How dare he live as though he were forgiven? As though he never had done any errant thing. How dare she walk as though she were free? Liberated from a verdict of guilt and a penalty of condemnation; freed from the prison clothes of the blameworthy. How dare they lift hands in worship that were lifted in anger, hatred, lifted in sin?

Repent! you shout. Let him bring us evidence of suffering, proof of his pain. Let us judge her heart, evaluate his intentions, determine their rightness, let us cast with pride our ballots of heavenly retribution.

Their standards must be OUR standards! We would not; therefore they must not. We decide, we determine, we establish what is acceptable and what is intolerable.

We know. That is the crux of the matter: We KNOW.

We know what is in their hearts. We know what God knows of them. We know what ought to be done with them:

Banish them! Bind them with the steel of our judgments. Surround them with the tsk of the tongue and the wag of the head. Crush them with the hushed whisper and the subtle snub.

Disapprove them. Disparage them. Disallow them. Disinvite them. Disengage them. Disfellowship them. Deny them, deride them; hold them in disdain.

Sinners! They have stumbled, fallen; they have muddied themselves in the mire of sin. Offenders! They have tripped, proven their humanness; they have demonstrated their weaknesses. They are “less-than.” “Less than” who? Less than us, surely! We would not. Stumble, stagger, we would never fall.

But they, they have been brought to the court of human righteousness and they have been found wanting in our all-seeing eyes!

Or perhaps they have not. Stumbled, as we have believed, fallen as we have observed; perchance we were misinformed, given one side, but certainly not the other side of the story, but let us not let truth obstruct our righteous and holy highway. We are certain, we know, we see what God may not see: We know motive, intention; we know the flaws.

How dare they? When they demonstrate by their attitudes, by their words, by their acts, they do not know God; they do not know His heart; they do not understand His ways, His purpose, His love.

How dare they? Reinterpret, misinterpret His words? God forgives, “so far as the East is from the West so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” He forgives and “will remember their sin no more.” Teachers of the law and the Pharisees were invited to cast stones of death at a woman found guilty of mortal sin, should they be without iniquity. The woman was instructed merely, “Go and sin no more.”

How dare they? Misrepresent those holy words? How dare they? Pervert perfection by dragging lofty righteousness to man’s grimy and unholy estate.

How dare they? How dare they assume a position reserved only for One, for One Holy, for One righteous Judge Who gave His life that we might be tried in the court of heaven’s grace, judged with the beauty of mercy, found innocent because of the pouring out of His own, pure blood?

How dare they? Oh, they dare . . . they dare because they do not believe.

Have we, the Church of Jesus become victims of our own success in our relations and interactions with God?

Looking with some twenty years’ perspective since the first Toronto stirrings indicated a fresh move of God’s Spirit in the earth, some painful possibilities exist. Many of us among the people of God had by the 1990s cried for God to refresh us, to revive His work, to visit us with His intimate presence, His person! “Church as usual” was no longer an option for hearts thirsting for God’s close fellowship and love. We cried for Holy Spirit to come, to visit us, to make His habitation among us, and He did it!

And when He came He showed us that lots of the formality of our religious experience was worthless. We discovered that God was not impressed with our man made spirituality. We got down off our high spiritual horses and became real with God and with one another. And God blessed. God came. Oh, how He came into our midst! Lives were transformed; not just adjusted or amended, this was no season of “soul-tweak” but lives were changed completely, totally, fully. Lives were healed of longstanding pains of physical, spiritual and mental abuse. What years of conventional counseling and praying and hoping and waiting could not deliver, God did in moments.

For those who recall those days (and many long, yet too brief nights) this was the apex of our experience with heaven. And then, so soon we became accustomed to Him. The extraordinary became the ordinary. We discovered that familiarity does breed contempt. No longer were we awed by His presence when we came together to worship. We could sing to Holy Spirit, we could worship God with one hand and hold our coffee cup with the other. We could drink in His presence while we drank down our coffee.

And at some point we lost the preciousness, the pricelessness of His presence. We lost the glory of His touch, we lost the awe of His communion, the intimacy of God’s heart with our hearts: We. Lost.

And so, as countless generations before us have done, we attempted to manufacture what we could not create – the holy, awesome, life-changing, intimate presence of the living God walking among us, touching our lives with His grace, transforming whole churches from mere places of worship to centers of mission and purpose.

And as I ponder these painful truths, the question arises, “Can we recover what we have lost?” Can we?

Certainly our times call for a supernatural church to confront a dead and dying world filled with the philosophies of meaningless and death. And if the times call for such a church, we ought then to cry out to God once again to come to us, to forgive us, to dwell among us, to sweep us, one more time into His arms of love and safety and protection and to there infuse us with His Spirit that we might be, in the midst of desperate times, the full representation of the hope of the world, even Jesus.

Allow me for a moment to challenge your perspective, your concept, your understanding of the word “church.”

For most people, “church” has come to mean a building, a denomination, or a program. I believe God has something else, something greater in mind when He uses the word.

A while back God began to speak to me about changes that the church needed to make if His followers were to make a significant difference in the world around us.

As my understanding of those changes developed, the Holy Spirit brought a truth to my heart that I didn’t fully comprehend: He illuminated this statement: “The door to the future is in the past.” Immediately I thought of the church of the Book of the Acts. That’s what we often refer to when we talk about a true, New Testament church. We examine Acts 2:42-47 to discover the ingredients of that church and try to apply them to our own experience and then wonder what we’re doing wrong when we don’t see three thousand or five thousand people born into the Kingdom in our meetings.

Part of the reason we can’t find the success we seek is that we tend to look for patterns to follow. We want systems and programs, concise equations whereby if we do “A” “B” and “C,” we will get “D.” There are church groups that instruct leaders to “Develop a first class children’s program, find talented musicians and preach no more than fifteen minutes on positive subjects and your church will grow.”

Unfortunately and all too often, our definition of “growth” differs greatly from God’s meaning. God cannot be reduced to a formula or a recipe. If the church is truly His church, it follows that “church” cannot be reduced to simple, repeatable formulae. Church historians know this: What worked for one generation didn’t work for the next generation. Look at the record of the church: Each generation was required to find God for themselves and to discover His direction and to hear His voice for themselves and for their unique generation.

As I contemplated that statement – “The door to your future is in the past” I asked God for understanding. He said, “Go back to Genesis.” I turned to Genesis chapter one and read,

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. (Gen. 1:1-3).

Allow a brief commentary: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” All that exists around us, every law and principle that provides the material and spiritual to exist were created by God. Man had nothing to do with any law, principle, truth or reality that enables the physical world to function. All things, everything existent was made by God without the assistance and before the existence, even of man.

“The earth was without form and void . . .” In order for God to “rebirth” or “restore” His church, we must come to a place of complete and total reliance upon Him. Any idea we have, any vision or concept of what the church is must issue directly from God and not from our own experience, education, or from our own minds or souls.

God must be the solitary source of direction, counsel, instruction and illumination if His church will indeed be the church Jesus said He would build. We must offer ourselves to Him “without form and void.” This is critical for us to understand: “without form,” and “void.” Empty of our ideas, empty of our theories and models, without any preconceived concept of what the church must look like, where it will meet, when it will meet, how it will meet. These are all assumptions and notions that we received, were handed down to us by former generations. It’s the “we’ve always done it this way” mentality that so often conflicts with the purposes and direction of a mysterious and creative God.

We have seldom emptied ourselves of ourselves, choosing rather to fill ourselves with ideas, schemes, plans and efforts that have only failed, disappointed and discouraged.

And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters . . .” It is the illumination and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that gives life. We have relied on supposedly “tried and true” methodologies; we have learned from the examples of previous generations; we have absorbed the teaching of college and seminary professors but we have so seldom emptied ourselves of ourselves, regarded all our earthly understanding and learning as “dung” and with the Apostle Paul declare “this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

Then God said, Let there be light; and there was light. “Then God said…” it is up to the Father and His timetable to determine the “Then” moment of time when we will understand the nature, the structure and even the purposes of His church, this “New Wineskin” of which Jesus spoke.

We cannot determine the timing of any eternal thing; we can only move when heaven’s timepiece chimes. “Then God said, “Let there be light . . .”  Only when God reveals the light are we able to see. There is no artificial light source; no earthly beacon can shed light on and uncover what cannot otherwise be seen. Until God turns on the light, there is darkness in the house. But when God speaks, light appears; understanding comes; comprehension is made easy.

God does not cooperate with pseudo-church forms, the unsanctified bastions of religion and the ungodly mixing of the fleshly with the spiritual.

We are moving into a new, unexplored realm of experience in Jesus and in the church. God is not finished with the church, but He is finishing with His cooperation with pseudo-church, the unsanctified bastions of religion and the mixing of the fleshly with the spiritual. He is not only demanding, He is enabling a generation to “come out from among them and be separate” and to inhabit and comprise “a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.”

This is the church that is emerging from the counsels of heaven; this is the church of the Latter Rain, the Temple more glorious, the church of the living God against whom the gates of hell cannot not prevail.

God is calling out His people; a committed remnant that desire more than a religious atmosphere and high, holy-sounding rhetoric. God is assembling an army of warriors who will storm hell’s gates and prevail against all of the enemy’s schemes. Heaven is sounding the trumpet call for volunteers to join that army and become the church that will stand faultless around His throne, a Bride adorned for her Groom, Jesus.

The doorway to the future is in our past, all the way back to the beginning, the Genesis of it all.

How did His Church Become My Church?

“There are approximately 38,000 Christian denominations in the world.”

                                    (Christianity Today – General Statistics and Facts of Christianity Today, 2001).

* (Update: As of 2009, eight years after the CT study, more than 43,000 denominations have been identified).

Does this statistic bother you?

We so easily miss truth by way of our assumptions, our faulty perceptions, our beloved traditions. “We’ve always done it this way” is no excuse for error in our behavioral patterns. “We’ve never done it that way” is no justification of wrong-minded “rut” living

Have you considered that the word “Church” as used by Jesus and “Church” (as a descriptive experience) may not be the same? Indeed, they may be completely unrelated!

Jesus said, “I will build My Church and the gates of hell will not prevail . . .” We routinely reveal our error in understanding when we make statements such as,

“Are you going to church on Sunday?”

“Where do you go to church?”

“How do you do church?”

Jesus said, “I will build My church.” He did not say “I will build a school or an entertainment center, a business enterprise, a social gathering place, a nesting place for ‘birds of a feather to flock together.’”

What did Jesus have to say about church attendance? What did He say about “orders of service” and times of service and frequency of services and pastoral personalities and preaching styles and music preferences and, for crying out loud, the acceptable color and pattern of the carpet?

What did Jesus say about doctrinal distinctions and denominational differences and modes of baptism and understandings of communion? Or should we refer to the Lord’s Supper as the Eucharist? Did Jesus introduce the liturgy that so many view as sacred, proper, essential? Was it Divine genius that gave us homiletics 101?

What about “church growth” schemes? What did Jesus say about these? Was the Lord of glory the Originator of the Church Conference? Did the Savior introduce the Convention, the Congress, the Summit or the Seminar? Did He initiate the Saturday night “Prayer Hour?”

Was it Jesus Who suggested taping a Denarius, or in a rich neighborhood, an Aureus on the underside of a seat, to be won by the lucky worshiper who chose that moneyed seat?

Where did the term “Do Church” originate?

What makes one building a “church” and another a manufacturing plant? What makes one structure a sanctuary and another a dispenser of latte’s and pastries?

Did Jesus intend our Sunday-go-to-meeting duds should be different than our Monday-go-to-work attire? What chapter and verse in the gospels delineates a shopping mall for religious trinkets, “Christian” music and “Christian” books and “Christian” refrigerator magnets? Or perhaps it is Pauline theology that bears responsibility for the “Christian” financial enterprise that converts merchandise for millions of dollars each and every year that we await the rapture of the church.

I think we may have, somewhere along a long line of “doing” confused our being with performance, achievement, a “holy” but not wholly godly routine. Somehow, I think the “exploits” of Hebrews 11 and of the Acts of the Apostles have been largely lost beneath the sheer weight of a good-mindedness that is not necessarily God-mindedness. Our faulty definitions have displaced original intention and the simplicity of our watching, our cooperating, as Jesus simply, straightforwardly and miraculously, builds “His church.”

Acts 28, beginning in verse number 30 gives us a wonderful portrayal of the intention of Jesus in building: “For two whole years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him. Boldly and without hindrance he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.”

And he did it all, away from the synagogue, away from the crowds, without benefit of the limelight or the fawning groupies or the wild and raucous cheering section, all the while being held prisoner of the government of Rome. No, Paul wouldn’t “fly” in today’s religio-centric church, he was far too unconventional, too controversial, too “small time potatoes” for modern churchmen.

Jesus said, “I will build My church.” Oh, hey, I just noticed: “My” church, indicating possession, custody, ownership, control, proprietorship; “My” church

One of the first words learned by every toddler, beyond, “mama” and “dada” is “Mine!” It seems that we come from our Manufacturer uniquely equipped to issue that explanation to all in our world – “Mine!” And we carry that sense of domination and control and ownership into our concepts of church: Far, too many expressions of “church” are “mine” in either the collective or the individual sense. We’ve all heard it, “Have you attended Smith’s church?” Or, “What do you think of the __________________ (you fill in the denominational label) church?” Or, “This is my church.”

The songwriter penned the words, “What’s love got to do with it, do with it, do with it?” It seems that modern “churchites” have their own version: “What’s HE got to do with it, do with it, do with it?”