What if We Don’t Finish the Task (Part 1) – Lessons from Church History and God’s Eternal Purpose

Most Christian groups that come and go make a contribution. I don’t know of any group that has ever made two. That has never been made before. And of course, we don’t know anything about some of them. We don’t know what the Bogomils did, except that they survived for a while. I don’t know that there’s anything that even that very first group, the Priscillians, contributed. I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what the Celtics contributed to the faith that endures today. I know there’s one song that they contributed to us that we still sing. Somebody help me. How does it start? It’s the oldest known Christian hymn. Be Thou My Wisdom. Okay, thank you. Maybe in a few minutes, I’ll ask brother Matthew to tell us if there’s anything lasting that they contributed.

In some ways, the Waldensians gave us something that nobody had done until perhaps we did something a little similar: they went out in twos and went all over Europe, and that’s unique. And to my knowledge, nobody else has ever done that. Boy, I’ll tell you this: they left a testimony; all of them left a testimony of faithfulness in the presence of incredible opposition.

Watchman Nee did give us the concept of one church per city, believe it or not, and gave us a wealth of deep Christian literature. If there’s something else that he did that was utterly unique, I’m not really aware of it. But I would say they gave a testimony of incredible faithfulness in the midst of modern persecution. They are hang-tough people. The Moravians gave us missions. It’s just that simple. They recovered… they restored… missions. The Anabaptists gave us baptism of the regenerated. Do you understand what I mean by that? You only get baptized when you’ve been saved. And everybody, if you’re a Baptist, you get the impression that the Anabaptists dunked people. Well, they didn’t. They sprinkled, because that’s what they thought baptism was, but it was only for adults—kind of hard for a Baptist to admit the Anabaptist sprinkled. I believe today they do immerse. Mennonites are a denomination now. Very stultified. Very, very, very.

If you’re talking about Jon Hus and the Hussites, are you talking about them? Okay. I know. Not the Hussites, but the Hutterites. Is that a different group than the Hus? Well, we’ll have to talk after the meeting. Maybe we know something here that we didn’t know we knew. By the way, there are still some holdouts in Canada who are true Huguenots. But I have to say of the Huguenots that they were never…man, listen, if you ask them when they lived on this earth if they were outside the institutional church they would say, yes, but they were thinking of the Catholics, but they were basically Calvinistic; we’d call them Presbyterians today and they followed the John Calvin church, but boy they suffered for being Calvinist… for being followers of John Calvin.

The Plymouth Brethren…they left us with a mean spirit. Can anybody help me give them credit? I’m sorry. Now, you know, we tend to forget the Quakers. The Quakers, when they were around, were often not considered part of the Christian family because they did not believe in the Holy Spirit. I made that statement, and somebody jumped down my throat and said they do believe in the Holy Spirit. Well, actually, they believed in enlightenment. I have never heard that they believed in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They were not Trinitarian. What did they give us? Well, they gave us pacifism. They gave us… what do we call it if we don’t believe in going to war? Conscientious objectors, right?

Well, this is where the problem comes. Do you have an open meeting whenever virtually all Quakers have disappeared, and are now social groups? It’s a social organization, non-redemptive. The few Quakers who are left get into a meeting, sit and wait until one of them is illuminated, stand up and speak, sit down, and then wait some more to be illuminated again. Is that an open meeting? I’ll let you figure that out. That’s bigger than I can handle. Except they can sometimes go for a month or two without anybody being illuminated. True, I’m sincere, they sit there really quietly. Let me put it this way. We should really respect those people. They filled more dungeons in their day in Along than any other group of Christians in the British Isles. That is something they gave us. Yes. Absolutely, they gave us equality of men and women in the church. They were the very first to do that—total equality in the Quaker movement.

The local church, what have they given us? Audience: How to find your spirit.

Alright. Amen. Maybe others have done this. By the way, the Plymouth Brethren were really good at this. The leader of that group was very strong in “spirit, soul, and body.” And yes, he spoke a great deal about how to know and identify your spirit, so let’s give him one. Maybe we should say that John Darby and a few others were the first to speak on the subject of spirit, soul, and body. It did not exist previously to the brethren. So let’s go back and give them a checkmark #2.

Yes, Jesse Penn-Lewis, though, was not there, is they? And I actually think John Darby was. And I’m going to give Schofield credit for giving something to the kingdom of God. I’m sorry. I’m going to swallow really hard on that one. I don’t consider that a contribution. Brainy Bible study. Okay. Well, again, I’m not really clear. I’m trying to think of positive things that have stayed with us. All of them left us a testimony, including the Brethren.

I absolutely knew the contribution by Nee and the little flock. Oh, they left a testimony in the face of the communists. Their devotion to one another…but their devotion to Watchman Nee was also incredible. The communists gathered a group of people together in one of their meeting halls, and one of the things the Chinese communists did was to make everybody confess some of their faults and the faults of their friends. They got them together in a room and said, “Now we want each of you to speak about the faults of Watchman Nee.” They badgered those people and screamed at them, and one would stand up and say, “Watchman Nee didn’t have any faults,” and another would stand up and say, “He didn’t have any faults,” and it was just driving the communists crazy.

Now, this is one of the antidotes I’ve heard about his life. There are many. I think finally some little lady went stark raving mad, broke under the pressure, and started screaming, “He had faults, he had faults,” and so on. But I always thought that was wonderful. I don’t know of any other group in the whole world that would do that… other than you, for me. (laughter) You laugh. Yeah. That’s a man, not a worker.