The Most Beautiful Girl in the World Part 3

Now I have a point, you have an inheritance. You have a right to all the spiritual blessings that are in heavenly places in Christ Jesus in the church. You have a right to live this way. And I forgive me for being the blunt person that I am on rare occasions, but you folks who are going to have a house church, this is not your understanding or sight of what you’re going to do. I know what’s in your head. We’re going to get together. We’re going to love one another. We’re going to eat together. And I’m going to minister a little bit. And we’re going to this and we’re going to that. And it’s going to be. You don’t know this world, you don’t know this dimension, and you don’t have a prayer of a Chinaman in hell because the church of Jesus Christ or any gathered group of people in a living room cannot continually go on the basis of what is known on this earth in the Christian faith today.

Our faith exists outside of space and time. Our experience with Him is not tied to those things temporal, and we touch Him, we face Him, we know Him, we embrace Him. And if you please, we dissolve in Him and lose a sense of our own being in Him. And we come back to places as dull as earth and sit down with our brothers and sisters and share the Christ whom we have encountered.

And when I talk this way, I always think, I wonder if anybody out here has the foggiest idea what I just said. It bothers me when I am, look, I’m just an ordinary Christian. And when I got into this business, I really thought that a whole bunch of other men would come and do this a lot better than me. And I get a little ticked at all the preachers running around on this earth who don’t care enough for the Lord to get to know Him.

Now, you see, mister, you’re going to live with a little group of Christians and you’re going to love one another and all this that and the other and you don’t have anything because our faith as we experience it today doesn’t have a half-life of three years. All we can do is be preached to, and until God’s people themselves become the ministry and become the reality and the experience and the expression, the church cannot go on.

My physical existence is not necessary for the church in Atlanta, Georgia to continue. There is an assurance among ordinary lay people, “upper lower” class people. Are you “upper lower” class? Definitely “upper lower” class and a few of you who are middle lower class, that we know what we’re doing. Well, Gene, boy, you must have spent years with them. I spent about as much time with them as Paul did with the church in Iconium. No, I haven’t gotten up to four months yet, have I, brother? And most of what I’ve done recently is just sitting around on the floor chatting with you. They don’t need me anymore, and they know it. And they couldn’t do this in the beginning, and now they can do this.

Do they have good elders? You bet. How many brothers in the church? 11 elders. How many sisters? 11. Stand up just a minute, I want them to hear this. At this moment, turn around. At this moment, the direction of the church, and I’m not talking about the Lord now, the direction of the church, you would expect to come from elders or pastors, would you not? The weekly decisions being made, would you tell these people who are totally, absolutely, and completely at this moment in charge of the church in Atlanta, Georgia? It’s who?

Audience Member: The sisters are in charge.

Thank you, brother. Listen, the sisters take over the church every once in a while, and they run it for three or four or five months, and they don’t think anything about it. It’s no big deal. It’s the only church in the world in which the sisters lead the church. I mean, they have meetings every week and make the decisions of what’s going to happen next week, what they’re going to do, and the variety is infinite, and the brothers are not threatened, and the whole sense of the church shifts and the sisters come to a point when they realize there are things that they don’t want to handle. I didn’t say they can’t handle it, they don’t want to handle it, and they turn the church back over to the brothers.

I’m going to try to explain something to you that is just not a thought that has ever crossed the mind of people over the last 1700 years. And that is the matter of church ownership. And I listen to you speak, and I hear you say I belong to that church; I go to that church, I’m a member of that church. That is a dead giveaway, brother, that you don’t own it. You are a fixture.

The ownership of the church for the last 1700 years has been in the hands of pastors. And outside the organized church, it’s been in the hands of elders, and God’s people are simply tools in the hands of those people. I never hear the brothers and sisters in Atlanta say ‘I belong to that church, or I am a member of that church.’ The sense is totally different; the ownership of the church belongs to you. And although I take absolute and total control of a church when I first start, that’s because you are a bunch of fallen, hard-necked, agenda-prone, bullheaded, division-prone, shallow, senseless, spiritualist, dumb, ignorant, feisty, rebellious, warlike, smartalec. And I’m only in charge because I know it’s the only thing that’s going to keep you from killing one another, and I take my hands off, and suddenly ownership of the church is born, really is what happens. And she has her own unique expression. I mean, she doesn’t look like any other fellowship of believers on this earth. She is not, you know, every Baptist church on earth looks the same. Every Catholic church on earth looks the same. Every Plymouth Brethren church on earth looks the same. Every Presbyterian, Reformed, Calvinistic Church of Scotland church looks the same, but the ownership of the church is known to be by the people, in the hands of the people.

I’m coming to another point. You make a terrible mistake when you talk about elders. Eldership comes out of corporate leadership. And I have never seen a church anywhere on this planet allow that to happen. Boy, it just comes. We had ordained him as an elder, and so a true elder comes out of gradually comes out of the corporate leadership of the church that is in the hands of all the brothers or all the sisters or whatever it may be, and gradually there comes up somebody who is looked at and looked to a little bit more, and he’s not dangerous. But I have never seen eldership anywhere else but what it was dangerous.

Now you have your choice if you’re going to be a mummy sitting on a pew. You have your choice as to whether or not elders, deacons, pastors, or committees are going to own the church. You have the choice of whether or not you’re going to live in this realm or in another one. Whether or not you’re going to experience the Lord or just hear about Him. Whether or not you’re going to be a deaf mute or a functioning part of this girl. You have the choice of whether or not you’re going to see Him or not see Him by the revelation of the Holy Spirit in your own life.