What if We Don’t Finish the Task (Part 3) – Preserving the Organic Church for Future Generations

By the way, Alan, I am going to tell Kristin an interesting story that really should have been told last night. I was sitting in the Tirana hotel, minding my own business, when in walks a hurricane, pulls up a chair in front of me, and starts rebuking me right, left, and middle. I don’t know his name; I don’t know where he came from; I don’t even remember what he said, but for about twenty or thirty minutes, I got chewed, chewed out royally. Somebody walked into the Tirana hotel and chewed me out! He was an American, and I just sat there, and he began just telling me all sorts of things wrong with me, and then I did that thing. I leaned back, crossed my legs, and listened to him, with the very definite impression that I could fall asleep at any second.

And when he finished, I said, “Do I look like the person you’ve been talking about?” And he said, “Uh, no.” The men who follow me, I want you to fit into that category, please. I don’t want you to look like the image you will be given.

You do not know this, but there was this thing, I think it’s on the internet, that the way Gene Edwards controls the church is he makes them all read all of his books, and they, they, they have to, have to, have to, they have to listen to all his tapes, and they have to do anything he tells them. That is only true in Arlington (laughter).

That’s why I’ve been asking y’all recently: have I asked you to read one of my books, and you’ve all been giving me the horse laugh. I didn’t know I had been asking you to read any of my books. Oh, I know you don’t mind anything I say; that’s true, but when was the last time I held a book up and said, “I want everybody to read this book”? That wasn’t my book. And that was before you got to Roanoke. Brothers don’t look like what you really are. And that’s a strong, strong man of integrity, character, and piety.

You know what we’re going to lose…and I’ve already said this, but—We’re gonna lose the testimony of building slowly. Every man I know has tried to accomplish everything in his lifetime, and it’s a fool’s journey. You can’t do it in one lifetime, and you sure can’t do it in one lifetime and build big. Now, how many of you have ever heard me say, “This is gonna take three hundred years”? Have you? It’s gonna take a good three hundred years for everything I’ve just mentioned even to begin to permeate the institutional church, and it’d better start influencing the brothers and sisters who are fifty years from now. They will exist; they will be tired of the institutional church; they will come out of it because that’s the way things happen in the Christian world. But are they gonna be Darbinian? Are they going to be ruthless? Are they gonna have elders? Are they gonna have people who go to the cross? Are they going to have people who are gradually transformed rather than transformed overnight? God spoke to Moses and said, “You’re not gonna be around here much longer.”

We will lose healing, healing that is quiet, unknown, and unobtrusive, and is done without fanfare. Trust me, that will be lost. And I think one of the most amazing things that goes on with all of us is that we —we walk in here; we—every one of us needs a Christian counselor. We do. Over at First Baptist Church, they have them available, free to their congregation, to counsel and help them, and you gradually change. You know, some situations are hopeless. We don’t even know you. Jesus, we know, and Paul, we know. It’s incredible. It’s absolutely incredible how normal we get after a while without anybody giving us any psychological talk or anything like that. You get…you get normal. And there are exceptions.

We’re gonna lose workers who are more than speakers. We’re gonna lose practical men. You know what else we’re gonna lose? This will be after I’m dead; you will not be able to understand this. You’re gonna lose me. The Plymouth Brethren, to this day, are exactly like John Darby. Mike, the people in that movement you were in are exactly like the men who founded it. They have his spirit, his temperament, and his way of doing things, and it is impossible for a work not to reflect its founder. And you’re going to lose me.

I knew what I was doing since the day I started, and I knew one of the things I could not do was to leave you with an ugly spirit. The next guy who comes along should be influenced by you. If you disappear, we have lost… I hope the next people who come along will be influenced by you. I trust that your own atmosphere and spirit will reflect some of mine.

By the way, something else we’ll lose is…we’ll lose our story. Not their story, but our story. But if we, if we don’t lose this, it’s gonna take some remarkable things that you and I are gonna have to do, and you’re gonna have to do a lot of it after I’m dead. We’ve got to be here when others like me come along. Wouldn’t it have been great if Watchman Nee had met us in the nineteen-twenties? He wouldn’t be Darbinian. And if he had told you…or hinted broadly…that we were the only people who were saved, I think you’d cut him off at the knees, frankly.

You were so gentle, you were never more beautiful than that night. Now he was a madman who believed in sinless perfection. I never saw anything like you in my life. You were so gentle to that guy. And you let him talk, and you didn’t rebuke him; you didn’t tell him he was the nut that he was. And when he finished and threw up the question, “You startled me by your knowledge of the New Testament,” I sat back there and said, “What’s going on here? You never—I never taught you that,” and you asked scriptures, and it was, it was absolutely beautiful.

You know something else? We just had Peter Lord, didn’t we? Peter came first. Okay, Peter had come. Then there was he, and we’re having visitors come all the time, and we had him, Peter, and we’ll have Jack Taylor, and we’ll have the people from India, and we are open to—I saw that group of people. And what was the charge laid against us? That we didn’t…we weren’t open to other people. And we gave him a thousand dollars or something like that, put him up in a hotel, and fed him. And, no, you were beautiful. If I never told you that, you were beautiful. Nobody else in this world could have done what y’all did that day. First of all, you had a harebrained worker who invited the guy. The second thing that happened was you let me get away with it, and he’s the man who had said all sorts of things about me, and there was never a word spoken ugly about him.

We’re gonna lose a higher gospel, a higher revelation, and experience of Jesus Christ. It’s gonna be lost, and we’re gonna be back down to this objective Gospel that is being preached everywhere.