Body

I took a person I greatly admire to task yesterday. Well, it seemed to me that he thought people who were not in Messianic house churches were less than they ought to be. He corrected that perception but admitted that he does much admire the Eastern Church against the Western one.

This is actually more understandable to me, given that I often feel the same — except that a few weeks ago, I received an article about the church in China that began to rearrange everything I thought I knew about the Body of Christ. It was a wonderful story about how often the Chinese fast, how long they pray, what miracles they are doing, how they are suffering. They express the opinion that American Christians are proud and don’t ‘get it’. I was prepared to agree and I wanted to rejoice, but something constrained me. I couldn’t figure out what it was at first. I began to put two and two together.

First of all, the Chinese church of the article comes across as typically “conservative and evangelical” even though they believe they are not like Americans. They remind me very much of attitudes I was raised with. “How much suffering can you take for Jesus?” They have one ministry in the Body — evangelism. They fast continually and pray for hours every day. They say this can turn situations around in about 30 days. They are always working, working, working for Jesus. I would like to say this is a good thing — maybe even necessary, given that they still need evangelism in that country and face much hostility. But when they say, “You proud Americans….” and then proceed to talk about all their works…then I have to wonder who’s running things.

I spent three years in a Chinese-dominated group. They had some wonderful things, to be sure. They were also very rigid and legalistic. They believed they understood the Cross (and they were somewhat proud of all this). They believed that part of enduring the Cross was never to complain about anything — even if it was legitimate. It meant, in this particular situation, that leaders sometimes practiced abuse. But that is not to say the people I knew were the same as the people in the article…but the conformity, the “we’ve got it figured out”, “how much can you take for Jesus?” were all embedded in there. I suspect it represents Chinese culture mixed with the excesses of American evangelism which they learned from us.

I began to reconsider the Church. What is a good church and what is a bad church? What is it with all these people pointing fingers at one another with a “you people” attitude? A friend of mine shared that he complained to the Lord once about the deplorable state of the Body. “It is weak, it is beaten up, it has festering wounds,” he said. Then, the Lord spoke and said, “Don’t you ever talk like that about my Body again. My Body is strong, it is robust, it is healthy…”

I considered that later. Now I think it’s right. I wondered how the Lord could abandon His Body for 2000 years to wolves. But He hasn’t. Are heresies, slanders, wounds, sickness, despair, pride, envy, etc. part of the Body of Messiah? Yet there they are in what we consider too casually as His “Body”. Messiah’s Body is perfect. When we eliminate sin and sickness, only that which looks like Messiah remains. That is the Body. That is what Paul meant when he said,

Gal 4:19 My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you,

It is why Jesus said:

Mat 5:29 And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast [it] from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not [that] thy whole body should be cast into hell.

And why Paul said again:

Rom 8:29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate [to be] conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

What I am saying is that the Body is that which is according to the image of His Son. Those things rooted in sin and sickness are not part of His Body.

When I saw that, I also saw something beyond the “Here’s how you do it right” syndrome. God has spoken to His saints in many ways under the worst years of the visible church. Anyone with an open heart, He can speak to and they have the choice to take hold of His words. No one can stop you from being holy — truly, truly HOLY unless you choose not to be. One may be in prison, isolated for some circumstances of family obligation or in a situation where there are no believers in agreement.

If you will look in the Old Testament, there is The LAW. If a person transgressed, they had to make restitution — pay a penalty of some sort and make atonement. But how is it so much went on back then with seemingly no judgment? For instance, why was David allowed to eat the shewbread reserved only for priests, yet Uzzah was struck dead for steadying the ark when the oxen shook it? Why, as a Nazirite who could not come near to any dead thing, was Samson allowed to slaughter hundreds of Philistines with his bare hands and a jawbone? We see on the one hand that the LAW was not to be trifled with and on the other hand, Jesus taught that it was really about the heart.

There are many believers outside of all organization, but are they outside the Body of Messiah?

1Cr 11:29 For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.

If we think the Lord’s Body is weak and ragged and wretched, can we say we discern His Body? If we say this one is “in” the Body because they are part of this thing and another is “out”, do we discern the Body? Perhaps the real reason the Body seems to be according to rules instead of unity is because people do NOT discern the Body. When they do, will there be unity in real time? And then will people say, “How they love one another?”

I have to tell you this. I know I have heard the Lord. What I am about to say, I do not say lightly. The time to fret and carry on about the institutional church is over. It is over.

A friend told me the other evening that he used to gripe continually about the state of the church/churches until one day the Lord told Him, “My Body is robust. My Body is strong. Don’t you ever say that my Body is weak again.” I didn’t think too heavily about it at first. The institutional churches, Messianic congregations, etc., are not Messiah’s Body. Messiah is interested in those members, wherever they are to be found, who are His Body. And that Body is, indeed, robust.

The time for bashing the institutions is over. The Lord has spoken in my heart, “Live out of Me.”

The world has been judged. Yes, it has already been judged by every word out of the mouth of God. The sentence just hasn’t gone forth yet. Until that time, there is a little space to repent. There is a little time for the unregenerate to turn to Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world — but not much. There is a little time for the members of the Body to repent of living out of the “life” of the world (even of the life of the institutions) — but not much.

The Lord has spoken to my heart that this is a celebratory time for me — not a time of sorrow and mourning. He has challenged me to live out of His speaking and not out of the surface truth of what is happening in the earth. He will begin to deliver His people in this time. I have begun to celebrate in obedience, for the Lord knows what is to come — and it is good and not evil for those who listen. I have begun to light the candles and to offer celebration in my home.

As is my custom, I drove off in the early morning and prayed on the way to work. About three years ago, He told me to pray for His kingdom. I pray the Lord’s Prayer on a regular basis, and until recently, these words seemed to be highlighted: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” For two days now He has taken a “highlight marker” to a different part of that prayer: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” I believe the Lord is going to begin to deliver His people in this time.

He wants us to begin to live out of Him now. Do not wait until you are overcome with tragedy to give up your natural life. Begin now. Look for His salvation now. Do not be entangled with the world’s thinking or the news or any reports you hear that tempt you to think that the Lord is not coming to deliver. Yes, bad things will happen. But this is not the Lord’s speaking. Whether in life or in death, the Lord is going to deliver His people who take up His life and refuse to live out of the vanity of the world.

I have nothing else to say on the matter. Whether in life or in death, we are the Lord’s. This is a glorious time.

I went back to the root in order to know my place in the Body. Beginning with the early Jewish church, I hit a snag. Ephesians 2:15 says that God made of Jews and Gentiles “one new man”. I mentioned in the last post my acquaintance who converted to Messianic Judaism. It does happen sometimes but not usually. He keeps many of the Jewish laws because he lives in Israel where doing so has relevance. But Paul tells us that God has made two stalks of humanity into one new man in Christ.

This made great sense when I realized that I could not be what I am not — a Jew. However, I could learn from the intersection of the Jewish-Gentile church. The Jewish believers kept the Law; the Gentile believers did not. There’s our answer: We should not strive to be what we are not. God never secreted His things away from the world even when He entrusted the sacred to the Jewish people. The sacred things were revealed in their lives in order that the world might know God.

It took some sorting through random bits of evidence before it hit me over the head why today’s house churches still don’t approximate the early church. It is true that when we meet with other believers for any reason we are “the Church”. However, this simple minded approach lacks any purpose or objective. My mind went into overtime when I realized that the intentional simple churchers I knew were essentially Protestant/Evangelical/Charismatic but in a home instead of a structure. Not much is different. They have the usual pot luck, worship and praise, sharing and prayer — it’s all rather predictable. I can walk into most any group and know exactly what’s going to happen even if I’ve never met these people in my life.

Then we have the really simple house churchers. They have no services and no objective other than to show up and share the Lord as He happens to intrude on everyday conversation. They are no less sincere or unlikely to pursue God than the others. These decry such distinctions as “sacred” vs. “profane”. Every affair of life is holy — but on the other hand, they have also lost the sense of worship in community. Sometimes I’m not sure whether the profane becomes sacred or the sacred becomes profane. They regard the Lord’s Supper as an ordinary part of a meal, though they do take it seriously, making appropriate remarks as the need arises. There is a certain value in learning some propriety, which I think they miss — it teaches us respect for others and for special moments set aside in community. The original Lord’s Table was not part of everyday life — it was part of a Passover Feast and the Lord did a new thing on that occasion. He used the wine and bread to institute a new covenant.

I have known groups that did their best to eradicate culture, believing it to be divisive. I think it a mistake. Groups that dispense with culture end up creating a new culture and becoming unnecessarily weird so that they have relevance to no one. Culture is good and necessary. It is the means by which we pass down the narrative of who we are and what we value.

Still, we cannot impose our culture on other groups. It has often been a practice of the institutional church to kill its message by this means. When Bruce Olson went to Colombia to work with the Motilone Indians, he found other Christian groups had also been there to no success. They wanted to force new believers into ways of relating that made no sense to them — strict programs and buildings that were square. The Motilones have round buildings and they give thanks to God whenever they pull up a root — hence, no need to say grace at meals as they have already said it. That, to me, is a lesson to embrace culture but never to put people in a cultural strait jacket.

Having said this mouthful about culture, it brings me to what I really want to drive home in the next post — something long, long neglected. And that is the very wonderful and beautiful role of culture in the Church. Far from being a hindrance to the Gospel of the Kingdom, it ought to be a furtherance. I will lay out in the next post what I believe will support that conclusion. I hope to turn the heart of the children back to the heart of the fathers. Hopefully, you will see the beauty of intentional community worship as well as the personal freedom it allows when living, breathing, playing, worshiping as “the Church”. We should begin to see some authenticity when we recognize our real “Fathers of the Faith”.