How to Have a Home Church (Part 3) – Becoming the Body of Christ Together

This is Gene Edwards, and I’m speaking to the churches. I hope that every one of you is gathered around listening, and I trust that you all have a yes within you. I’m talking to you about what it means to be the church. The other time that I spoke to you, I left out one thing I would like to add. Please listen to it, all of you, very carefully. Church, being the church in her fullness and in all that has been her charter, has things to do. One of the most shocking aspects of the church itself is that from time to time you have to do something to address someone in the church who is absolutely driving you, the church, stark raving mad. And sometimes, of course, that person turns out to be you. That’s fine, just the nicest thing in the world, as long as it’s not you. I think that that is the great test of a church. There will be several others, but the earliest one will be. The test isn’t really on the church; it’s on the individual, and the question is always asked, or a statement made: you weren’t Christian in what you did.

If I could take you to the graveyards of dead churches that were trying to be born in a home, and they were trying to get away from the institutional church, and we could have visited every one of them. It would take years, even if we stayed only one day; I think if you could resuscitate the bones and listen to them, it would be because people said what you did wasn’t Christian. They get their feelings hurt, and they leave. Or they do even worse: they get their feelings hurt and stay.

That’s because we have not plumbed the depths of the destruction of our human nature or the fall. We are naive in this area. There is no way in the world for a group of Christians to come together and to get to know one another without you facing the horrific discovery that every person is terribly damaged. Each person is their own person. He has an agenda that nobody else has, and he’s going to stay with it. He has an idea of what the church should be, and really doesn’t want anybody else to conflict with his idea of what the church should be. There is immorality. There are psychological problems. There’s deviousness. I cannot even begin to explain to you.

So as I look to the wholeness of what a church is to be, I look straight into the face of, “What you did was not Christian.” The only thing I can reply is that you’re probably right. We probably weren’t. We probably didn’t. But we’ll have to stick with one another anyway. I have said this to people: the folks who took care of the problem were doing the best they could. Stand with them. But they weren’t doing it right. Well, then you do it and see how good you are at it. You will discover that every problem has a depth and complexity that defies human wisdom or understanding.

All I can say to you is you’ve been reading too much of the Gospels and not enough of the last pages of the epistles. The Jesus story looks like it’s just really beautiful. I think I said to you folks earlier that the only time Jesus Christ ever clearly spoke of the church, He was explaining how to excommunicate someone from the church. Go read it. It’s in Matthew. That’s all that is about. That’s all He talked about: how to deal with someone in the church who is causing a great problem. Yes, it sounds nasty until you get over to the epistles, and then you find out what’s really going on. If you think the depravity of depravity isn’t deep, I would recommend you get a flashlight, get under your bed, lock your doors and windows, and turn to Deuteronomy and read the curses and the blessings of God. I’m going to say 15 and 16, but I’m not really sure.

When Moses came down from the mountain, he asked half the children of Israel to stand on one side of the mountain, and one would recite the blessings while the others would recite the curses. If you think human nature has changed one bit, look at the curses that God said would fall upon you if you forsake the commandments of God. They are a better description than anything you have ever read, heard, or seen reported or read about anywhere in the world, and that was 3,000 years ago. It’s not like these are things that would happen that had never happened. This is what people were experiencing, even then. So before you say you weren’t Christian, get a good look at just how damaged we are.

Now, we live by some standards. One of them is that when you sit down to talk to anyone, you keep in mind that you may someday be the one who has done this very, very same thing. There is no wiggle room for self-righteousness. There is no how horrible you are, how much better we are than you, and what a really great disappointment you are, and I’d be ashamed of myself if I were you. No. As they say, keep in mind your number may come up next—same sin. But I would never commit that sin. Uh-huh. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Absolutely. No, you wouldn’t ever. Yes, you will. Especially if you say you’re not going to…and that’s just the way it goes.

So with this being our second time together, I’ve asked you, do you want to be a whole church? I keep sitting here looking out into the ether waves. Who is on the other end of this talk? I’ve got something I want to say to the man who is listening and saying, “Boy, this is really great.” I want to lead my people. Well, you may have to blank out the next part. My dear sir, if you’ve got a little home group and you’re teaching the Bible to them and you’re telling them how wonderful Jesus is, you will never have the church this side of the day. You’re doing all the functioning, and you’re not allowing the church to grow. Any real work of God will be a work to get you to work yourself out of the work.

Little things like getting up and leaving a meeting, like having a meeting and then telling everybody, next week you’re going to meet, and I’m not going to be here. Those are little things. I’ll be a week off, but here’s all we’re going to do. You’re going to sing, you’re going to testify, you’re going to share. You have to get people started doing that because they haven’t opened their mouths in 1,800 years. Have you even thought in such terms? Those are the small, little, rudimentary aspects of raising up the church the way she ought to be. I defy you to find in the New Testament a church where one man stood around, sat around, knelt around, hung from the roof, and did nothing else but teach the Bible to a group of people. It’s not the New Testament. It’s not scriptural.

Well, they had a hard time being what you are because they didn’t have a New Testament for most of the first century. If you’ll read a little book by me, you’ll find out that an abundance of Scripture didn’t even show up for 200 years. So you’re barking up the wrong tree, and besides that, you’re teaching the Bible; you’re not teaching Jesus. And it’s not going to work if you can tell God’s people all day long, all week long, all month long, all year long, what they’re supposed to do, and they cannot do it. You might as well read the Ten Commandments and the entire 633 laws of Moses and tell them to obey every one of them and never break them under penalty of eternal destruction. To tell people they can live the Christian life—there’s only one Christian in the universe who lived the Christian life, and that’s something we’d better find out fast. By the way, who is He? The Trinity. He’s really good at living the Christian life, and nobody else can do it.

So with that, I’m going to read you a list, and we’ll start it. I keep looking at my list here and thinking, what’s the first thing, Gene? What’s really the first thing? And it’s not on this list. The first thing is a man: a man on fire gathers a group of Christians around him, presents the Lord Jesus Christ in pure glory, and then tells God’s people how to know Him, touch Him, live with Him, and walk with Him. A book cannot do that adequately. I just recently wrote a book entitled Living Close to God (When You’re Not Good at It). I’ve given it away to probably about two dozen people by now, and I haven’t heard a single report that it has taken root in their lives. At the end of the book, I even said a book is very inadequate. Somebody has to live. Somebody has to point. Somebody’s got to lead. Somebody’s got to show us how. And that needs to be somebody who knows not just the Bible, but the Lord.