We want to read a few passages of Scripture in the New Testament this morning as we consider serving in His house. Let us begin in John 13.
Little children, I am with you a little while longer.
You will seek Me; and as I said to the Jews, now I also say to you, “Where I am going, you cannot come.”
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
By this shall all men know that you are My disciples, if you have love one for another.Simon Peter said to Him, “Lord, where are You going?”
Jesus answered, “Where I go, you cannot follow Me now; but you will follow later.”
Peter said to Him, “Lord, why can I not follow You right now? I will lay down my life for You.”
Jesus answered, “Will you lay down your life for Me? Truly, truly, I say to you, a rooster will not crow until you deny Me three times.
Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me.
In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you.
If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also.
And you know the way where I am going.”Thomas said, “Lord, we do not know where You are going. How do we know the way?”
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.”
And then we want to read some verses from Hebrews 3. It is all having to do with the house this morning.
Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the Apostle and High Priest of our confession.
He was faithful to Him who appointed Him, as Moses also was in all His house.
For He has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses, by just so much as the builder of the house has more honor than the house.
For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.
Now Moses was faithful in all His house as a servant, for a testimony of those things which were to be spoken later; but Christ was faithful as a Son over His house—whose house we are, if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end.
And then I would like for us to turn to 2 Corinthians, just for one verse in chapter 5.
For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
I just want you to focus on this phrase: “a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”
Let us pray.
Father, even as we read this morning, the only way to understand and to be Your house is for Jesus to be the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father’s house but through Him.
We come today, even as we would talk about a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, and we would ask that the Holy Spirit would help us to understand, that we might live in the house of the Lord. We sing so many wonderful things about dwelling in Your house, feasting in Your house, and fellowshipping in Your house. O Lord, forbid that we would be outside of this wonderful place.
And then teach us how to serve in Your house by the Holy Spirit, we pray. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Serving in His house—this is my particular responsibility. It was laid upon me. My brother Ed immediately chose ministering to the Lord. Our brother DeVerne Frontie immediately chose serving one another. And I was left with serving His house.
You know, this phrase in itself can be difficult to understand right at first. I wonder what you think of when you hear “serving His house,” especially in light of the fact that it is in this threesome here: serving the Lord, ministering to one another, and serving His house.
Well, we can understand serving the Lord—ministering to the Lord. We can understand ministering to one another. But ministering to His house? This involves setting the chairs. This involves the deacons’ work—you know, taking out the garbage, those kinds of things.
So it certainly sounds like perhaps it is the least important of the three. But, as I will try to show, since it is my part, it is the most important part.
Of course, that is not true, because there is only one Master and one servant. So all serving done through Him is just as valuable, and you cannot have one of these three without the others—not really, not effectively.
If you look in Acts 13, we see in a very simple passage before us all three of these dimensions, and we realize how important all the individual parts are. This is something I think I will say just for the sake of clarity this morning, although I am sure you have realized this already.
In Acts 13, we read the first few verses:
Now there were at Antioch, in the church that was there, prophets and teachers: Barnabas, and Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul.
And while they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.”
Then, when they had fasted and prayed and laid their hands on them, they sent them away.
Now, that is Ed’s part: ministering to the Lord. And fasting—well, I do not know whose part that is.
What a wonderful picture, because here are the prophets and teachers in Antioch. So immediately, you know, obviously they minister to the saints by the Word of God. They minister and speak God’s Word. But they know they cannot do this effectively, and in the long term, unless they are also ministering to the Lord.
As a matter of fact, what do you have to share if you do not minister to the Lord? And the one thing I would say that is my gravest regret is that, for all the years I have served the Lord, I have only recently come to understand that the most important part is ministering to the Lord.
If we do not spend time with the Lord, the value of whatever ministry we have to share is not as clear. And that is something I did not realize. I thought you just cranked out the gift: study the Bible, come up with ideas, speak them.
Now, ministry to the Lord is absolutely essential to these teachers and prophets if they would minister to one another. And yet, as they were ministering to the Lord, the Lord had His house in mind. Somehow He related to them, through prophecy or some other way, that it was now time for Saul and Barnabas to be set apart and to go out and preach the gospel.
They were to preach the gospel in such a way that the church, the house of God, could be built in various locations. So we see that really all of this is necessary.
Of course, you cannot minister to others unless you have ministered to the Lord. But did you realize that you cannot really minister effectively to the Lord unless you are ministering to one another? Because the two great commandments are fused as one. A man cannot say he loves God but hates his brother.
There is a consistency, and there is actually a meaning to ministering to the Lord when you are serving God’s people. It gives validity to it, and it gives the basis upon which you are ministering to the Lord. So all of this is essential.
And then, of course, ministering in His house is important. It is strategic in giving, once again, validity to ministering to the Lord and giving reality to ministering to God’s people.
So we are going to try to look at this this morning. But I think the first thing we need to clarify is this matter of His house: this house not built by man, eternal in the heavenlies. What is this house?
Let us go back to John 14. We need to observe and class ourselves in the same category: before we can serve His house or minister in His house, we have to know what His house is.
I do not know if you realize or notice this, but the two passages that I read—namely John 14 and Hebrews 3—were adjusting exhortations to saints who did not fully understand what His house is.
It is an amazing thing that so many of us who are indeed Christians have no idea what His house is, or more specifically, have an outward idea about what His house is.
The disciples, who had traveled with Jesus for three years, had an idea of God’s house. And what was that? The temple.
Jesus had to correct them. By mentioning these things, He was trying to provoke questions that would lead to revelation about what God’s house really is. It is not the temple.
Strangely, again, when we read Hebrews 3, here are Christians who understand what it means to be saved and to live by the grace and intercessory help of Jesus, yet they have a misunderstanding about the house.
The Lord, in His sovereign mercy, is speaking to some Christians of Jewish background and warning them that this house which they thought was the house is about to fall in judgment. They had better get hold of the real house, not made by hands, in the heavens.
So we need to have that adjustment in our lives as to what the house really is.
Let us notice a few things in John 14. First of all: “In My Father’s house.” It is the Father’s house.
He says, “In My Father’s house are many dwelling places.” That says something else to us: right then, when Jesus was talking to His disciples, there was already this place, the Father’s house.
“In My Father’s house”—not one day, “In My Father’s house will be many dwelling places.” There already are. My Father’s house exists now.
The disciples thought, “Well, of course, the temple.” But that is not what He was getting at. He made that clear when He said, “Now I am going away, and where I am going, you cannot come.”
“Well, wait a minute. Where are You going?” “Well, to the Father’s house.” “Well then, where is the Father’s house? If it is not in Jerusalem, now we are completely nonplussed.”
But you see, there is something that the disciples have to grab hold of regarding the house.
Now, of course, there are the houses on earth—the temple, as we know. It is interesting that Moses, when he wrote that beautiful Psalm 90, began that psalm in his elderly days, looking back upon the ways of God and everything, and said, “O Lord, You have been our dwelling place through all generations.”
There is a touch of spiritual reality way back in the days of Moses. Moses was the one who saw, somehow up on the mount, the heavenly house from which the tabernacle was designed according to its pattern.
He saw somehow Jesus in the center, sitting on the mercy seat. By faith, he saw that. He saw the silver redeemed by the shekels of redemption—silver men and women standing around as the pillars of that tabernacle. He saw that somehow. He saw the glory of God fill that tabernacle, and he said, “This is a testimony to that.”
Looking back, he said, “Lord, You have been our dwelling place through all generations.” The disciples surely knew this psalm, but they needed to see something deeper in their hearts.
Even Solomon himself, whose great testimony was that he built the temple—the great temple of Solomon that David had desired and his son had built—recognized something beyond the physical structure.
When Solomon had built the temple, and the glory of God had come down, and every piece of furniture and all the sacrifices were in place, he said, “But, Lord, can You indeed dwell on earth? Actually, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain You, especially this little temple made by man’s hands.”
Yet he said, “You have committed Your presence here in some way, so that when we need You, we can come and pray to You here in the temple, and You will answer our prayers.” God had chosen to come and dwell in that temple, but they knew it was impossible for God to dwell in any temple made by man’s hands.
Once again, we get a larger view when we go all the way to the end of the Bible and see the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven. Is this the Father’s house?
The Father’s house raises many questions because this Scripture is used in times of comforting the saints. Are those who have passed on already, who knew the Lord, already in their dwelling place in the Father’s house?
What does the Father’s house look like? Does He like mansions or castles or big homes? Does He like some huge Gothic-cathedral kind of temple? Is that His idea of a house? What does it look like?
You know what? It has some geography to it. It has some reality to it, although we cannot see it right now.
Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also.” So Jesus lives in the Father’s house.
Now, that really got confusing. “Well, now, He already lives there, but He is walking here.” I think this was provoking many questions in the hearts of the disciples: “What is He talking about?”
Then Jesus says, “Of course, you know the way.” Thomas could not take it anymore: “What are You talking about? Of course we do not know the way. Where are You going? Tell us. Maybe we will know the way. Where is the map? What are You doing?”
Jesus cleared it all up by saying, “I am the way,” leading to more questions. “Oh, now what is He saying to us? He is confusing. Jesus, stop confusing us. You do this all the time. You tell us parables. You say things we do not understand.”
May the Spirit give you understanding.
How can you describe the Father’s house? How can you serve in the Father’s house if you do not understand what the Father’s house is?
It is a living house—a living house. You see, in 1 Peter 2, just one verse we will look at there. In 1 Peter 2:5, as Peter is talking about the new ministry that we have as priests unto God altogether, he says:
You also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
Now here we are: living stones, living stones. So the house is a living house. It is moving all the time. The walls are always kind of rumbling and moving. Oh, this is exciting. And then people pile on top of you. That is part of the house game.
It is a house made of living stones, and it is a spiritual house. “Oh, that means it has no physical side to it.” Yes, it does, but it is a spiritual house, not primarily a physical house. “Oh, now that is even more confusing.”
Jesus said, “I am going to prepare a place for you. I am the way.” And Jesus was the way.
Of course, we know, though the disciples did not at the moment—although they had been told—that the way was the cross.
Only the cross of Jesus Christ and His death could fit us for the house of God. Unless we are spiritually alive, there is no place in the house of God. It is a living house, a spiritual house. Jesus went to the cross to fit us for the house.
But then He went to heaven, ascended, and sat on His throne to fit the house for us. You cannot have the Father’s house unless you have the Son on the throne, because He is the Son of the house. You cannot have the house without the Son of the house. He is the builder of the house.
There upon His throne, He said, “Okay, now it is time to build the house.” How did He do it? He sent down the Holy Spirit. He grabbed you, gave you spiritual birth, and put you in the living house. Then He piled stones on top of you, and there you are.
He is the way: Christ crucified, the way to the house.
This is a heavenly house. It is an eternal house. It is now existing. It existed back then. It has existed since the beginning of time, and it will go on existing forever.
Even when you pass away, you will be abiding in the house, because He has prepared a place just for you. That is wonderful grace. That is wonderful mercy. The Lord is so loving to us in His great salvation.
Now, this house in heaven—I will let Ed talk about that. He is up in the heavens there, talking about these various matters of ministering to the Lord for these next couple of days. I do not want to get into controversy about heaven, but the house is a real place, and you are going to really enjoy it.
I am not exactly sure what it looks like, but I can tell you two things: the house looks like Jesus, and the house is decorated with everything that is good and pure and noble and lovely and beautiful. It is a wonderful place, and I am glad that we are saved by our precious Lord Jesus.
But there is testimony on earth as to that house in heaven, and the testimony is realized in two different ways.
First, every individual believer who has come to the Lord Jesus as their Master and Savior is a house. You are a house.
Jesus tries to bring this home back in John 14 in several ways. He tries to help them understand what it means for Him to live in the Father’s house. In John 14:10, He says:
Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you, I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works.
Suddenly, Jesus starts talking in a new way that He has never quite talked before. He says, “Do you not see the Father? When you see Me, you have seen the Father, because the Father abides in Me. I abide in the Father. I am living in the Father’s house.”
Then He said, “It is to your advantage that I go away.” Now the disciples say, “Now He is really talking nonsense. How could it be to our advantage that our leader is going away?”
He says, “If I do not go away, then the Holy Spirit cannot come into you. There He can abide in you. You can abide in Me, and the Father can abide in you. Here a new house has been found.”
Every believer who abides in Him, who keeps His commandment—He says, “I will manifest Myself, and the Father and I, We will come and abide in him.” Now you are a house.
What a wonderful house. Every Christian is a temple of God, indwelt by the Holy Spirit. When people see you, they should say, “Hmm, I see God there,” because God is there, if we abide in Him and He in us.
This word abiding comes again and again through John 14, climaxing in John 15 when He says, “Abide in Me, and I in you.”
Brothers and sisters, this may sound unimportant to you, but indeed it is the most important part about living in the Father’s house. Do you abide there every day?
As Jesus told the woman at the well, worship is no longer a matter of which temple you go to. You are a worship house when you worship in spirit and in truth.
Worship now transcends geography. It is a matter of your heart. Are you worshiping in your spirit? Are you worshiping in truth? And you know something? In the end, only God knows if you are or are not.
Are you such a worshiper? Are you worshiping in your house every day? “O Lord, I am so glad that I abide in You. What a wonderful house. Praise You for this house. Thank You for the grace. Thank You for the inheritance. Thank You for Your life.”
“And then You abide in me. Speak to me, Lord. Give me wisdom, Lord. Correct me, Lord.” This is such a wonderful thing. Do you live in that house every day?
It is absolutely crucial to serving in His house.
But I know you know all of that. As a matter of fact, when Paul was talking in 2 Corinthians 5 about that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, he was actually talking about his resurrection body that would come to him one day.
So everyone is a house. But then, of course, what we will be talking about for the most part is this: whenever two or three are gathered by the Lord in His name, and the Spirit is leading, there is the house of God.
So we say the house of God is the church. Well, I just want to make this little adjustment, if I could: the church is a testimony to the house of God that is in heaven.
The writer of Hebrews says, “Whose house you are, if you hold fast the confession and the boldness of your faith to the end.” There is a reality to the church that must be there in order to truly be a testimony of that house in heaven.
Recently, I have been studying the book of Revelation, having a Bible study back in my home. As I have been studying, one thing came to me in a fresh and wonderful way. I have never seen it quite so clearly before, and that has to do with mystery.
I saw it in the first chapter, where Jesus explains the mystery of the stars in His right hand and the mystery of the lampstands surrounding Him in the vision.
I was reading a man named Govett, and he said, “Now, you know what mystery is?” Of course, I had always wondered about that. He said, “There is a mystery to things when there is a reality both here on earth and in the heavenlies.”
Hmm. I thought about that. This is what he meant: according to Govett’s interpretation, when Jesus is examining the lampstands, He is examining the lampstands that are before God in the heavenlies.
The church, meanwhile, is here on earth, but it has a lampstand in the heavenlies. There is a testimony before God which is so important to Jesus that He comes as this Servant and High Priest and says, “Oh, look, look, church. Now listen: your lamp here is just about to go out. Your lamp here is flickering. There is something wrong here.”
Your testimony in heaven before God is more important than even your testimony down here on earth.
I started thinking about that, and I realized how true that is. We know how important it is that the church be a testimony here on earth, but did you ever stop and think that our testimony in heaven is even more important?
What is our lampstand like where you fellowship, where you gather with God’s people?
It is interesting. Sometimes people are gathering where things seem tough and everything, but the lamp is burning bright in heaven. Sometimes things are going great, there are huge crowds, and everybody is happy, but the lamp is almost out.
When you read those seven churches in Revelation, you suddenly see God’s standard and His perspective of what the lampstand’s condition is. It is completely different from ours.
Outwardly, Ephesus and Laodicea would seem to be the best. But inwardly, Philadelphia and Smyrna—churches under persecution, churches that were small and afflicted—were those that were commended.
Our adjustment is this: on earth, we are bearing testimony of the Father’s house. There is a lampstand representing what we are doing down here on earth, but there is a difference.
This is what the mystery of the church and the mystery of the angels is. Who are these angels that Jesus is writing to? Does He have to write to angels anyway? “Now, John, write to the angels because they are too dumb to hear My voice”—as if they are actually celestial angels?
John is writing to some men, some responsible people who are in those churches. That is what the angels are. But wait a minute: they are here on earth, yet they are representing something in the heavenlies.
You cannot just call them men. Otherwise, Jesus would have said, “Write to them.” But there is something in heaven. There may be some angelic help that they have, some kind of messengers, some kind of burden that they are receiving from heaven. You cannot just say these people He is writing to are merely humans.
Well, they are just humans, but there is something in heaven that is a counterpart. That is part of the mystery. Now, have I confused you pretty good?
Let me put it this way: the things that we do down here on earth, when we assemble together, affect that testimony up in heaven—that heavenly house. And things that are happening up there affect what is happening down here on earth.
There is one more illustration to completely obscure you on this whole matter, and we will go on. We have this matter of agreeing together when we are praying and binding those things which have been bound in heaven, and loosing those things which have been loosed in heaven.
Do you see the relationship? There is a mystery in that kind of prayer. To what degree is it our just stepping on something, and then God says, “Well, I have to do it up here because they asked for it down there”? To what degree is it that we are doing something down here that God has already said, “We are doing it up here; now get with it. Do it down there”?
There is a mystery in that whole matter of prayer which you cannot lay out as merely an earthly thing or a heavenly thing. There is a correspondence in everything that is going on in our lives.
In the end, we are testifying to something eternal, something we cannot even see yet, but something to which we are bearing testimony down here on earth in its reality.
Well, all right, now let us leave that alone, because I see it is all clear to all of you now what His house is. It is a heavenly reality with two testimonies here on earth: the life of every individual believer, who is the house of God in whom He dwells, and the gathering of believers truly gathered in His name and bearing testimony to Him.
We will come back to that in just a minute, but now let us talk about the service side of His house. It is a living entity. How do we serve His house?
In the Old Testament, there was a clear division between ministering to the Lord and ministering to the people. The priests spent their time ministering to the Lord, offering the sacrifices, and praying the prayers of forgiveness. They were especially busy during the feast times. The priests were ministering to the Lord, for the most part.
The Levites had to take care of the house matters. They had to bring in the water for the sacrifices and the oil, and get everything put in place. Even when the tabernacle moved, they had to carry it physically from place to place.
They had to minister to the people. When people came with their sacrifices, the Levites had to cut them up and do all the preparations, and then the priests would put them up on the altar.
So there was a clear division between the Levites and the priests. The priests were ministering unto God; the Levites were ministering unto the brethren in Israel.
But when Jesus came and built His house, we all became both priests and Levites. We are all supposed to minister to the Lord. This is not a specialized thing. And we are all supposed to minister to one another.
Where this plays itself out is in the house of God.
Because of the lack of clarity concerning the house of God, that which should be one—the ministry of every one of us—becomes split again like the Old Testament.
I do not think it has actually been said so far this week, but let me say it one time: every born-again person is a servant. We are servants with this multidimensional calling: to the Lord, to the house, and to one another.
But when the house is not seen clearly, it is almost as if this single service, rendered in these three different ways, becomes split again like the Old Testament. Specialties come into place that sometimes have little to do with the house of God.
Today, as an example, there is a tremendous reemphasis on ministering to the Lord.
There is what they call the recovery of worship. There is tremendous worship going on today. Worship is being recovered in the house of God. Assemblies everywhere are singing these songs that we are singing, clapping their hands, and worshiping God in ways that have not been seen before. Tremendous worship recovery—that is ministering to the Lord.
At the same time, there is a tremendous interest in meditation. Eugene Peterson, who wrote The Message, this modern paraphrase of the Bible, is a Presbyterian minister who is very strong on the matter that every Christian needs to meditate.
He teaches how to meditate and come before the Lord, to find your center in Him. He suggests that every Christian needs to find the Sabbath and keep a whole day of meditation and quietness.
He said, “Take your wife, and you and your wife sit in a room, and do not talk to each other for a couple of hours, but meditate on the Lord,” and so on and so forth. Meditation is an important aspect of the Christian life, and this is being reemphasized.
Then, of course, there is prayer. There are some churches built on this whole purpose of prayer twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They call themselves houses of prayer.
When you join the church, your responsibility as a new member is that you get the worst times, like three to four in the morning. What they do is pray around the clock. They pray all the time, about everything, all around the clock.
People send in phone calls and faxes: “I need prayer for Aunt Tilly’s knee,” and all kinds of things. They pray twenty-four hours a day. They come with the list. You have three to four in the morning, somebody covers from four to five, and so on and so forth. Around the clock they pray, because what we need to do is minister to the Lord.
Of course, God answers many of their prayers. It is a very amazing thing that goes on.
At the same time, there is a multiplication of ministries to one another. This thing has gotten so far out of hand. There are so many specialized ministries going on that you cannot even keep up with them.
It used to be that there were a couple of hospitals you could give to, or a couple of orphanages, or some feeding projects—just a few things like that. You knew what you could give to. But now everybody has a ministry.
You have a Christian? Is he baptized in the Spirit? He has a ministry. Specialized ministries: substance abusers, people who do not read well, ministries of this nature and that nature. There are so many things proliferating out and out in specialized ways.
There are churches now designed to meet everybody’s needs. “You got any need? You like bowling? We build a bowling alley. You do not like preaching? You like drama? We have drama every Sunday. You sort of like jazz? We will have a jazz group every couple of weeks.”
There is a huge, successful movement around the nation today, and their purpose is, “Whatever the people want, we do it.” There is a need-meeting church. Such an emphasis today.
Of course, there are many evangelistic works that reach out to very specific groups. They call themselves parachurch. I have never quite seen where that is in the Bible, but it means they are connected to the church.
Here is the point I want to make: I cannot really judge these different groups, because some of them are really precious. Some of them are very giving, these various different services and ministries around.
But here is the problem: the tendency with all these ministries, whether ministering to the Lord or ministering to one another, is to somehow become disconnected from the house.
Even when they started out of the house, they take on a life of their own—its own financing, its own leaders—and they are now no longer connected to the house.
They go from being connected to the house to becoming parachurch, and from becoming parachurch to becoming instead-of-church.
A number of groups that started out to preach the gospel are now churches. Some groups started out as Bible-study times where college kids gathered and are now Bible-study churches.
So they have become instead of the church, or better than the church, or I do not know what. There were specialties that are now specialty churches. But the house of God is larger than that, and the disconnection causes damage.
It is not easy to see that there is a distinction between having an army of prayer warriors and being the Father’s house of prayer. Do you see what I mean?
Sometimes what is called worship ministry is entirely different from that spiritual worship acceptable to God which we read about in 1 Peter 2.
I have the feeling that what the Lord is trying to do is get all of the priests alive in His house, offering spiritual ministry from the spirit through the soul, offered to God in His living house.
But sometimes teams of worship ministry sort of take the responsibility of worship away from the priesthood, and they become specialized in worship. Something has been lost, not gained, when the saints step back and let the leaders do the work.
Sometimes this is not even seen. All these things have their own basis. Sometimes these works may have been started because the church was not faithful, and so people reacted in some kind of way.
But here is the deal: the reality of all ministry gets tested in the house of God. It is much easier to minister if you are not connected with the house of God, because the lines are direct.
Now listen. If I am not connected with the house of God, then I get a burden, I have a calling, the Lord spoke to me, and the Lord sent me. Nobody can say whether that is right or wrong.
It is nice to be unaccounted for, you know. “Oh, the Lord spoke to me and said I need to move.” “Well, why did the Lord tell you last week you were supposed to stay?” “Well, He changes His mind.”
Do I need to say that this is rampant in the church today? Everybody is doing what they feel burdened to do. Everybody has their own calling.
I was trying to do it as good as I could. I just did not have much vision. When I got saved, I got saved royally, you know. So I felt, “Well, I have been saved so much, I guess I should go into the ministry.”
I felt the Lord called me into the ministry, but I self-proclaimed myself called to the ministry. There was a little rubber-stamp process in the church where they said, “Well, he said he is called, so I guess we better say okay.” They trundled me off to school to study.
How do you know I was called or not? It was not like they said, “Oh, we have been waiting for you to say that, brother.” I had been saved one year when I felt the call.
But in the terms that I was in, they could not stop me. So they waved goodbye, not knowing what my future would hold, thinking, “Oh boy, here he goes. We do not know what is going to happen to him.”
The lines are direct. Then you can start a ministry, especially if you find a legitimate need, or even a desperate need. You can start a ministry, gather people, send out letters for support—it is amazing.
Then you get something going, and it is self-rolling. The church says, “Now wait a minute, wait a minute. This kind of ministry, we wonder—” And they say, “Well, you see, that is the problem with the church. They wonder. God has given me this ministry. Nobody can stop me.”
I remember one brother who was teaching junior high in a particular fellowship I was in. The brothers began to feel, “You know what? This brother does not understand what the house of God is. He is just kind of slamming those kids every week.”
So the brothers said, “Joe”—that is not his name—“we want you to sit down. Just be part of the ministry time and everything with us for a year before you teach anymore.”
Joe immediately said, “I cannot teach here. I will go somewhere else where I can teach, because God has called me to that ministry.”
That is what we have brought ourselves into these days, because the lines are direct. Nothing goes through the house. It is me and God: “God told me.”
If our serving becomes related to the house, this becomes very difficult.
When you serve the Lord in the house, it seems as though the house is the bottleneck in the hourglass—the narrow waist. You can minister to God up here, and you can minister to others down here in the hourglass, but just try to bring it through that little neck.
Now you are experiencing the house of God. Ministering in the house of God becomes so difficult. Moses became exasperated with the people of God: “This is impossible. It is impossible.”
Oh, that neck gets so narrow. It is unbelievable. We have an idea, and we present it to the brothers, but it gets lost in the brethren’s black hole.
They took it, and it went out beyond Vulcan. It never came back. You never hear this thing mentioned again.
We have a ministry idea and we say, “Let us go with it.” Somebody says, “No, let us pray about it.” Oh, and it hits the wall of “Let us pray about it.” It gets on the list, but somehow it drops off after three weeks on the list, and you never hear of this opportunity again. Where did it go?
Then there is some simple need, some little tiny thing. One of the joys of Christian life is to be in a brothers’ meeting taking up a simple matter that would take any good executive two seconds to decide on, and it goes round and round and round.
You have the brothers who always say, “I do not know.” Then another one—this is the guy we call “Let us be careful.” Then this guy over here is the Spartan in the group: “That will cost too much. That will get really involved.”
Then there is a guy who says, “We have never done it before. It cannot be from God.” And it is just, “Should we buy a couple of garbage cans?” It was not that big.
You get into the house of God, and everything takes on an inertia. Oh, we have to wait for one another and keep reminding one another. Our patience moves well into longsuffering.
This is the house of God, considering everybody. Oh my goodness, this is so difficult. We are tempted sometimes to cut off from that thing.
Here is the deal. See what is really going on? Here is what is going on: we found the enemy, and it is us.
The Lord is applying the cross to our lives, and we hate every moment of it. Those great moments of inertia and dead stillness in the house of God come because we have our ideas and we will not lay them down.
We discover in the house of God that the doorway to the house of God is not just Jesus; it is Christ crucified. We start bringing our stuff into the house of God, and it gets whammed at the door. We cannot understand what this holdup is of what obviously is God’s will.
And it is us, because this house is not built by man’s hands.
Everybody has a better idea. Everybody has an angle. Everybody has a background that they try to bring in. It is amazing.
I look around sometimes in a group that I am involved in, and I say, “You know, this guy has this axe. This guy has this. Can’t anybody be balanced and neutral like me?”
The fact of the matter is, this patience kills us. It brings the cross to us. It does us in.
Sadly, if you have an emphasis and you will not lay it down, you will eventually cut off from the house. You will not be able to take it.
Some people take it for years and then cut away. Some last only a little while. They come among us, they have an issue, an emphasis, they try to bring it out, it dies in the black hole, and they leave.
You know, it is like the house of God is a huge barge being towed by tugboats. For some reason, the Lord has such a sense of humor: He sets around that barge twelve tugboats, all going in a different direction. So the barge can hardly move.
Now, in fact, in the house of God, the Holy Spirit has an emphasis for the moment. Maybe the brother with the evangelistic tug is on the right track. But until we learn to listen to the Lord and agree with our brother, the tug will not move us that way.
He will just be stalemated by the people who say, “We need the deeper life first.” We are always in this tension in the house of God with people who have different agendas. I call them tugboats.
We are pulling and yanking. We find somebody else who comes into the house and has our same kind of yank, and we join them up with our tug.
The Lord has His emphasis, but the house is never a house of an emphasis. That is the problem. The house is made up of all God’s children.
If we want what is commonly called today among those who are young—let the older ones just pass by—radical worship, radical worship is great. The drums are beaten, everybody is jumping up and down and singing.
But you cannot do that when you have two children in your lap, giving a snap to one and showing the other one how to color inside the lines, and you are in a worship time. Radical worship does not work for you, does it?
“That is okay. We will leave all the old ones with kids behind. We will get up at five o’clock in the morning, gather together every morning, and worship God for two hours.” You can do that when you are single. Try doing that with your kids.
We have all kinds of emphases and ideas. But the shame is—and do we not all weep?—when somebody cuts off the towline and says, “Well, I am going to do what God has burdened me to do,” and they run off with a couple of other tugs in the same direction off the earth, singing, “I think I can, I think I can.”
How we need one another is only depicted by this tremendous life in the house of God that meets us.
Negatively speaking, we need the cross.
Dear brothers and sisters, if everything that calls itself Christian ministry were in the house of God, we would be in a mess. There are things not only not of the Lord but even contrary—ignoble vessels doing all kinds of things.
Recently, one of the groups that used to be a great parachurch group in the nineteenth century—the YWCA, a great Christian women’s organization—has now been taken over by the head of the abortion-rights movement for women.
What has happened? Something that was such a witness around the world became disconnected from the house. It got connected to people who became corrupted with money, or whatever the thing may be, until eventually a work that started out so glorious became just a machine going about its way to stay alive.
That is negatively. Positively, I would like to say this: the house of God is too important, and God’s eternal purpose is too important, for Him to allow it to be manhandled.
So I want to say four things about the house of God in terms of this whole matter of ministry—four crucial matters of ministry in His house.
Unless the Lord builds the house, the servants labor in vain. Only the Lord can build His house.
He said, “I will build My church.” It says in Hebrews that Jesus was the builder of the house of God. He alone is the One who builds.
When man tries to build, it turns into wood, hay, and stubble. He builds all kinds of things. All kinds of things are called the church, but they are not the church. Only the Lord can build His house.
Think of it, brothers and sisters: this is a living house. What we need are doctors who understand the living body, not carpenters and plumbers to build the house of God. But most of us are like plumbers.
The Lord needs people who understand that this is a living being, an organism—the house of God. Only the Lord can build that. There is a growth which comes from God. It is quite different from the growth produced by man’s organization.
These are all self-evident: you must see the house before you can serve in the house.
I do not know how else to do it except to confess to you my own place. For several years, I served, I ministered, and I had not seen the house.
I was only like most ministers in churches around the world today. I was ministering, but I had not seen the house. How could I minister effectively? At best, it had to be haphazard. If you do not see the house, you do not know what you are doing. I did not know what I was doing.
I remember when I was just beginning to serve the Lord, somebody handed me a book. I was a Baptist back then, and this guy was a Baptist. He wore a trench coat, pulled his book out, and gave it to me. So I knew it was an illegal book—which, of course, piqued my interest.
It was The Normal Christian Church Life. I read that book and thought, “Oh, this is it. This is the pattern. Of course, there are apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, elders, and deacons. There is local ministry and wider ministry. This is it. This is the pattern.”
I saw it, and I began to build by the pattern. I went around building according to that pattern. I still did not see the house, but now I saw the pattern.
As it was, I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, building a pattern as a pastor of a pattern—although I knew pastors were not the pattern. I was a worker, but anyway, it is a long approach. It is confusing.
I was there building this church, and this guy Stephen Kaung came to town. Every month he was killing me softly with his song.
All month long I was building the pattern. Then, one weekend, I heard him speaking, and he told me that the only way into the house of God is by Christ crucified.
Every month he came and spoke of Christ crucified. As he did, I saw my ministry. I said, “Well, what am I doing? There is no cross in this thing. I am building based on preaching, building based on good music, and all this kind of stuff.”
I was doing everything. I was leading a prayer meeting. I sang and led the singing. I would sing a solo so people could cry, then I would preach. I did not take up the collection—but yes, I did everything.
Only the Lord can build the church.
I went to a retreat because I was hearing Brother Stephen speak about the church. I spent the weekend telling these young people about the church. When I came back, I mentioned it to Brother Stephen.
He said, “Well, if you preach the church, you get the cross. If you preach the cross, you get the church.” I said, “Ooh.”
I was preaching the church. I had seen the pattern. The only thing was, the Lord had to kill me first.
The Lord arranges these things. I was becoming convinced that I was on the wrong track. Of course, the irony of it all was that this pattern thing was developing really fast. It was growing very successfully, and I was seeing that the whole thing was wrong.
I did not know what to say, but I had never been in the Father’s house before. I had never really seen it. So I began to say, “Lord, You have to show me this thing. I have never seen it work.”
It is a wonderful ideal—everybody ministering, everybody worshiping. It is a wonderful idea. I just did not think it could work.
Then, in 1975, the Lord in His sovereign mercy allowed me to go to this little assembly of God’s people on Halford Road in London, England, where Lance Lambert was.
I saw the house of God. It destroyed me.
I saw a place where God was at home. I saw a place where people had learned coordination, deference, and the cross. Their worship was living and real. Their prayers were even more than that.
It was a weekend of evangelism, actually. Because I was involved in this kind of thing, we had success and a number of people got saved. I was with a team of people.
But I got up on the final Sunday because I was leading the singing, you know. I told those people, “You know something? I have seen home for the first time in my life.”
God was home there. I was home there. And I never could go back after that.
I came back to Raleigh. I ministered for another three months. I got sick for three months, to tell you the truth. Finally, I resigned.
I went to this little group of people who had found the key: the cross. I answered, and they said, “Welcome, brother. Come on in. Just do not bring anything with you.”
I could not speak. They would not let me speak. They did not trust me. No, they were right. They were right. I could have led that group right off on another pattern.
But I saw something—not the pattern. They said, “Do not even bring your guitar.” “No, no, too dangerous.”
I tore up my ordination papers. I said, “From now on, I am just Brother Dana.” Well, it is easy to tear that up. It is hard to take the reverend out of your mentality.
The Lord just killed me and killed me and killed me. At one point, I had been in it six months and I was dying. I said, “Lord, You have taken away my ministry. I have no ministry.”
I went out in the woods, crying so loud, crying out in the woods, yelling at God. He said to me, “I never took away your ministry.”
He said, “I want you to learn how to bring things into being by prayer instead of by preaching. Why do we not start there?”
Here I was, an old guy, and now I had lost everything. I lost my retirement, my career, and all that. You know what I was? I was Brother Dana. Ever since, I have been Brother Dana.
There were some poor days there, some hard times there. But I found my home. I can never go back.
Occasionally, some group that does not know me well asks if I would come and be pastor of some big pattern thing. I cannot do it, because I have seen the house of God.
I wish I could describe it to you more. But when you see it, slowly the Lord begins to say, “Here is how you can help in what I am doing in the house of God.”
It is a very secondary position to be in after calling the shots. Of course, the whole pattern exploded. You cannot set up the pattern and have it work unless everybody in the pattern dies.
But when you see the house, what a wonderful thing to see. You must see it in order to serve.
The third thing I want to say is this: when you see the house, then you suddenly realize what Romans 8:28 really means.
When you see the house, you realize your whole life has been engineered for your involvement in the house. Your whole life—all of your gifts, all of your abilities, your passions, your burdens, your motivation, your life, your all—is meant for the house of God.
Oh, how the Lord grabs hold of you, and you get a real sense that the Holy Spirit has taken over your life and led it where you do not know where it is going.
When you had control of your life, I guarantee you, you were not part of the house of God. When you have lost control and the Holy Spirit has started to take over, then you have the feeling, “Now I am being engineered according to God’s way.”
It is very strange. A person says, “Oh, I am ready to serve the Lord and go to the uttermost parts of the earth,” and the Lord limits them and makes them stay home because of their job, their health, or their family.
Why is it that Paul wanted to preach to the Jews, and God said, “Uh-uh, go to the Gentiles”? It killed him just right; it made him an apostle.
Some people have a burden from God for the gospel, to preach the gospel to the lost, and the Lord says, “I want you to shepherd My people.” You say, “But, but, but, but—” Do it.
Some people have a desire to minister the Word. It is so precious. They want to minister the Word, and God’s people keep saying, “You know what? We have some more practical things we would like you to do in the house of God.”
“Well, when am I going to get to minister the Word and be discovered as the next Charles Spurgeon?” Somehow the Lord puts those desires on hold and perhaps brings them in later. But meanwhile He says, “You know what? Help out with the tape ministry.”
“Great, I get to hear preaching night and day, night and day.” The Lord knows what He is doing.
Here is another one: you are absolutely overloaded with too much to do, and the Lord opens doors of opportunity and says, “Be faithful.” Unbelievable.
If you stay in the house long enough, it will kill you. He will not do things your way, but you will see in the end that it was His way, and it was the best way for you. But you have to hang in there long enough.
The first ministry in the house of God is to be deministerialized and just to be a brother or a sister in the house of God.
The fourth thing I would say is that, when one has seen the house of God, one sees that all serving in His house—including the black holes, the bottlenecks, the moments of waiting and suffering—is producing something in heaven that is precious to the Lord.
Every work that you are able to do through the house of God and with its blessing will have a stamp of God on it that will make it a stitch in the garment of the bride being made ready.
Every suffering you go through will somehow be transposed into a jewel that is going to be set in the New Jerusalem, the bride which will come down.
Everything you go through in the house of God has its application in the heavenly house, and it is so, so valuable.
That is why, on earth, I have come to the place that when people ask me to evaluate a situation, it is actually almost impossible to evaluate a situation here on earth, because you do not know what is going on up there.
Sometimes a group seems to be just barely hanging on. Sometimes a group has been openly attacked. Sometimes a group is almost overwhelmed with problems and sensing their weakness.
The Lord says up there, “Good job. Well done.”
Sometimes the group looks like it is doing great down here, and the Lord says, “I do not even know you.”
We need to be careful about judging the house of God. We do not know the half of it.
But if the Lord has hold of His people, if He is shaking them, if He is dealing with them, if they are going through these prices, then we know that something above is glorious.
I end with these three exhortations to everybody here, especially those who know something of the house of God. In the last days, I would just say this: the time is short.
Number one: forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.
Listen. Do not listen to the naysayers who say the church is corrupted beyond meeting and beyond hope. “Just give up and live your personal life ministering to the Lord.” Do not you believe that.
The Lord has not set our time on earth here for us to sit all alone and criticize everything that is happening. Do not forsake assembling together with the saints, especially as you see the day drawing near. Your life depends on it.
You stand in the house of God, and you serve.
Number two: know that God has prepared a place for you. In His house, there is a place for you. There is a service that is so precious. There is a meaning that the Lord wants to work in your life.
Give Him time to help you discover your place in the house of God. “I go to prepare a place for you.”
Even though we have an auditorium full of people here, I say that God has an individual responsibility for everybody here in His house. May you find it.
The third point is this: if you give yourself as a servant of His house, you will discover you were born for this.
This is your reason for being. You will be fulfilled in this, and your vessel will be perfected in this.
O dear brothers and sisters, I am humbled every time I see vessels of honor who paid the price in the house of God—in years when it was nothing, in years when everybody laughed. But they paid the price. They are vessels of honor.
Everybody who hangs in there and allows the Lord to work through the door of Christ crucified, taking away from our lives those things that are just us and replacing them with things that are just Him—when we allow Him to take us through this process, we find the house.
We are the house. We live in the house. We glory in the house. It is our life. We were created for the house.
May you find the way. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
Lord, we just bring this matter to You. We know that only You can reveal the house: this wonderful living Christ, this wonderful entity, this people-group together, not living by themselves but out of Your life.
O Lord, bring us through the door. And those in the door, O Lord, grant them patience to see the perfection of Your working, the greatness of Your testimony, just to be faithful, just to hold fast, just to be uncompromised.
O Lord, all these things mean so much to You. Encourage the lives of those who have experienced the house of God to find that hunger and that satisfaction that comes.
Meanwhile, Lord, may it be that everybody here makes it a reality in their lives that their lives would be a house of God full of Your presence—abiding, revealing.
O, may we learn how to serve in Your house. For Jesus’ sake, we pray. Amen.