We do not want ordinary men. Ordinary men cannot win the brutally pagan life of a city like New York for Christ. We want quiet fanatics.”

John Heuss, Our Christian Vocation (Greenwish, 1955), pages 15-16.

HT: Ray Ortland

Aubrey Malphurs, Planting Growing Churches For The 21st Century (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004), 30.

A frowning church is ugly. A praising church is beautiful. Think of a man wearing a great suit, with the perfect shirt for that suit, but then he puts on a killer tie that makes the whole thing pop. That’s what praising God does for a church. A spirit of praise beautifies everything.

Boom.

All that to say I found the quotation yesterday very insightful.

“By becoming a Christian, I belong to God and I belong to my brothers and sisters. It is not that I belong to God and then make a decision to join a local church. My being in Christ means being in Christ with those others who are in Christ. This is my identity. This is our identity. . . . If the church is the body of Christ, then we should not live as disembodied Christians.”

• Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church (Wheaton, Ill, Crossway Books, 2008), 41.

“You can’t fit God’s dream (if I can use that language) for his church inside of the American dream and have it work. It’s a radically different lifestyle. It just won’t squeeze into the available spaces of the time and energy that’s left over.”

If the church wants to be a community that stands out in this increasingly individualistic society, then we need to fight for that selfless, sacrificing community. Otherwise, we will be swept along to create our individual kingdoms with everyone else.

The man who was going down is Adam. Jerusalem is paradise, and Jericho is the world. The robbers are hostile powers. The priest is the Law, the Levite is the prophets, and the Samaritan is Christ. The wounds are disobedience, the beast is the Lord’s body, the [inn], which accepts all who wish to enter, is the Church. … The manager of the [inn] is the head of the Church, to whom its care has been entrusted. And the fact that the Samaritan promises he will return represents the Savior’s second coming.

But he did not stop here. He used this hermeneutic in the Old Testament as well. He took the exodus of the children of Israel and saw it as an allegory of the Christian life. Thus leaving Egypt is the initial salvation of the believer and then crossing over the Jordan river into the promise land as going into heaven.

I find it interesting that many of the spirituals seem to come from this interpretation of Scripture. In the midst of the slavery of early America, the slaves passed on their theology through song and they seemed to view their lives as traveling through the wilderness and they lived with the hope that one day they would “cross over Jordan” and enter the Promised Land (heaven). Note some of the song titles:

• Wings over Jordan
• Roll Jordan Roll
• Get Away Jordan
• On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand

I find it interesting to see the allegorical interpretation of Origen in the 2nd century so embedded into Christianity through the centuries. We even talk about going through the wilderness in some of our language today.

This idea is not too far off track as the wilderness or desert is typically viewed as symbolically representing a time of testing. For Israel was tested in the wilderness (Deut. 8:2) and Jesus was tempted in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1) and Jeremiah uses the analogy of the dry desert verses the lush land as a portrayal of a wicked life verses a righteous life.

Anyway, the more I study the history of the church, the more I see many seeds of modern Christianity planted in prior centuries. It’s really fascinating.

When reading through the book of Acts, one striking component of the early church was the immediacy of baptism after conversion. Peter called the people to repent and be baptized. It was so attached together. In fact, one of the more fascinating passages to me is in Acts 8, where the Lord sends Philip to visit the Ethiopian eunuch. Philip asks him if he understands what he is reading and he says, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” Philip climbs up into the chariot and starts explaining Isaiah and telling him the good news about Jesus. Then the next verse says, “And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?”

The text does not skip a beat. It goes from Philip sharing the gospel to the eunuch wanting to be baptized. We would ask, “Where’s the conversion?” But we do not need that because it tells us about the baptism. His baptism gives undeniable proof that he professed faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. When writing this passage, Luke assumed the conversion and emphasized the baptism, so often we can turn that around.

Although this sounds normal in our capitalistic society, the Bible describes the church differently. The church is not a product, but a body. It is a body of people of all ages who have unreservedly given their lives to Jesus Christ. The body meets together in order serve one another. In other words, Sundays are not to get your needs met, but for you to meet the needs of others. Each believer has been entrusted with a spiritual gift and the church is the garden in which these tools are used.

It seems that if someone sees a weakness in the body, he treats it like a messed-up fast food order. He is displeased and complains to those around him. He may just deal with it for a while, but if it happens week after week, then he decides to leave and never come back. He may leave without talking to anyone, but he may also ask to see the manager to give his two cents about how he thinks it should be done and then storms out.

A beliver in the church should realize that he is not being micro-managed for greatest productivity, but his pastor is keeping watch over his soul and caring for him and will one day be judged how he did so. He puts his whole heart and soul into shepherding the whole body of Christ. So why would one not go to such a leader when there is conflict, dissatisfaction, or any other issue. If for nothing else, we need our thoughts and desires tested to see if they align with the will of God and who better to test them with than the men who spend their time studying the Word, praying, and caring for souls.

It’s sad to me to see people actively a part of a church and then just disappear because they think they found something better. Although the issues are different in every case, I hope they will seek counsel from their elders, who aren’t worried that they are a dissatisfied customer but are concerned that a part of the body needs help.

“The world expects the Christian to be different and looks to him for something different, and therein it often shows an insight into life that regular church-goers often lack. The churches organize whist-drives, fetes, dramas, bazaars and things of that sort, so as to attract people. We are becoming almost as wily as the devil himself, but we are really very bad at it; all our attempts are hopeless failures and the world laughs at us. Now, when the world persecutes the church, she is performing her real mission, but when the world laughs at her she has lost her soul. And the world today is laughing at the church, laughing at her attempts to be nice and to make people feel at home. My friends, if you feel at home in any church without believing in Christ as your personal Saviour, then that church is no church at all, but a place of entertainment or a social club. For the truth of Christianity and the preaching of the gospel should make a church intolerable and uncomfortable to all except those who believe, and even they should go away feeling chastened and humble.”

My Jesus I Love Thee

My Jesus, I love Thee, I know Thou art mine;
For Thee all the follies of sin I resign.
My gracious Redeemer, my Savior art Thou;
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.

I love Thee because Thou has first loved me,
And purchased my pardon on Calvary’s tree.
I love Thee for wearing the thorns on Thy brow;
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.

I’ll love Thee in life, I will love Thee in death,
And praise Thee as long as Thou lendest me breath;
And say when the death dew lies cold on my brow,
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.

In mansions of glory and endless delight,
I’ll ever adore Thee in heaven so bright;
I’ll sing with the glittering crown on my brow;
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.

While singing this song, I realized that in my own heart I was pulling inward in my thinking and I was virtually the only person there pouring out my heart before the Lord. Although this isn’t wrong, I don’t think it is what Christ intended to happen when His people met together. The question I asked myself is: What makes my worship with all the other believers on a Sunday morning different than when I sing on my own before God? Should our worship of the Lord look different when we gather together than when we worship on our own the other six days of the week?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do think that it would have a different affect upon my soul if we exchanged all the I’s, me’s, and my’s with we, us, and our. Although it messes with some of the poetic nature of the song, a few rhymes and such, here’s what this hymn would look like:

Our Jesus, We love Thee, We know Thou art ours;
For Thee all the follies of sin we resign.
Our gracious Redeemer, Our Savior art Thou;
If ever We loved Thee, our Jesus, ’tis now.

We love Thee because Thou has first loved us,
And purchased our pardon on Calvary’s tree.
We love Thee for wearing the thorns on Thy brow;
If ever We loved Thee, our Jesus, ’tis now.

We’ll love Thee in life, We will love Thee in death,
And praise Thee as long as Thou lendest us breath;
And say when the death dew lies cold on my brow,
If ever We loved Thee, our Jesus, ’tis now.

In mansions of glory and endless delight, We’ll ever adore Thee in heaven so bright; We’ll sing with the glittering crown on our brows; If ever We loved Thee, our Jesus, ’tis now.