Yet, we have perhaps a half a trillion dollars’ worth of money tied up in educational plants, in something called a building given to us by Constantine, with choirs given to us by the pagans, with stained glass windows given to us by a Roman Catholic priest in the 1200s whose name was Suger out of a town called St. Deny, France, with a pulpit that came out of paganism, and seminaries that came out of the reformation and started by the Roman Catholics. You want to hear about 11 o’clock? Why do all Protestant Christians meet at 11:00 a.m. on Sunday morning? Does anybody know who has not been who did not find this out through me? Okay.

It’s because Martin Luther drank beer. That’s why you meet at 11:00 am every Sunday morning. He really loved beer, and the Protestants during the beginning of the Reformation met at 5 and 6:00 a.m. in Wittenberg, which became the model of all things Protestant. He loved staying up on Saturday night to talk and drink beer, so he moved that meeting up to 8 a.m., drank a little more beer, and stayed up a little longer, moved it up to 9 a.m., drank a little bit more beer, and talked a little bit later, and moved it up to 10 a.m. And somebody said to him, “Martin, we’re running out of Sunday morning mass.” He said, “Great. We still have one hour left. We’ll move it to 11:00 a.m., and we can still call it morning mass, morning service.” That way, he could stay up almost all night long, drinking beer and talking to his friends, and that’s where the Sunday morning church service came from at 11:00 a.m. That is a historical fact that any Lutheran scholar can tell you, and it is all over the planet.

I went into the jungles of Thailand and found a group of Christians who had not been seen by white men in 50 years, an entire tribe. I found them in a refugee camp. I was one of the first white men to ever see them. They were Hmung. They came out of Laos and Vietnam, and when I got to them, they had made huts all over this refugee camp; there were 2,000 of them. In the middle of it, they had built one hut a little higher than all the rest of the huts, and they had taken bamboo sticks and driven them into the ground, and taken a bamboo pole and tied it. They had put a table in front of that thing, and at 11 a.m., they met for church. It’s in our bloodstream. This is not the community of the believers.

Brothers, I mean, there’s a reason for revolution here. Good historical grounds for an out-and-out revolution. I think, I mean this, and you may quote me, but please don’t. I think Sunday morning was made to sleep late. I think that we ought to do away with church on Sunday morning. You people are a bunch of radicals yourselves. (laughter) But I come to the final and absolute ends of all things. I come to you tonight to tell you, or to ask you this question. I’m going to list some things and ask: Can you find a passage in the New Testament for Christian funerals? Can you find a passage in the New Testament that calls for praying over and blessing civic activities? Can you find in the New Testament a place for the professional confession of sins to a single individual? No, you can’t.

Can you find the Sunday morning sermon? Can you find an individual specifically appointed to visit the sick? One specific individual appointed to teach? Can you find any scriptural grounds whatsoever for a ritualistic marriage ceremony in the New Testament? New Testament Christian practice. Are you with me? Can you find any of that in the Bible? Any of that in the New Testament anywhere? Even the slightest, most remote thought of any of that being somewhere central or even peripheral to the first-century Christian family. I’ve just described the Protestant pastor to you. The only difference is that he doesn’t perform confession of sin; He does counseling.

Now, where in the tooth did the modern-day pastor come from? Now, this is going to lay some of you out cold, but he was invented by one Martin Luther in about 1530, and he never existed in the pages of church history before that. This is the story. Here is the story. The Roman Catholic priest had seven duties. Now, he wore a black robe. He was single. He never married. He was a…you can’t understand the Roman Catholic Church until you understand single brothers. Thank you, brother. He’s a single brother; that’s what he is, that’s what a Roman Catholic priest is—a single brother, a religious single brother. There’s nothing on earth more dangerous than a religious single brother. That’s the Roman Catholic Church, and that’s an explanation of why she’s like she is. It’s true.

Now, the priest had seven duties. Now, let me see if I can recount them correctly. One was to teach. Another one was to bury the dead. That is a Roman-Greek tradition. The funeral with a philosophical narration is a Roman-Greek tradition that entered the Christian church in the days of Constantine. I have read Roman funeral orations, and you can’t tell them word-for-word…I could substitute the entire message and preach it next Sunday, or next Wednesday, over some dead body, and you’d never know the difference. It is a Greco-Roman tradition; it has nothing to do with the Christian faith whatsoever—an oration over the dead. Let’s see what the first one was. Teach, bury the dead, marry the young; the Roman Catholic priest did this. Hear the confession of sin; blesses the civic…throwing holy water on civic functions. Some more…raise money. Visit the sick. And there’s one other; there were seven of them. I usually end up with eight, and I can’t remember what the other one was. That was a sacrament, not a duty. It’s not one of the seven pastoral…that’s what it was called—seven pastoral duties of the priest.