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

Martin Luther said to take off your robes, and don’t you dare hear confession of sin, but bury the dead, bless the civic things, and all the others. They came down to us through the Roman Catholic tradition of the seven pastoral functions of the priest, and the Protestant priest began to assume the pastoral roles of the Roman Catholic priest. So, they began to be called pastors because it was the priest’s pastoral role. And God help us; we have created a monstrosity. If you have ever been a pastor, you have no idea the pressure you live under. You are also costumed just like the priest, and boy, you better believe your costume. You’d better not take that costume off.

If next Sunday, every one of the 325,000 Protestant preachers in America walked up into their pulpits in a sports shirt and khakis, there’d be 325,000 Protestant preachers out of work next Sunday night. You are costumed, and don’t you ever forget it. And I want you to know – you’d better be there when Aunt Nelly gets sick. When you show up at a Kiwanis or Rotary, they’ll always call on you. You lift your voice and say, “Lord, before the drinking and the cussing and the swearing and the dirty jokes start, we pray for Your blessing upon this meeting.” We do it.

“Now, team A has met its rival tonight, team B, out on the gridiron, and before they come to kill and massacre one another and bones are broken, Reverend Edwards is going to come and lead us in prayer.” It is a Roman Catholic tradition, most of which finds its roots in the duties of the Greco-Roman philosopher who visited the sick when they were dying and was paid to comfort them, who delivered the orations and all of these things, which fell to the Roman Catholic priest and now are in the pastoral role. Brothers and sisters, forgive me, but it has no grounds in the New Testament. And you know what the most interesting thing about it is? Whether we have admitted it or not, most of us who are ministers and pastors figure it out. You sit down with a pastor, let’s say 50 years old, sit down with him in a restaurant and say, “Hey, just how much of what you’re doing is really based on the New Testament.” And he’ll say, “Precious little.” But the tragedy, the worst part of it, is he’s salaried, and he is subject to your capricious feelings.

This week, I returned to the church, the last church I ever pastored, and a brokenhearted lady told me…this was a dear friend of mine in the church I pastored. She told me they had just lost their pastor because he preached something one lady didn’t like, and she got her feelings hurt, and the deacons asked him to leave. Now, where in the name of God and angels and heaven and scripture could you possibly find anything in the Bible to justify that? I’m going to say it again. We have historical grounds for revolution. I have just told you the origin of virtually everything we practice as Protestants—outward forms. There’s one last one. The Sunday morning church ritual was invented by John Calvin in Geneva, Switzerland, in about 1540 AD. And that’s why we go through that same blessed ritual every Sunday morning. Gregory the Great invented the Mass and its ritual in 500 AD., and the Roman Catholics have never changed the form itself. They went from Latin to English, but they never changed the form. We adopted John Calvin’s 1540 order of service. You can find it in his handbook, the Reformed Church’s Order of Worship, and it is being followed today almost identically in every Protestant church on this earth.

Now I ask you why, and I say to you that’s not the spiritual community of the believers. That is an interaction between divinity and divinity among a group of people, such as first-century Christians. What is the church? It is a society, a divine society within a secular civilization. Let me see if I can wrap it up. Fish have schools. Sheep have flocks. Cattle have herds. Secular, lost, unredeemed man has civilization. That’s the realm in which it lives. Can you name me another one? I found out the other day that blackbirds have…what is that word? They have what? Say it really loudly. Murders. Thank you, brother. Do you know any others? Quails have pods.

The redeemed have the church. Can you follow that? This is our civilization. This is where we live and breathe and move and have our being. It is our morning, our afternoon, and our evening. It is the fellowship of the redeemed. It is a heavenly colony within a world gone mad. It is the church. It is Jerusalem that is walled in for the believer. That’s what the church is.

One other thing I want to say again: she’s your inheritance, and there’s somebody down in here, something down in here, in you, that drives you to her. The more you seek Him, the more you will be driven to long for her. I have watched this in all the testimony of the church throughout the ages. The more a Christian moves toward Christ, whether in the Roman Catholic Church or elsewhere, the more they will long for the spiritual community of believers, until it becomes a white-hot passion. I must warn you, you always get in trouble when you say…your “innards” say, “I’ve got to find the fellowship of the redeemed. I have to go back to the first things…not to an organization, not to a ritual, not to a doctrine, not to a belief, but a way of life that has come out of a head-on encounter with Christ.” The church is the organic expression of the spiritual experience of a group of believers. That’s what she is.

This is not the message I had intended to create tonight. You know, I hope the Lord gets inside of you and just bugs the daylights out of you. I long for the day. I’m not mad at anybody. I really, really, honestly carry this so lightly. Have you ever been to France? You can drive up to almost any town, and its outer edges are very modern. The further you move in, the more it feels like a timeline. The further you move into the downtown city, the older it gets. And right in the very center, you’ll find a great cathedral. Oh boy, built back in the days when they bled whole towns almost out of existence to build those things. You know what they are today? They are museums. They are civic museums. They are places where tour guides take you through and tell you about them. Praise the Lord.

I have a dream. I have a dream. 300 years from now, church buildings will have been turned into quaint restaurants. I do. I do. I have a dream: shopping malls, educational plants. I have a dream that God will deliver all men of God called from being pastors. When the church of Jesus Christ visits the sick, when we have given up the funeral to rejoice over or weep over the passing of a brother and a sister, when the sacraments are handed out by a sister, any sister, if you please, any old sister. When the bread and the cup are just passed. When Christians are back in living rooms where they belong, where they came from, and back in cemeteries where they met, and go to hotels to have their big meetings, and return to the parks for fellowships and picnics. I have a dream that, when seminaries have become libraries or museum pieces, and, as in the first century, the church planter will raise up the Christian worker as Jesus did and as Paul did. And the seminary has become a great library where you can check into a dormitory, spend a week reading books, then check out again and go back to the business of having church planters raise up workers.

I see the day when we don’t pray over football games anymore or civic meetings, so that they know we don’t do that anymore. I look forward to the day, a dream, when some of God’s people, just a few of them who minister, do what Paul did, and that’s work for a living. And those who don’t, and that’s wonderful, live by the “un-hinted for” gifts of God’s people. When every non-denominational parachurch organization, non-denominational tax-exempt organization has ceased to exist because the community of the believer has gotten back to doing and being what she is: the centrality of all believers. When all care and love and concern, all help, all healing, all love, all passion and compassion are expressed within a body of believers. That does not have to disrupt one Christian doctrine being taught today. That’s true. Not one doctrine we believe as believers has to change for these things to happen. Not one. For these things to go, it’s just a matter of letting go of traditions.

I have a dream of a day when Jesus Christ looks down out of heaven and says, “Isn’t she beautiful? Isn’t she gorgeous? She’s beautiful. She’s not a knock-kneed, freckled-faced, and snuggle-toothed anymore. She’s beautiful. She has made herself ready. I think I’ll go and get her and bring her to myself for my glory and make myself once more one with her. Personally, I’m not speaking for the Lord, but He made me in His image. I wouldn’t come back to earth and pick this thing up. I really wouldn’t. I wanted to marry a beautiful girl. I married the prettiest girl I ever laid eyes on. Boy, she was gorgeous. I can’t see my Lord coming back for this.

Brothers and sisters, if we can have a reformation in the 1500s, we will have a revolution sometime in the next hundred years, when we simply give up the complex and return to the simple. When we have finally stopped being sectarian with one another, love one another, and receive one another, because Jesus received us. When we have stopped throwing up walls of doctrine and the community of believers is what it has always been, a beautiful, nonsectarian, openhearted fellowship of the redeemed. Praise the Lord. I hope the Lord obsesses you with her.