A Syn and Melchizedek summary.Part VIII

I have now made this From the Mystery of Sin to the Mystery of Syn Part VIII

The two recent series dovetail into one another and I wanted to hammer home a few of my findings over the years.

The word Pathology means the branch of medical science that studies the causes and nature and effects of diseases .

Living a more or less continuous stretch of my life in Christian community, brought me face up to the window with my own spiritual pathology and that of a community's. I wanted to find an answer. I had to find an answer. I believed from the Word that there was an answer. But I was aware that we hadn't found it. Not in our daily living.

One of the best early keys came from a leadership couple called Stan and Averil Warren. They seemed streets ahead in this living business which is why they were chosen to lead the Bible House.

Stan taught from Amos "Seek Me and Live". In other words any failure, or any attempt at moving on into our vision of what we wanted from life was going to come out of our Seeking God.
And I would have to say that most of us found a lot from God in this way. Firsthand. On our insides. And not by rote-learning off other people teaching techniques.In fact when I got the breakthrough I was looking for,this was eventually how it came. I only subsequently learned through Norman Grubb and his Zerubbabel group about "what had happened" and was able to verbalise it in the 1989 tape "Third level Christianity".

Averil used to say something interesting. Whenever we made errors in the house, or bondages in our life were being exposed....she wasn't primarily interested with just getting those issues right.
She would say simply "We need to pray God into that area of your life. You just need more of God."

Subsequently I have found out more about the detail of why these two details are absolutely correct. So rather than learning completely new stuff and starting some new weird sect or something, I'd describe it in the words of Ed Miller as just "turning the light switch on" in a room I already knew.

Sheila Atchley had an alternative image for my one about "the suspended orb of God's Word". She used the picture of a curtain rod. You've got the flowing and beautiful line of a curtain, but only because it is tensioned correctly overhead with a curtain rod.

In February I was restringing a Bechstein piano in Kegworth and only had one week to do all the strings, all the hammers ,all the dampers and then regulate the thing so that the new parts worked properly....oh and tune the thing to stability a gazillion times!!! And I facebooked people saying how tough it was "re-stringing when the tuning pins had not arrived". Because Bechsteins
have these little fixing holes in things called "agraffes", I was able to cut some of the strings to length at least, and have them sitting there loosely in position.But they do tend to flop around and obstruct each other.

So what's the punchline? Yup. The strings need to be tensioned by the presence of tuning pins at the other end. Maybe they are not up to full tension yet. For that you have to have restrung the whole piano! The whole piano shares the downstrain evenly so that one portion is not overtensioned. A fully tuned midsize Bechstein has a collective tension of 25 tons! (that by the way is another prophetic Church image)

But even putting strings on, there has to be this tension in order that strings do not foul each other.

How does that relate to us? Well, for grace teaching to really work on our insides and produce the Jesus life, we do need covenant. We do need law! But not this time as a tool for condemnation to show us our need for a Saviour. This time it is the leveraging tool that Christ uses to believe "Who we are" against.
Imagine a hippy called "Death" who a couple of us met in Amersham,round his house,witnessing to him.I was 15 or 16. The guy didn't believe in paying his way. Didn't believe in working. He had taken over a couple's house and was squatting in it. He only believed in medicating his feelings with hash. He didn't believe in marriage, only living with who he chose when he chose. If his partner had kids, then as long as it suited him he would sort of be some kind of parental figure.
Until the child crossed his will, and would be bundled out of his way.

What was going on here? He was one of the most extreme versions I have ever met of a guy who was stripping his life of every covenantal boundary. Milder versions are now everywhere you look.
People think freedom is not being shown up for being what you are. A lazy,good for nothing,non- producing,selfish ,twisted, non-relational island who demands the whole of external humanity meets him on his terms and only his terms...or stuff them all!
Death had tried to rid himself of all external measuring devices which would read back to him what an idiot he was.

We need covenantal measuring devices. They are good for our lives. This is one of the functions of the local Body of Christ. To be light to us. About ourselves.
But unless local believers know who they are in Christ, you get the opposite extreme occurring whereby far from being a House after the Order of Melchizedek who are helping you with the very real covenantal issues of life/family job etc. they are making up laws of "tithing mint and cummin". They are tethering your life to all sorts of false covenants that work to destroy your life and keep you from the very real covenantal responsibilities God has given you.

Which brings us to 2 important questions which at first seem unrelated.

Why is Body life not the same as socialism?
And is Pariotism a good or bad thing?

Here is the answer to both.
If each individual is living his or her life as Christ as me in my form...Body life is Syn Life...is collective divine life....you're living out a mystery together. And Patriotism is the healthy expression of corporate life on a national scale.

But conversely..
if each individual does not know he or she has died with Christ and his or her life is now hidden with Christ in God the Father.....
then put that bunch together and you get socialism. You might as well be atheists. You will be expressing the life of your father the devil just as ably as any Russia or China under communism.
And your collective Patriotism will be a "super" representation of your false ego image of being a god in your own right, either expressed in a Russian or Chinese form of demonstrating your atom bombs through your streets on a yearly basis, or in the more benign but even more deceived version of America, appointing itself as Big Brother nation to defend other causes,(but only when oil runs out, or its own interests are threatened) namely Iraq, but not Zimbabwe or North Korea for instance. This deceit was ofcourse highlighted 20 years ago in the album "Joshua Tree " by U2.

So to the Free Believer's network I would say the answer to bad church is not no church, it is rather church run in the order of Melchizedek.

From the Mystery of Sin to the Mystery of Syn VII-This is what Grace does.

The prophetic always shoots forward to the future like a direction arrow. But what about today?We're right in the middle of something beautiful as church members unravel the mysteries of what God has done for us.
I was putting Ben to bed this week and a brother phoned up right then. Christine was out preparing songs for the up and coming conference so I had to juggle. No time to do anything but respond in prayer. Wasn't particularly feeling great myself. But somehow Christ came through, he told Christine the next day.A pattern that usually happened did not. It was halted in the prayer.
OK we may not be at quite revival pitch here...but on the quiet- every day- God is building-seamlessly- networks of relationships- responses of faith. You turn round every so often and gaze at what God's building- and think wow this is not the work of a man. This is awesome. I believe loads of us are in situations like this. Perhaps it is all the more beautiful because there is no fanfare...no hype....it just IS. Christine had a lovely time yesterday in our church secondhand furniture shop. Both the furniture and the money from it go towards debt relief counselling, or providing direct help to needy situations. But the thing is Christine so enjoyed being with Kaye, because she is so precious. (Her husband Ian is the one I go to see man films with, if there is something that Christine does not want to see.)

What the devil does not tell us about when enticing us to sin, is what we miss out on by not being available for the "syn" life. The truth is Life,Christs's life in us, does not live "unto itself". It's meshed in with this glorious Bride that is being prepared, this Body that is being built.People that are being called to share in this life. Attracted to its light.
Here is Sheila on what is happening with their church led by her husband Tim.(Taken from her blog)
Friday, May 8, 2009

"I'll Show You My Faith By My Works"
"Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works." (James 2)I have proof that preaching grace doesn't produce passive Christianity. Two words: Harvest Church.Nope, neither Harvest's pastor, nor his wife worry that the message of "Sola Gracia" (the "Grace Alone", history-rending cry of Martin Luther) will cause people to be without evidence of their faith. The people of Harvest Church, though they are told Sunday in and Sunday out that they have no righteousness of their own, persist and insist on abounding in righteous works. Go figure!In my church, I cannot think of a single member who is not actively involved in the lives of others. I mean that. Not. One.Those are darn good statistics for "one of those grace churches."Every single day, the saints are caring for the sick, serving little children, repairing each other's automobiles, counseling the confused, pulling off whole weddings and funerals, cooking meals for others, paying bills for those out of work, giving gifts, babysitting each other's children, clothing the poor and homeless, and preaching the gospel without regard to reward or fear of man. The people of Harvest are ever about the business of life: playing their music, painting their paintings, producing their television broadcasts, practicing their medicine, dancing their dances, singing their songs....and yeah....answering e-mails with an enthusiasm that is sincere, and writing blog entries with grace infused passion. All of it "works of righteousness".People in whom there is no guile. That's my church, for the most part. They don't treat relationships like a game of chess - always analyzing the other person, attempting to stay "one move ahead". Their love is sincere. They won't try to impress you. They don't try to be righteous. They don't try to do righteous things. They've been taught better than that. They simply are righteous.Tim and I do not even conceive of a life that does not abound in what Eugene Peterson paraphrases, in James, "...a seamless unity of believing and doing." Um...to us, in our personal lives, the "doing" literally often goes without saying. Our finest doings happen when we are unconscious of them. And the members of Harvest out-do us all the time.We love to have it so. They are our letters of commendation - commending not us, but the gospel of Christ, and the message of grace.You see, Paul said it like this: "Not by works of righteousness which I have done, but according to His mercy He saved me." Righteous works? Paul says, "Been there. Done that. Still doing." And the big deal is....? The big deal is the mercy of God. What Paul accomplished, through grace, meant not near as much to Paul as the grace that enabled him. The works themselves really are not the big deal. They are the evidence of a reality far, far greater.Here is another thing Tim and I cannot conceive of: Not being Tim. Not being Sheila. Tim can't be Barack Obama or John Travolta. I can't work the works of Laura Bush or Angelina Jolie.So...when we say we are the righteousness of God in Christ, and that it is "not I, but Christ who lives in me"...we mean that the things we do, every day, become acts of righteousness. Tim and I have been made righteous. We can't be anything but righteous, just like John Travolta can't be anything but.....you know. John.My home, its atmosphere and hospitality, is an ongoing act of righteousness. I can't help it. I am righteous. The cookies I bake are an act of righteousness, because a righteous woman created them. Our old cars...the repairs Tim makes to them are acts of righteousness, done by a righteous man, for the good of his family. When he takes his boy canoeing, it is an act of righteousness.No one needs a mandate to just "be" who they are, in Christ.The grace of God sets us free to abound in all the good works we were created new creatures in Christ to do. That might mean organizing an entire wedding reception for someone else, or that might mean traveling to Cambodia.I can find you lots of people in my church who do either one or both, every chance they get, and all of it is as natural to them as breathing.They know who they are, in Christ. They can't help but act like who they are.Really! To them, it is no big deal.