This post began life as a note on Facebook as "Any idiot can...." And caused quite a furore.
Below the post is a copy of my reply to the newly "homed" and back from hospital Rich Novek.(Weeeeelcome hoooome Rich) In it I explain some of the distinctive that Daniel Yordy and I feel in "seeing " not only the Third Level Message for individuals, but how it relates to a Melchizedek version of Mature Church. We're not claiming any special rights on this...it's just that Daniel and I were like spies in the previous generation, and got to taste and see some of the wacking great fruit in the Land. But unfortunately it wasn't quite the time.....so we've been dwelling in tents again....waiting....
Any idiot can crash through evangelicalism,through pentecostalism and the charismatic, through a terrifying Romans 7 until they find Christ is their life inside them......the challenge is now: Can we so speak the Word like Jesus and Paul,in particular, and the rest of the apostles too, to raise up congregations in this Biblical norm. We've spent decades sharing one to one in hushed tones. But until the church is "seen" manifestly working things out to this depth,then this verse is still a fairytale : Eph 3:10 so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly
places.
Verse implication All streams of living water implicit in the Life of Christflowing through corporate expressions locally,nationally,internationally
NOT primarily for the purposes of evangelism, although this is the effect of binding the strong man,
BUT primarily hitting the targets untouched by all previous generations....who had as much right to do it as any, ever since Christ "stripped all principalities and powers and made a show of them openly".
And what are these targets? This is the Epesians 6 warfare, and the Psalm of Ascents pinnacle psalm 134 of standing by night in the Holy/Holiest place.
This is the stripping of all the Ezekiel 8:10 scrawlings on the walls of the Temple of God's creation....MAN.Of whom it is said in Revelation
They have become the dwelling place of God
God is now tabernacled amongst them.
God's Means is God's Finished productJust as we send kids to school, not just to learn IQ facts, but to learn EQ facts. ie not just to learn head knowledge, but that they also learn as peer groups what growth is as an interpersonal group,and just as the peer group is not only the end product, but is itself the means for an acceleration of growth.So the Body of Christ is both the end product of God tabernacling with manBUT IS according to 1 Corinthians 12-14 (including the LOVE revelation)
............THE MEANS TO GET US THERE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE
God's Circuitboard
Just as an electric circuitboard has to have no shortcircuits in order to work,in order for the Church to be the very place where God takes off his shoes and puts His feetup on the sofa, and opens the fridge for a fountain of cool,refreshing streams of Living Watercoming from His own very Presence...
Leadership have to have passed through the revelation stages of Romans, Colossians, Ephesians etc.
It has to be sweating out of their pores as LIFE, as a contagious LEAVEN which they infect others with just by being in their presence for more than two minutes. Proof( Norman Grubb, Watchman Nee, Evan Roberts all spent very little time all told in the presence of Jessie Penn Lewis....but the rest of their lives was spent working out what just happened.I myself but spent one evening with Richard Wurmbrand, and I think all told 3 hours with Basilea Schlink , and a few more hours with Ed Miller....and huge sections of my blog refer to them.
The gospel in today's church has short circuits in it
The gospel in the Bible has the 100 megawatt 120 million volt power of grace shot right through from beginning to end.(Like a stick of rock lettering)Any works whatsoever are just physical hand gestures exuding out of a rock certain revelation and experience of Christfixing Himself in our innards as us. All the grace type portals that we have as Christians are the flimsy cardboard window frames by which God floods in with more of Himself.Bible reading,prayer, fellowship,praise, waiting on God, reading testimony books,conferences,taking bread and wine, baptism in water.....ALL these things, which in most churches are
WORKS PILLARS , like the 5 PILLARS of the Muslim faith are very very very secondary to people being blitzed, zapped,virtually electrocutedwith the FINISHED WORK of Christ on the Cross, in as many aspects as us leaders can prise into headspace, heartspace , spirit space....and if there's possibility, legspace. Under Spirit anointing we publicly portray Christ crucified and all mankind as the co-crucified.Like Paul, we long to get into a place, to have a "gift of utterance", to " be able by some means to share a gift of faith" with a flock. It's nolonger a message. By the Spirit I heave out the spiritual concrete that has been written by the Spirit right across my heart and being, and layer it into other believers, like a bricklayer laying more mortar. But whereas he has to be careful in case mortar looks untidy, we can splash it all around in great huge dollops, the Father doesn't care, and somehow straightens it up so it looks neat later!!!!
The Bible shortcircuit
Because of the way the Fall locked us into our leftbrains in fear and shame, we crawl out of our darkened caves just far enough to be able to crane our neck over
a Book which is written in a strange language called Ruach..the breathe or wind of God.
Now to our cavern accustomed eyes it appears at first to be in English, but decidedly odd for a cavern dweller, whose limited linear approach to life is:
how do I get food for today and retreat into my cavern to eat it and remain safe?
But unless we see that the Bible is God's record of how He gets and plans still yet to get HIS ONE LIFE in the Universe squashed into His other main life form in the Universe that He constructed for the job....MANKIND, we really don't get what this RUACH book is a manual for.But with no other thought than caverns on our mind, it is very hard for the Bible not to become
ONE BIG SHORT CIRCUIT .
Now this doesn't mean that the Bible is a shortcircuit, any more than a dollar bill is meant for babies to chew and suck on.....but that's what babies do....and that's also what caverndwellers do with a
Ruach book.
Martha said to Jesus about her dead brother Lazarus. "I know he'll be raised on the last day." You see she'd read the Book. But Jesus was angry. Hey hold on a minute. "I am the resurrection and the Life". Evangelicals interpret this as Jesus the superman swooped down to earth and appears in her garden just in time to save the world....well raise Lazarus.But Philippians tells us Jesus laid ALL HIS GLORY aside. I suppose charismatics could argue that He was now anointed with the Spirit, so He had the power. But it's more subtle than that. Jesus knew He had come as a normal man. He was the 2nd Adam.It would be as if Adam had had a friend called Lazarus. What Jesus the Man, who had laid all glory aside was saying was, the Father in me, the I am Life...is both Life and resurrection of Life. Which is a whole heap different from anything my Baptist pastor taught me. Then Jesus said to the religious scribes ....John 5:39"You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!" Then in John 7 :16-17 “My teaching is not Mine, but His who sent Me. 17“If anyone is willing to do His will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from Myself. Examine verse 17. If you were a theologian, what's verse 17 got to do with the price of eggs?A theologian's version would be : when you've studied all the original texts and the surrounding Rabbi's commentaries, you shall know if what Jesus is saying is orthodox.
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| Charismatic not liking the verse "Unless a seed, fall into the ground" |
Bible Clue
But this then is a clue to how scriptures DON'T shortcircuit.Our understanding, appreciation, and ability to work out the genuineness of any teaching has scarce nothing to do with the hours we spend reading scripture.
This is my life story.By 12 I had spent 12 times 52 times one hour in a Methodist church. I'd vaguely heard the gospel of forgiveness and asking Jesus into your life about twenty minutes of 624 hours.
I knew Bible stories.I was brought up with Bible notes like Quest, but I was really unable to read more than a slender passage before falling to sleep, or just becoming bored.I became an atheist for a year, and entered into a very very deep depression. God heard the cry of my heart for something genuine, and used the persistent needling of my friend Rod Nixon in Amersham to get me into the Christian Centre, an outreach in new Amersham.
Over two monthly meetings I saw two Billy Graham films. I asked Jesus into my heart. Within no time , I was attending two studies on the book of Romans along with other young people. Six weeks later at 13, i was baptised in the Spirit. In the next few weeks I hungrily so devoured Watchman Nee's Normal Christian Life, that I'd printed and produced a potted version for all my schoolfriends. (Actually complete with rather limited artwork....come to think of it...how similar to my blog!!!)
A elderly methodist lady in her 80s who i gave Nee's book to read to said "I haven't a clue what this is all about, but it seems very good."
By the summer holidays I was reading all the epistles in blocks at one sitting, and I became aware of how little, even a renewed baptist pastor, who every week was leading people to conversion and the Baptism of the Spirit, how little his gospel sounded like the one in the letters. Then I tackled a minister of the then liiberal church of Scotland where we were staying on the Isle of Coll about all this and also the baptism in the Spirit.And ofcourse I added to my understanding and revelation of scripture, but really things plateaued for nearly twenty years until I began to understand the Third level of Growth.
This overnight, brings into focus lots of scriptures the charismatics never use like:
if the Light that is in you is darkness, then how great the darkness! Charismatics cannot use that one because it is impossible for them to get their head round the fact that now they have been filled with the Holy Spirit, how could they still be in darkness?
( This is a blogpost in itself)
So revelation of scripture has everything to do with internal YESES to God, and hardly anything at all to do with hours spent reading it.
The Bible is a shortcircuit only to those who have
SHORTCIRCUITS in their heart.
Just as the Body of Christ can never be one, while each individual member isn't one him or herself, what we can transmit of the Word is limited by what Yeses we have said internally to God. So both unity, and understanding are tied up in this verse of David in Psalm 51: Unite my heart to fear Thy Name
Jack Fortenberry and Structural Shortcircuiting
Two years ago before Jack came along I was an "internal" kind of guy. I wrote a disgruntled letter back to Jack after he had talked about "Corinthian Elders", saying it was nothing more than rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as it was going down. I said , "We have to get the Christ as us message out. Then automatically other things will fall in line."After all, this is what happened when huge numbers of us got baptised in the Spirit. The way the baptist Church was run for example, began to totally change. So, surely the same would apply with the third level message.
But then I read Corinthian Elders.I was poleaxed by the clarity with which Jack had seen something. Most Christian division today occurs because of our unbiblical church structures. We're lame wads (Simpsons). We willingly plant a timebomb in all our church foyers and switch on the timer?How?By creating churches (and I use the human phrase advisedly, because God's version grows organically by revelation according to context) with a pyramid structure with a pastor at the top, we may as well call the fire brigade now and get them ready to pick the church building pieces after the bomb has decimated everything in sight.
What everybody in the whole world calls
STRONG LEADERSHIP from a leader has exactly the same logic to it as President Moi's last 10 years as President.When i was chatting to Daniel Arap Moi about the possibility of taking my camcorder footage of his schools back to England he gave me certain instructions. He overrode the headmaster of the school compound my parents and I were on and I became aware of his immense power.
Now both he and Jomo Kenyatta were convinced in their role as a strong father-figure shaping a nation that had newly found independence. And this with many tribes vying for total control.Now there may be some trace of truth to this, and to an African mindset used to village elders, and tribal kings, this paternal role may have been safe territory.
To the West however, Moi looked increasingly like Mugabe and so many other African leaders including ofcourse Idi Amin. Which was behind my blogpost, when does paternalism become patronistic dictatorship?
You see from the start, when the West look at an African nation, they then don't need to see or discuss anymore. Why? Because they see a pyramid.
Now for some reason no American looks at any of their churches and sees the same thing. They are all so suckered, in the same way as Africans, on the notion of "strong godly leadership".
Church without the Glory shortcircuit
Yup, but Mr African, Mr Englishman, Mr Guntotin,devil defyin' American, supposing God, the Eternal God in the heavens doesn't run His house that way, and cannot bring His glory. Supposing the nearest a pyramid ever got to glorifying God was even then one man,
supposedly in charge,
face down on a cold stone floor
not exactly leading,
well not humanly
by the name of Evan Roberts in the Welsh revival.
Supposing we all dug out our scriptures again and noted that meetings are run
by everyone having a "hatha" (howbeit that everyone hath a gift ....be it a hymn or a song or a scripture 1 Corinthians 12-14)
by the overall simple premise that all church is , is getting Christ into folks innards properly that they too become mature and as quickly as possible father the next bunch who go and do the same.
None of this shortcircuiting into reducing the gospel to a level of
halfbreed zombies who stagger out onto town squares in half transformed states scaring witless the people out to do their shopping with curdled zombie cries of "Have you heard of the 4 spiritual laws?"
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| And you say they rejected you? |
No more shortcircuiting of pastors taking their people through12 step programmes so they learn more of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
or Restoring the Foundations Courses to heal the soul of a Zombie, and wind him or her up enough to point them too at the village square.
Or do you like
cosy Christ as Us
churches of one ?
No...the short circuiting stops the minute the ministries ARE all LIVING letters.
They know inwardly they have died and are risen with Christ
It is really nolonger them that live But Christ
The life they now live in the flesh is Him.
They don't really have to do much in church, because as it was with Jorge Pradas or Ed Miller, just having them in a meeting, the Christ in them moved the meeting to incredible heights in the Spirit....and hey...sometimes Jorge or Ed got to talk as well....but only if the Holy Spirit had stopped all the other things He was doing simultaneously in the Body as it lay flat out gobsmacked in awe before the Living Presence of a holy God.
Anyone here on facebook up for this type of Church?
You know, the one that takes its name from Christ
it's agenda from Christ,It's speed of growth from Christ
It's functional form at any given moment from Christ
It's unique calling and identity from Christ
it's Way from Christ, who knows how to get a church all the way from zilcho Western humanism all the way through the chapters of Ephesians, where
like the Moravians after a 100 years prayer meeting they so entered into their Ephesians 6 call just two of them alone were all ti took to completely zonk John Wesley,
who with Whitfield so turned England around we were about the ONLY NATION at the time that DIDN'T HAVE a bloody revolution...but these Moravians went all over the globe...to India, to Africa, to South America, to America, to Asia....Hmmmmm anyone up for this? Or do you like cosy Christ as Us churches of one ?
END of Facebook post
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Rich,
I'm sorry on a human scale it's so rough.But the Spirit by me is detonating the mirage of church that is in much of 3rd leveller's thinking, and like Lot, they are fleeing as fast as they can from, instead I and the Spirit by me,are saying, folks, that was always a lie....but so is running away fragmented as ones and twos into the desert. God is building a house that is not in the clouds, that really works, because our lives really work....not incidentally because they make sense outwardly to folk, but like Moses'bush and his own desert experience, we have learned to burn continually and not be burnt up....(this is the true Spirit definition of a life that works).
Daniel Yordy and I and somewhere out there are others, who have not only crashed into a 3rd level form of seeing and living, but as an early taskforce, have been part of an early Melchizedek form of church....founded out of nothing but Word, perpetuated (originally) by nothing but Word, with everyone literally living day in and day out cheek by jowl on that Word. His group were tasked with walking into all things under the Spirit revelation of the Three Feasts and how it worked corporately at life level.Our group were tasked with unearthing praise and worship in the late 70s and early 80s to the nth degree, which meant following the Holy Spirit right into some very deep places. People would come among us and literally fall prostrate on the floor as they came through the door. Daniel's group preached Word like you've never heard in your life...in fact Rich...you're actually about the nearest as well as Daniel that I've heard since. But they were pretty useless when it came to praise and worship...featuring a few 1940s accordian songs all beit anointed ones) and tongues singing, and our groups had only simple sounding Word. Actually to be fair it was mightily effective Word, but had nowhere near the density of Daniel's crowd.Sam Fife and the Move see Wikipedia
Although there was no clarity of third level seeing as there is now, the Spirit content of what was going on was so high, Daniel and I , though experiencing the rough end of both setups have the sense not to throw the Christ baby out with the bathwater....so we're carrying a lot of real world Body of Christ stuff around with us, which is just not on the net yet.
When strongholds are being hit, everyone thinks you are an enemy, but this is the power of the lies in Ezekiel 8:10, that people actually firmly believe that these scrawlings are them.
No, individualism is not them...for all the reasons I wrote yesterday. We have the Trinity in our heart, so like it or lump it...we've got a whole Chuch of them already to go inside us already. There's no way churches won't form round us...who will grow and churches form round them, who will grow and form churches round them....this is just what seed does....in fact it doesnt do much more than that....but try and prevent it...you'll have a job!!!
Thanks so much for your history there Rich and it's not your heart I am after...it's any loose scrawlings hanging around.
Love you bro.By the way I never helped save you to kill you.
Chris
