Friday 3 November 2017

God's Light brings definition - a Look at 4 points in history









Please link these four histories.
1.God saying to Israel both through Moses direct, and later about that time period in the desert but as recalled by prophets...
the jist is while you were not a people, I called you and betrothed you in the desert....
(the tribe of Dan didn't feel very married, or didn't want to be, because as soon as they arrived in Canaan they toddled off, and Julius Caesar says they formed Greece)
2. Jesus preaching a whole new level, and finding that He had to do most of it on the shores of Galilee and in the hills beginning with mutlitudes.
3. Late 60s and 70s people were being baptised in the Spirit across the world in their thousands and wondering what on earth to do now. They snuck out to Fountain Trust meetings at the London Friends meeting House. or , like in Emsworth they held "extra curricular activities" was it once a week or once a month , gathering from different churches round people's front rooms.
4. Wondering what on earth to do, one bunch as Dave Tomlinson describes in Post Evangelical and M Scott Peck "The Different Drum".....one bunch feel unhappy now with the "socialisation stage and strait jacket" and ditch a formal relationship with God to follow and research spirituality in general another bunch like myself notice that there is something essentially sick still with 1 John 2's "young man stage". I mean the charismatic thing is a necessary transition stage, but like the disciples circling the mountain of God for 40 years.....THE ACTUAL LAND OF PROMISE it was not....
In each of the histories, and I believe currently today, God always brings more Light, more definition.
in the wilderness God had to wait for a malleable next generation of fresh hearts, to be able to take the people into the Land. The definition if you like was , after 40 years of merrygo round
One morning Joshua said....
Now , Today, we are going up to the land.
Imagine the shock to the system.
In Galilee, Jesus had healed the sick, fed the multitude, preached widely....but He was disturbed.
And as if playing out naturally in the background, He also heard of John the Baptist His relation, having his head cut off.
He was floored internally....He had to spend time really hearing God intently.
Two things happened to bring definition.
120 disciples, who followed more closely still wasn't defined enough. He was led to choose by the Spirit 12 men....and led to choose a devil as one of them. I guess this mirrors the reality we are in now, where as He said....after the farmer sows, an enemy would come by night. So now we too have a field that is made up of genuine God people, and complete fakes.
secondly His preaching changed gear in John 6. He told the multitude that He wasn't here to provide all their outer stuff, He wanted to get at the root of their beings.....for the first real time since Genesis 3, He had come to bring the Bread out of Heaven, by which we may be born again , eat, and bear fruit, thirty, sixty and 100 fold.
In Emsworth a Catalonian evangelical who fled Spain and Franco's death warrants and imprisonment.....yup the civil War had always been about the Vatican taking back their power....
Jorge Pradas found himself in one of those loose and woolly fellowship meetings in Emsworth and by the Spirit asked them suddenly to show him in the New Testament what "a fellowship was".
You can have fellowship, but nowhere is the word "a fellowship".
That;s David "New Cartism".
The only thing in the New Testament is "the Church of the Living God", as Watchman Nee says....in a local geography.
if you isolate the tiniest bit of my body it is Chris Welch DNA.
If you reduce the size of a gathering of believers down to two in a place......it is still the ekklesia....the church of the Living God meeting in the Name of Jesus.
So Jorge asked by the Spirit, "Are you people here the Church or aren't you?"
That was how Emsworth Church was born. Perhaps it should have been called New Brighton Road Church, or later Horndean Road Church. Considering there were other believers meeting in the usual denominations...perhaps it was a bit steep to call it Emsworth Church....but maybe equally it woke some of the sleeping denomination people.
So we come to online stuff.
I came online because there was no terrestial place to share the thirdlevel. Many of us on here are here for the same reason.
But that doesn't make it right. It may make it a New Cart....but New Carts are dangerous.2 Samuel 6.
When in 1973-5 many many of us were withdrawing from 1st level Christian situations to position ourselves for the secondlevel Jesus was bringing in, we found ourselves isolated, meeting in front rooms, and some number of us across the world fell sexually. (Jamie Buckingham for example)
Now I am not calling Jorge Pradas a proper thirdlevel apostle, but in many pioneering ways he was pretty darned close....and for those days, in the 70s he was establishing works of God that were starting to look like real churches that we read of in Acts.
But ONE THING that wasn't going to happen too quickly in a real church setting , where you are walking eyeball to eyeball in Light.....is adultery or fornication.
Blogs and Facebook have been very similar to the use of books when invented in Guttemburg .
When mass flyers and cheap printed sheets were available in the 60s, Watchman Nees works were flying everywhere. The Jesus Move was built on things like David Wilkerson's Jesus maturity manual, hippie type colourful gospel fliers.
I created a potted version of the normal Christian Life for my school.
But Books and online media ARE NOT CHURCH.
Jesus had to move from the multitude....actually at one point the Bible says...seeing the multitude he went in the other direction.
He became defined in the Spirit. He poured Himself into 12. With an overspill of 120 including his Mum and Mary Magdalen.
Judging by who was at the tomb it seems they were actually listening.
I think it was 2012 -2014 some of us were on a continuous private Thread sharing, as we could in our schedules all round the clock all round the world.
Things do have a natural course, and perhaps it was over.
But it was during this period I suddenly saw how all through history God has defined MOVES.
We can see this in Nehemiah 8.
Notice how key this book is. The FIRST thing the returning people did was build the 12 Gates and walls.
The first thing the Spirit has done since the pouring out of the Spirit in the 1900s has been to redefine and rebuild all these devastations in the Spirit.
But just rebuilding is one thing.
Then chaoter 8 comes.
Some kind of "Gathering in the Square " Prophetic Moment
where things get defined in the Spirit.
Selah.....again

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