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

Well, shouldn’t he know the Bible? It’s a byproduct of knowing the Lord, folks. The Lord teaches the Book; the Book doesn’t teach the Lord. The Book opens itself to revelations we cannot comprehend by getting to know the Lord. I repeat something I said to you recently. On the Emmaus Road, Jesus opened Scripture; it was not Scripture that opened Jesus. This is something we’ve utterly lost.

Okay, here’s my list. Please react as I go. Interestingly, I list first meetings, and there’s a lot to be said about meetings. Why would you put that first? Because we can lead someone to the Lord Jesus Christ tomorrow and bring them in here, and if they don’t see a resonating display of Christ, they won’t come back. Our meetings have to be high, beautiful, and expressive. Now I’m speaking to a small group of people here, and this group of people in this room must learn how to have a meeting. That meeting has to be with life. You’re not meeting for yourselves when you’re doing outreach; you’re meeting for other people coming through that door. And you are extending yourself to their needs. You cannot have a dead meeting. It will not work. Everything about it has to be new. You’re going to have to give yourself, really give yourself, concentrating on that meeting and functioning in that meeting.

I recall the statement that a pastor of a large church, I think it was, I don’t know, St. Louis, Missouri, I think, and he said, every Sunday morning for the invitation we sing Just as I Am Without One Plea. Several times people asked him, same song every Sunday at the end of the meeting, why can’t we sing something else? He responded, “That song is not for you.” It’s for the people in the room who need to respond to the Lord Jesus Christ.

So the first one is a meeting, and there’s a lot to it. Now, if we were to learn a great deal about the way of meeting, and if some of it sounded mechanical, then let me tell you something. I said earlier, we haven’t functioned in 1,800 years. Do you have any idea how long that’s been, that you’re out of the habit of functioning? You’re 1,800 years without functioning. I don’t hesitate one bit to say the next meeting we have, you’re going to do this, you’re going to do this, you’re going to do this, and do this. And then you know what happens? You do it. Somebody else says, hey, that’s not bad. I’ve got something to say, too. You have to, some way, let the tongue out of the cage. It’s been in there a long, long time. Perhaps more than anything else here, we have to look straight down the lion’s mouth of meetings.

The second one, I’ll go ahead and read the rest of them. Maybe you’d like to say which one you think is most important. There’s got to be ministry. Ministry from the Word of God. Evangelism. Somebody’s got to know how to lead people to the Lord Jesus Christ. Now listen to this next one very carefully. Some brothers or sisters will teach, preach, and explain what baptism means. I don’t care what your gender is. It doesn’t matter what your gender is. We are too small to be picky. Someone has to explain what baptism means when we baptize. Somebody else, or that same person, better know just about everything that the church of the Lord Jesus Christ knows about baptism.

The next one is…I’m going to borrow a term from the institutional church because I don’t know any other one. It’s called follow-up. This is probably the hardest part of this whole list. You baptize someone, and they’re really excited. They need to be visited. They should be given books to read. If they don’t read, and most people do not read, then a video, or maybe it’s going to be one person talking to another person. And it needs to be very rich and very practical. In that respect, within the matter of baptism, there has to be what is buried there. Why does it go into death, and what comes up out of that water? One person goes in; another person comes out.

What went into that tomb? Somebody needs to tell the convert that your flesh went into that tomb. Your old species went into that tomb. I’m sorry, into that grave, yeah. And creation went in there. The devil goes in there. The fallen angels go in there. More than anything else, your self-life goes in there. Your relationship to the world and the world system goes in there. And that’s what you are burying that day. And you’re leaving the life you had behind you. If you’ve got drugs or if I were a Baptist, I’d say you’re giving up dancing. And whatever controls your life goes in the grave. What comes out? Ellis, how much comes out of that grave? All of Jesus Christ. We counted once what came out of that. Where did we stop counting? All of Jesus Christ. All that Christ is. I’ll take that.

Okay, now then I’m coming to the next one. Make sure I’m not missing anything here. Then there’s the follow-up that comes after that—oh, just talking about ministry. I told you we are going to make sure we have something to do for the next ten years. Ten years. I’m speaking about ten years’ worth of ministry. We may have to—there’s a certain brother in this room who could probably do a great job of ministering if we just would put an amplifier in front of his mouth, a megaphone that would increase his volume a great deal. Do you not agree with me, folks? I’ve been told it can’t be done.

Okay. Do you mind? Is there anyone in this room that minds a woman ministering to the church? Anybody got a problem with this? Anybody? Anybody? Anybody out there got a problem with this? Pentecostals have been getting by with it for a hundred years now, and they’re doing really…they’ve trumped the Baptists and everybody else in the world, too, Catholics and so forth. I was told when I was moving around the Pentecostal circus…circles… they said a new church was being born every day…and twice on Sunday. I don’t mind either. But do keep in mind that a sister speaking is not a brother. They have a totally different approach to things. And she should always be armed with a box of Kleenex right beside her all the time she’s speaking.

Alright, the next one. It has been greatly neglected.  Family. I think I said to you in our last meeting, out of every 100 people in the church, and there are 50 married people, how many of those 50 marriages are in trouble? I think somebody volunteered 60. Do you recall what you guessed? How many are in trouble? Anybody want to say? Forty? I don’t know, but I can say this. At some time or other, every one of them is in trouble. Every one of them. And do you know something else? The tragedy is that everyone thinks they’re the only ones having problems this severe. Therefore, they get divorced or other things. I don’t know why God invented the marriage of two separate species from two different worlds. Marriage might be a good idea, but He could at least land them on the same planet. They say that a chimpanzee has 90% of human DNA. Well, they ought to check out the female and the male, and I bet the DNA that separates them is something like 80%.

So for every one of you in every church, you need to accept a simple fact. Marriage is a disaster. A living disaster. Walking, breathing disaster. So we have a self-righteous person back here in the back row who says, “Not in our marriage.” Wait a while. Just wait a while. The cards are stacked against a good marriage. How many cards? All of them that have ever been printed. That’s how many are stacked against you.

So I’m going to say to you that someone in the church must take charge of helping with marriages. Who would that be? I was just about to say some books need to be read, and somebody has come out with some colossal DVDs that will probably still be good 100 years from now because they deal with the basics. If you could ask any marriage counselor who’s been counseling, say, for 30 years, he could probably tell you exactly what’s going to be coming through the door of any couple. It would come down to about 10 or 15 things. But let me tell you what really walks through that door: fallen humanity walks through that door.