Well, that was a wonderful time of sharing together at the Lord’s table.
I discovered this weekend that the brothers here—the administrative brothers—are afraid of me. It seems strange to me, because the young people call me Santa Claus and come up to me and, you know, hug me, whatever. But the brothers evidently are afraid of me.
And so they appointed Floyd to come to me and say that if I was going to speak, I couldn’t wear my green shirt.
So I’ve toned it down, as you can see—never wanting to cross our brother Floyd’s desires. But I wish the brothers would step up and tell me themselves.
I almost thought for a while it was Irish prejudice, but I think probably not. In any case, I’m both Irish and Northern Irish, as you can see.
Actually, I’m being paid a slight commission to wear this shirt. It looks like a polo shirt, but actually it’s the Lance Lambert line. And you can get it only in better department stores.
All right, well, enough of that.
I’d like for us to turn tonight to John 14, since we’re talking about the way—the way of the Lord. Of course, this is a fact that all we as Christians know so well, but I just want to read a few verses here.
Actually, let’s go back to John 13, just to pick up two verses that raise the question before the disciples. In John 13:33, the Lord Jesus, addressing specifically His disciples, said:
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.
There could be no bigger bomb dropped on the disciples than that. Again, in John 13:36, Simon immediately said:
Lord, where are You going?
Jesus answered:
Where I go, you cannot follow Me now; but you will follow later.
Then we pick up in John 14:1:
Let not 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.
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again,
and receive you unto Myself;
that where I am, there ye may be also.
And whither I go, ye know the way.
And Thomas said to Him:
Lord, we know not whither Thou goest; how know we the way?
Jesus said to him:
I am the way, and the truth, and the life:
no one cometh unto the Father, but by Me.
Then, in John 14:18:
I will not leave you desolate: I come unto you.
Yet a little while, and the world beholdeth Me no more;
but ye behold Me: because I live, ye shall live also.
In that day ye shall know that I am in My Father,
and ye in Me, and I in you.
He that hath My commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me;
and he that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father,
and I will love him, and will manifest Myself unto him.
Judas—not Iscariot—said to Him:
Lord, what is come to pass that Thou wilt manifest Thyself unto us, and not unto the world?
Jesus answered:
If a man love Me, he will keep My word:
and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him,
and make Our abode with him.
Then we go all the way back to Exodus 33. If you’ll go back and look once more at our theme verse—the prayer of Moses—Exodus 33:12-14:
And Moses said unto the Lord, See, Thou sayest unto me, Bring up this people:
and Thou hast not let me know whom Thou wilt send with me.
Yet Thou hast said, I know thee by name,
and thou hast also found favor in My sight.
Now therefore, I pray Thee, if I have found favor in Thy sight,
show me now Thy ways, that I may know Thee,
to the end that I may find favor in Thy sight:
and consider too that this nation is Thy people.
And He said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.
O Father, as we come and have had a time of worship together around the table, we’re so aware of Your love for us. We’re so aware of the expression of that love in Jesus.
And now, as we share regarding the way, and a further way, and even ask that prayer, “O, show us Thy way,” Lord, we know in the end we’re asking that You show us the Lord Jesus.
Thank You, Lord, for being with us in these days. Now, by Your Spirit, enable us, quicken us, strengthen us, that we might receive a further word upon this matter. We come to You dependent upon the Holy Spirit to tell us the things that we desire to know.
We commit this time into Your hands, in the name of our precious Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Now, I read that passage in John 14 and this passage in Exodus 33, and I wonder if you see the parallel—the connection there. Surely these two have a lot in common.
Moses was standing in this place. If you look there in Exodus 33, we’ve not spent much time on it, but this prayer actually comes out of the first three verses of the chapter. The Lord spoke to Moses and said:
Depart, go up hence, thou and the people that thou hast brought up out of the land of Egypt,
unto the land of which I sware unto Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying,
Unto thy seed will I give it:
and I will send an angel before thee;
and I will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite, the Hittite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite:
unto a land flowing with milk and honey:
for I will not go up in the midst of thee;
for thou art a stiffnecked people; lest I consume thee in the way.
Now, this of course is what caused Moses to bring these questions before his God. “Lord, You’ve told me to go up to the promised land, but I don’t know how to get there. I don’t know exactly who’s going to go with me if You’re not going to go with me.”
“And anyway, Lord, if I have found favor in Your sight, show me Thy ways, that I may know Thee, that I may find favor in Thy sight.”
A few verses later Moses says, “Please, Lord, if You don’t go up with us, we don’t want to go up. Because You’re the only thing that’s unique about us. You’re the only thing that’s of value in our life. Please, Lord, please.”
And so, of course, the Lord says, “My presence will go with you.” Wonderful prayer of Moses. There he is, standing in this kind of a gap. He’s seen the Lord, his Redeemer. He’s been instructed to go to the promised land, but he doesn’t know the way.
So he says, “O Lord, show me Thy way.” And of course, what was the way? Here’s the way: “My presence will go with you.” That’s the one instruction you get as to the way.
Sure enough, we know when Moses got down from the mountain and started dealing with the people, what happened? Well, the glory of God led them all the way to the promised land—the cloud by day, the fire by night. The Lord’s presence led them there.
But this was as a result of Moses’ earnest prayer: “O, show me Thy ways, O Lord.”
Of course, we know that the experience of Moses, which we’ve been talking about every time, always involved the cross. The way of the Lord always involves the cross. Oh, what a cross Moses experienced with those children over those years—rebellious children.
We find that probably the most frequent phrase connected with the name of Moses in the rest of the walk to the promised land was, “And Moses fell on his face.”
These people were a tremendous burden. But he carried out his stewardship. He prayed and interceded and stood in the gap at times when God had had it. He expressed the love of God in the midst of those people and stood representing God—His authority and His love—throughout that whole thing.
Oh, what a cross. But in that cross, he saw the severity of God. He saw the kindness of God. And by the end, as he speaks in the book of Deuteronomy, he basically says, “You know what? The Lord, who’s led us this far, is a God of love.”
He really only wants one thing from you, and that is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, and all your strength. If you do those things, the commandments will take care of themselves.
So Moses gave this great testimony in Deuteronomy before he went to glory.
Now, in John 14, we see pretty much the same thing. Here are the disciples. They know the Lord. They’ve been following the Lord. The Lord says, “I will build My church,” and they know they’re called to follow. They’re called to preach the kingdom.
Now the Lord says to them, “I’m not going with you.” Now, how would you feel? We need to give the disciples credit here. All they’d ever known in their ministry was the Lord’s presence. Now the Lord says, “I’m not going with you now. Where I’m going, you cannot come.”
Here are these disciples standing in the gap. They know their Master. They know they’re supposed to preach the kingdom, but they don’t know the way. “How do we know the way? Where is the way? What’s going on? How are we supposed to build this thing and be faithful in the kingdom?”
And the Lord says, “Well, you know the way.” They say, “No, no, we don’t know the way.” He says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. Nobody comes to the Father but by Me.”
And the disciples said, “Ah.” No, they didn’t. The disciples said, “Huh?” They had no idea what that meant until Jesus went, in that little while, to the cross, and then in resurrection ascended up on high.
It was on the day of Pentecost that the way opened up. It’s not even that the disciples understood it immediately on the day of Pentecost, although soon thereafter they knew what was going on. It was an experience of the way that was opened before them: Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life.
What happened in the church that day—the day the church was born—was amazing. You know what happened? They saw the Lord building the church. Suddenly, they understood what the Father’s house was.
What is the Father’s house? Is it a building? Up to that time, whenever you mentioned the Father’s house, what did the disciples think? The temple in Jerusalem.
When Jesus said, “I’m going away to build the Father’s house,” maybe they thought, if they were spiritual enough, “Oh, Jesus is building a temple in heaven.”
Now suddenly, on the day of Pentecost, they said, “No, Jesus is building a temple here on earth—His house, His Father’s house. But it’s not made with hands. It’s not made of stone. It’s not a building. It’s people.”
What a revelation. The house is people. And they touched home on the day of Pentecost. Suddenly they understood.
There’s a connection between John 14, 15, and 16. Most of us don’t realize this. Jesus said, “In My Father’s house are many abiding places.” Those who heard this in the original language—and of course, in the Greek it’s quite clear—understood that there’s a definite connection between Him saying, “In My Father’s house are many abiding places,” and Him saying, “I’ll not leave you as orphans. We will come to you, and We will abide in you.”
Then John 15 says, “If ye abide in Me, and I in you.” You see, that whole abide chapter that we all use personally—“If you abide in Him, He abides in you”—we all take it personally. But did you know every time it is referring to the disciples, it is referring to the plural?
The church is nothing less than the abiding place of God. And we can abide there. You can’t build it. It’s there by new birth.
They began to see that when Jesus went to the cross, He opened up a way—as it says in Hebrews—a new and living way. Here is the way.
Tonight we talk of the way of the assembly. That’s the way He wants us to go. What is the way of the assembly? Assembly is a simple translation for church.
What is the way of the assembly? Well, here it is: a new and living way has been opened up to live with God.
From Hebrews 10, you know that we can go into the Holy of Holies with God our Father because Jesus opened the way. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father”—how do you get to the Father’s house? How do you get to His abiding places? Through Jesus Christ.
We suddenly find ourselves there. What a revelation on the day of Pentecost. The whole import of John 14 through 16 is to give us the understanding of what the church is.
Do you know what the church is? It’s an intimate, abiding home. They found home on the day of Pentecost. Amen.
I’ll tell you further why. They not only saw Jesus building the church, but they sensed His presence. Unfortunately, now we have made a sort of distinction that they didn’t have in those days.
Let me tell you what happened when they gathered on the day of Pentecost, and afterwards when they gathered in homes and at Solomon’s porch in the temple. Do you know what happened when two or three gathered together? They started hearing Jesus’ voice. They started seeing Jesus do miracles again.
They heard Jesus. They saw Jesus. They saw Jesus walking. But, strange to say, He was wearing new clothes. Sometimes He walked through Peter, and sometimes He walked through John. Sometimes He walked through a simple sister, and sometimes He walked through Mary Magdalene.
But here’s the deal about this house: this is God’s home, and every time you go there, you see Jesus in somebody else’s way.
What an amazing experience. No wonder they continually met together. If you love Jesus with all your heart and soul, and you found out that the key is that you have to meet with some people, and then Jesus shows up, wouldn’t you get together morning, noon, and night?
The church in those days was Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. They continued steadfastly, meeting day by day in the house and in the temple.
Why? Because here I am, old lonely me. I wasn’t a saint, but I’d been converted. I don’t want to live all alone anymore. But I say, “Jesus, come to me, come to me.” This is how we’re all so independent today. This is our kind of thinking: “Oh Jesus, come to me. Fill me. Touch me. Speak to me.”
But back then, old me, the saint, knew: “I’ve got to get together with two or three, and then Jesus will show up and tell me what to do, and I’ll feel His presence.” It was a corporate experience.
Now of course, you knew Jesus personally as well. But I’m talking about the way of the assembly. What a new and living way. What a deal.
You imagine the surprise. I have a feeling Andrew was very gracious to Peter as a brother, but nevertheless, I think he was quite surprised on the day of Pentecost how good Peter preached.
Somewhere in the middle of that message, Andrew said, “That’s Jesus. Hey, he’s cheating.”
But then it wasn’t long before Andrew was piping up and saying things that he didn’t even quite know until he said them, and realized that the prophetic word of Jesus was speaking through him.
Everybody was amazed. “Why, little timid Andrew, look at him. It looks like Jesus. It smells like Jesus.”
What a home. What a place to live. Wouldn’t you run down to the temple every lunchtime? They had a special lunch meeting down there. Everybody brought their—well, not ham sandwiches—but peanut butter or jelly, and everybody went down there.
Now, whoever stood up, who cared who stood up, really? Matthew stood up. “I heard Jesus today. I saw Jesus walk in the midst, and He saved that person and that person and that person. This person got healed, and that person got called out for being a sham.”
Woo! Jesus in the midst. This is the only way to live—continuing steadfastly, seeing Christ in others, and sometimes, even more surprisingly, in you.
This is the new and living way. This is the way of the assembly. They saw the Lord building His church, this home He was building, and, oh, it felt like home.
Then they sensed the Lord’s presence—the very Lord’s presence Himself, not another spirit. “I will send the same Spirit. I’ll not leave you as orphans. I’m coming back. I am sending My Spirit.”
I think in the early church, when they heard the Spirit talking, they could hear it in the Lord’s intonation. Unfortunately, we don’t know Hebrew, so it wouldn’t help us. But they heard the words of Jesus as the Spirit spoke, because Jesus and the Spirit are one.
The third thing that was as amazing was the ministry that started to happen. All of them, being Jews and being aware of what was going on in those days, had seen ministry—sometimes powerful ministry—such as that of John the Baptist and others.
This ministry would be applied to the minds of people. But now, in this new economy, this new and living way, ministry was by the life of God, and it wrote on people’s hearts.
When somebody spoke, there was conviction in the heart. There was action taken—the heart being the conjunction of mind, emotions, and will. When somebody spoke something and there was ministry in the body, it went to the heart. There was heart-writing going on by the Holy Spirit.
It was a whole other level—not just to the minds anymore. Everybody’s mind was super-saturated by those days. They had a rabbi for everything. They had radio stations like we do.
We have dear sisters here from Memphis, Tennessee. They must have so many preaching radio stations in Memphis, Tennessee, you just get tired of it after a while. They say the same thing: “Send me some money, and I’ll send you a handkerchief.” Whatever it is.
But here was a ministry led by the Holy Spirit, through the Holy Spirit—the very presence of Jesus in the midst of that ministry—and applied to hearts.
So they continued steadfastly, in one accord, eating daily in the house and in the temple.
They met without an agenda, you know? They hadn’t come up with church plans. They didn’t have a Wednesday night prayer meeting. Every time they got together, they prayed. They didn’t have a Bible study. Every time they got together, they looked up something.
They didn’t have a teaching ministry, although people would teach during the time they were together. It was a time of the presence of Jesus, however He wanted to show up, however He wanted to lead.
That’s the church. That’s the way of the assembly. So simple.
The church is the place where you find God. Through Jesus, we come to God when we meet as the church. They lived in a measure of spiritual reality that was absolutely wonderful.
Whether it was the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread, or prayers, they didn’t have special days for that. They met in a home, and you go to somebody’s home and have a meal. Then they break out some bread and some wine and have communion while you’re there.
It didn’t have to be done by enrolled ministers. It was done by anybody. That was our provision of the Lord. It was so spontaneous.
My burden is that we would return to the spiritual reality of this church, where you come and gather together and sense God in the midst.
The church, of course, had to organize. Things got large, and things got varied. We know that what started in Acts 2:42—just coming together and saying, “Let’s see what the Lord has for us”—came to Acts 20:7, where we find that the saints had started meeting on the first day of the week to break bread together.
Their lives were busy, probably mostly evangelizing, teaching, and discipling their new neighbors and family members and all of that. But they said, “No, wait, wait, wait, wait. Lest we get things out of focus, we need to set aside at least one day—the first day of the week—and we’re just going to break bread and worship the Lord.”
“We don’t want to get distracted with busyness of ministry or anything. Let’s put that first.” So we find by Acts 20 that they had found some organization within the organism. Still, it was so precious.
We know from the book of Acts that the early church came upon crises. Every moment of crisis, the issue was simple: Is Jesus still the center and circumference of the meeting? That’s all.
The church, as an assembled body together, had to be willing to embrace the cross to keep that simple way. If we want God’s presence in our meeting, we have to be willing to deny ourselves and take up the cross so that the Lord can stay as the way in our meetings together.
They came to Acts 5, where Ananias and Sapphira had a sudden expiration. Why was that, you say? That was kind of a mean thing.
Of course, they gave some money to the church. We should have given them a brick and put it up on the— But they were taken out that very day. What was that about?
You see, in the church, it’s very simple. Jesus gets all the glory. But when somebody tries to take glory to themselves by doing something supposedly magnanimous, but with motive behind it, it takes away from the simplicity of Jesus being the only One who gets the glory in the church.
So Ananias and Sapphira tried to take a little glory. Barnabas didn’t take any glory. He just gave because he loved Jesus. But when they gave on false motives, God said, “Take them out. We want to keep the thing alive.”
Then the day came where those Hellenistic widows were not getting enough food. There had to be a distribution because there were so many visiting people all together in this home.
Imagine the home in Jerusalem—all of these houses packed with people from Cappadocia and Cyprus and Asia Minor, Hellenistic Jews. But no, no, no, no, no. Part of Jesus’ family. We’ve got to treat everybody the same.
Jesus loves the Jewish Jews and the Hellenistic Jews just the same. When it came that some of them weren’t being equally served, Jesus would never have a division in the body—a better rank and a lesser rank.
So they had to appoint some men to be sure of this. Everybody feels at home. Nobody gets left out. Simple.
Then, of course, in the big move in Acts 8 and even Acts 10, the Lord in His design said, “Let’s go and make the home a little bigger. It’s starting to get a little bit Jewish.”
“Let’s go out, because My home is the place where My presence is. It isn’t the Jewish place. It isn’t locatable geographically only in Jerusalem. I want My home in Antioch. I want My home in Ephesus. I want My home in Philippi.”
“I want people to feel at home, regardless of race, culture, or gender. I want them to come in and sense the presence of God. I am the way, the truth, the life. No man comes to the Father but by Me.”
So the cross was taken. Whenever the saints took the cross, what they experienced was the continuing, wonderful life of Jesus in their midst.
What a wonderful place to live—in this church, in this assembly. It certainly was at its best when it had no walls, no geography, no big shots, no organizations to speak of. It was just actually being led by Jesus Himself. There’s a novel idea.
They lived in a reality that was so precious. But it’s ours today to pray, “Show us this way in our assembly.”
That spontaneity and vitality has been lost in too much of our assembling together. Too much of what’s called church has anything but that living presence of God.
If we don’t have that essential reality of His presence in the midst of us, we have nothing, for all the accoutrements and all this stuff.
The disciples along the way learned, and Paul taught through all of his epistles, here’s what he taught: because of our fallen nature, we don’t like that simplicity, and we will try to organize it.
We tend to take this spiritual reality, bright and true—the presence of Jesus in the midst, recognizable by an open heart—and make it more and more outward.
Now, that spiritual reality always had outward expression, but nobody ever confused the outward expression for the inner reality. Revelation 2 and 3 were Jesus’ personal reminders to us not to confuse the outward with the reality.
Whenever we move by our flesh, not taking the cross as we should, we have a tendency to move from that spiritual reality of home to an outward form that, in the end, hinders the Lord from expressing His life.
Now, it’s so simple. We’re to love the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and He is to love us with all the grace of heaven. That’s the church. That’s it.
And we say, “Ah, we’ve got to be defined a little better. Let’s give ourselves a name. Let’s find ourselves a building. Let’s set up a bunch of meetings.”
If we’re not careful, the outward reality begins to define what we are.
That church, in its vital reality—that Acts 2:42 reality of meeting every day, fellowshipping together, living together, praying together, witnessing together, worshiping together, healing together, and just being in His presence together—can be replaced by a meeting mentality.
Now, I’m telling you, that goes straight against the simplicity of the church. When people say, “I’m going to church,” they’re one huge step out of the reality already.
Are you somebody who goes to church? Have you found it in your mind that the church meets on Sunday and that’s such-and-such a place? Then you’re way, way off the truth.
We are not going to church. We are church, if we know what we’re doing. If we are church as He wants us to be church, we’re church Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. That’s what church is.
But we have to have our minds illumined and renewed, because we’ve fallen into tradition in such a way as to leave the Lord so often out of this thing.
A meeting mentality is not church life. Church life is meant to be lived on a whole other level, and a much more continuous level—every day.
Now, don’t just make excuses about that. “We should meet every day.” It doesn’t always have to be all together, but it should be two or three.
No, I take that back. You don’t have to meet every day. I shouldn’t say you should meet every day. But if you found the magic—if you know that when two or three gather together, then Jesus shows up—and you love Jesus enough, you’ll want to get together every day.
Well, so how does the Lord renew us from a meeting mentality? I had quite a lesson in that for me the first time I came out here from California and, heading back to New York, was invited by these crazy people in Memphis, Tennessee.
This guy John Saunders looked like some kind of a lumberjack. I believe in those days—this was some twenty years ago at least—I don’t think he even wore shoes in the meeting. I’m telling you, this was Memphis: raw and real.
Being a good Baptist minister in the past, I knew what church was all about. But the Lord was revising that quite a bit. I understood the organism part of the whole thing, but to see it fleshed out among some people really did me a good, healthy bit of good.
Now, they did three things. Not that there’s a technique that can keep this meeting mentality out of your mind, but there are some things you can do to try to maintain the reality of church every day.
When I went there the first time—this was back, I don’t know, probably the eighties sometime—they didn’t have any Sunday meetings.
“Why should we meet on Sunday?” On the other hand, they said, “Let’s meet any time that we feel the Lord wants to say something to us.”
I think I happened to go through there. I left from somewhere, either San Diego or something, I don’t know. But I went through there, so I was there Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. They said, “Hey, Dana’s here. Let’s have a meeting.”
They sent the kids down the block. They told everybody they had a meeting. It was packed. Everybody was there Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—everybody there, hanging out on Wednesday, and I’m talking.
I said, “Wow, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I go to most places and they get twelve people that show up. Half of them belong to the family of the leaders.”
These people were excited to meet. They often had a Saturday night meeting. Having said they had no set meetings, they met every day. They had fellowship every day.
The sisters got together and had coffee every day. The brothers got together and had prayer meetings. Even now today, they still have prayer meetings at something like five o’clock in the morning.
I go there for their Saturday men’s meeting. Wouldn’t miss it. What time is it, five or six? I forget. Oh, six. They meet late on Saturdays.
They get together at six o’clock. They have a meeting until eight o’clock. Then they go together to have breakfast, and they talk about things.
John is part of a dying institution in the South called the Southern storyteller. Really. No, professional storytellers in the South who can spin a yarn and tell a story.
You just put John at the front of the table, everybody gets their eggs and bacon, and you sit around for a little while. He starts telling stories, and you laugh and you cry. He talks about the Lord and throws it in just like his books. He’s a storyteller.
What a wonderful time. The brothers will get together at six o’clock in the morning. They spend the first half hour praying, and half of them are sleeping. I mean, they were sitting there on the ground like this.
But then they stir. I think it’s seven o’clock. They say, “Okay, okay, here we go. Now, before we take up any matters, we want to pray for—Joe, open the book over there.”
They had a book of the martyrs. They have this book that’s about two thousand pages long of all the martyrs of the church. They would read the story of one of the men who died for the faith, or one of the women.
They’d say, “Oh man, what a great martyr. Let’s pray. Jesus, make us that fervent.” Then, “Okay, now let’s take a problem.”
They’d have a royal argument about something. “Ah, this guy wants two meetings on Monday.” “No, no, no, we can’t—just one meeting.” “No, we want to—” And they’d have a fight. Afterwards, they’d have a prayer, hug each other, and go.
Now, they had no scheduled meetings, if you put it in the technical sense. You know what? They met five, six, seven days a week because they desired to meet the Lord together. Isn’t that simple?
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have meetings that are scheduled. But sometimes we have meetings that people go to out of obligation and duty. You get the feeling, “It’s my duty. I have to go.”
“What am I going to do if there’s a meeting tonight and [someone] doesn’t show up? Now 124 people are going to say, ‘Why?’ Rather than go through all the rigmarole—why I’m feeling sick and all that—I’ll just go sick anyway.”
This is often the attitude we have, and we’ve left something real. So that’s the first thing: they didn’t have planned meetings. They just met all the time.
Second thing: they believed that the family must truly be a family together. You know what they did? I was amazed by this. Almost all of them lived within two blocks of each other, by choice.
You go there today, still a lot of them live on the same two or three streets. I’d have a meeting, I’d be over there, and they’d take me over to somebody’s house.
I’d go over to Saunders’ house, having a cup of coffee, and they’d say, “You know what? Let’s get some people together.” They send Kate out the door. She runs down the street, runs over there, and the next thing you know, ten, twelve, fourteen, twenty-six, thirty-five people come home.
You know how you have a meeting? Send somebody down the street, because they live just down the street.
I’m telling you, we’ve made a real mistake spreading ourselves out. Do you really think you can have day-by-day, real church life, spread out all over the kingdom come?
Some people overcome and travel an hour, an hour and a half, two hours to get to a meeting. Well, God bless them, but you can’t do that seven days a week.
Why don’t we live together? Why don’t we move together? “Oh, the finances are impossible. Well, you know, I have a home. I’m making an investment.” It’s all excuses, excuses.
Better that we rent and live on the same street. And I mean it.
The level of fellowship that we lose by having to rush in from work, go here and there, use a second tank of gas in one day to have a “fellowship meeting,” while you’re so tired you can hardly think—what if you could have a fellowship meeting and then just roll out of that sofa and walk across the street to your home?
You’d have them a lot more often. In Memphis, the sisters got together all the time and prayed over coffee. Didn’t make a big deal. They could pray in twenty minutes. They had a cup of coffee, they prayed, they left—just going down the street, going over here.
Do you know the difference that makes? I’ll tell you one thing I noticed my first time there, my second time there, my third time there: I couldn’t even tell whose kids were whose.
This girl we’ve got here, Kate Saunders, she’d come over to somebody’s house and the people at that house would discipline her. I thought they were their kids. You can’t even tell. They have such a family. They lived as family.
The dear kids that they grew up with, they’re as tight as a family. Right now, as they’re praying and watching their brother John, it’s a family.
It’s not people thinking, “Gee, you know, the guy preaches the Word. He’s really sick, maybe dying.” It’s a family, living together, loving together, listening every time John can share something, loving him, caring for the family.
It’s a family. They’re all going to lose, you know. There’s a family there. They’re not perfect, but I’m just saying, I’m just trying to show you a little picture of simplicity, because you’re all too complicated.
See, if John goes to be with glory, there’s going to be 120 family members there. It’s not just a person—somebody they know in the fellowship. They’ve loved him and hated him and been with him, fellowshipped and prayed and argued and heard what he had to say, been inspired by him and blessed by him.
That’s life. O that we could live it.
Some of us need to repent before the Lord and start simplifying our lives. Most of us make that foolish move: we finally end up getting the big house just when all the kids leave, and we’re stuck with a big warehouse for junk.
And we’re miles from other saints. What have we done? What foolishness have we done for the sake of trying to hold on to the American dream and be Christian too?
I know I have to be careful here because I’ve got people here from Arizona who believe you should go out as far away from civilization as possible.
I just hope they have a little compound out there in the middle of nowhere with another fifty saints meeting every hour, every day, all the time.
Listen, you meet like that, it’s such a blessing, and you’ll face the cross every day. That sister who talks too much—you’re with her every day. Oh boy.
The third thing that Memphis has done, even to this day—and actually, I’m not lifting them up; they’re a very human group, you know—but the presence of God is there.
That’s why John’s so unique, so original. I’m telling you, I get so blessed when I go there.
Here’s the third thing they decided: they made a decision, a raw, tough decision. They refused to buy a building.
They met in a brother’s house, even up to three years ago, I think it was. The house—this guy built on and built on, built out the living room as much as possible, knocked out a wall—and they kept meeting: 110, 120 people, maybe 130 people, still meeting in his house.
Finally, they had a to-do that lasted more than a year when they fell asleep: “What are we going to do? What are we going to do? We’re just outsized.”
They decided to meet in two homes. They worked out a fantastic plan where you can fellowship with all of the saints. Somehow you meet over there this week and there that week. I don’t know how it’s all worked out, but they maintained fellowship.
They meet sometimes together once a month, and then they meet in two homes. But they refused to buy a place.
You say, “What’s the matter with these people? There’s nothing wrong with a place.” No, there’s nothing wrong with a place. But for most people, there is something wrong with a place, because that becomes the church and that becomes their place.
That becomes, sometimes, an albatross around your neck. I’ve known more than one company of believers that completely shut down because they went bankrupt. They bought someplace they couldn’t afford and all this kind of stuff.
Then that place becomes the holy sanctuary. Kids can no longer throw a ball in the church because it’s a holy place. The next thing you know, kids get the idea that there’s something about this building.
No, it isn’t. It’s about people.
You’ll never hear anybody in Memphis thinking, when it says, “Ye are the temple of the Holy Spirit,” that it means the church building. “You’re the sanctuary of God”—they all know that means us gathered together.
That simplicity. Are we simple?
We can have a building and maintain simplicity, but you have to work at it by way of the cross.
Are you being church, or are you going to church?
I said to one of the young people from around here, “You know what? Let me tell you a secret. This is just a confession that I do these kinds of things.”
“All these years, you didn’t realize it, but it could be that you’re more church in Pasadena, in your little meeting, than you are at Buena Valley.”
You understand? The reality of church has nothing to do with the place.
What if on Friday night in Pasadena there’s body life—people sharing and giving and helping and praying—and when you get together at Buena Valley, it’s all kind of stilted and tough? There’s little life there, and people aren’t really saying what they want to say because they’re afraid of somebody, and all this kind of thing.
Then where’s church more real? Now, I’m hoping it’s real in both places. But I was just trying to wake this person up to the fact that she may have been going to church for twenty-five years and not realizing.
If you sense the presence of Jesus in a place where two or three are gathered, you’ve got church. You don’t have to organize it. You don’t have to incorporate it. You’ve got it. Simplicity.
Secondly, there’s a tendency, without the cross working in us all the time, for our meetings themselves to become outward. This we have to resist as we humble ourselves before the Lord.
Thank God we came together and had a wonderful time at the Lord’s table tonight. On the first day of the week, when we gather together, we worship and take the Lord’s table.
But here’s the tendency. I’ll tell you the tendency: the tendency is to devalue the Lord’s table and to overvalue the ministry of the Word.
If you don’t take this thing to the cross, it comes to the place where people don’t show up for the breaking of bread; they just come for the ministry of the Word.
If they’ve gone that far, stop the ministry of the Word. Just have the Lord’s table, because that’s the most important thing you can do: worship and have the Lord’s table.
I actually was in a fellowship for a number of years, and they just pulled the ministry meeting right out of Sunday morning. So if you came, you came to worship the Lord, take the bread together, and share your life. No ministry of the Word.
People said, “Why? But no ministry of the Word? Ministry of the Word is so important.” Fine, we’ll do that Sunday night. “Oh, well, we don’t want to come back. It’s too far to drive.” Aha.
Very interesting.
I’ve been to a meeting in one place that grieves me every time I go. You know why? Because when it’s time for the ministry of the Word, 500 people show up, and when it’s time for the Lord’s table, 100 people are there.
Now, to those 100 people, it’s the center of their lives. Praise God for that. But what’s wrong with the understanding?
Don’t we know that first—our first duty—is to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength; to come to Him, take the Lord’s table, worship Him together? That’s the most important meeting we have in our life, if we have His presence in the midst. Amen.
When we make the ministry of the Word more important, I think we need to find the Lord adjusting us.
This matter of losing that sense of family in our meetings—even in the Lord’s table—you can lose that sense of a family love feast, and it becomes a sort of dutiful memorial that has to be done in a certain theological fashion or it’s not quite right.
O, the Lord have mercy on us. We lose simplicity and we lose His life. What have we got?
One of the things that concerns me—you can imagine—I have such a burden for young people. Sometimes it seems like they—I just wish they could touch the reality of Jesus in our meetings. We’re so far afield. We’re so dutiful. We’re so proper.
There’s something in this. I think we need to repent.
There is wonderful provision given by the Spirit of God. Every saint in the body of Christ, truly born again, has received a spiritual gift to share the life of Christ one with another in precious fellowship.
But it’s interesting how even fellowship meetings, without the working of the cross, tend to become Bible studies.
Now, I’ve never had any problem with Bible studies, and I lead them myself. But my point is, after a while, many assemblies don’t even have a true fellowship meeting where people could just fellowship, as it says in 1 Corinthians 14:
What is it then, brethren?
When ye come together, each one hath a psalm, hath a teaching, hath a revelation,
hath a tongue, hath an interpretation.
Let all things be done unto edifying.
Somebody has a psalm, somebody has a hymn, somebody has a revelation, somebody has a word, somebody has a tongue, somebody has an interpretation. “Well, we don’t have time for that.” Or, “Actually, we tried it for a month and it’s a disaster, so we go back to a Bible study.”
Well, then those of us as brothers and sisters who are too chicken to share what the Lord has given us have got to go to the cross and say, “Lord, thank You for what You’ve given me. Now I want to be a sharer, a contributor in the body of Christ.”
In our ministry meetings, times when we share the Word on Sunday or whatever it is, if we’re not careful, we begin to prefer those who are gifted and tested in ministry and to push away those who are upstarts and just developing.
With that, we crush the body of Christ from growing up. We end up with something that’s top-heavy. The old guys are always sharing; the young guys don’t have the chance, nor do they have any room to exercise.
I go to a fellowship in Queens, New York. I fellowship there, and Brother Christian Chen is there, if you know who he is. He and I minister the Word there once in a while.
Now the church has grown and grown and grown, and now over 300 people meet on Sunday. Some people start coming because they’re actually just visiting Chinese people and they’re there to hear the Word of God.
They’re really upset by the fact that, first of all, on every first Sunday of the month, we don’t even have a ministry of the Word. We have testimony and open sharing.
Then the other three Sundays are taken up—maybe Christian speaks one time during the month. Maybe I speak once. I haven’t spoken there since May, but I’ll speak once or twice if I have a burden, and I’ll share two together or something like that.
Somebody came up and said, “Christian, Christian, you need to share more. Many people are coming to hear you share.” He said, “But that’s not our purpose for coming.”
So we continue to let the four or five brothers who are gaining some gifting and gaining some exercise share as often as Brother Christian and myself do. Because what’s important to us?
Those of us who are saints become impatient with having to listen to somebody just beginning. I mean, I’m impatient when somebody loses the blades.
I remember a dear brother out in Huntington, where I used to fellowship. His first time he tried to share, he was going to do something on the tabernacle, and he had a whole bunch of three-by-five cards.
About ten minutes into the thing, all the cards fell on the ground. He was so nonplussed. He swore he’d never share again. He just quit. He quit, closed his Bible, and we had an early lunch.
You know what? He’s a precious Bible teacher today. We gave him another chance. We forced him to take another chance. We saw he had something good. He just shouldn’t use three-by-five cards, you know.
We need to give room for those that come up. I’m not devaluing the wonder of having brothers in the body of Christ who have a gift to minister the Word of God. Praise God for that, and the strength we receive from it.
But we’re not there to fill our gas tanks. What are we there for? To sense the presence of God through this brother, through that brother, through that sister. Very simple, very simple.
We can fall away from these things if we’re not careful. When we come together for such meetings as we have, you know, in the early days—I know you’ve got to agree with me on this, because probably when you first started meeting together yourselves—there was a spirit of anticipation.
“I wonder what’s going to happen?” The big unknown. People are prepared. Something’s going to be shared. We’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen, but there’s participation, there’s anticipation, there’s spiritual preparation.
Oh man, it’s just a wonderful place to come together—God’s house. “How’s God going to speak to us today?” This is a wonderful thing.
But our tendency is, “You know what? We need pre-preparation.” The next thing you know, we move into some kind of realm that’s very planned, very predictable.
The next thing you know, the teenagers, who are smarter than us, know exactly who’s going to pray next. Sure enough, true to their prophecy, the meeting is very, very predictable.
Well, what happened? Let’s not blame the people who participate. There are some who are always chirping at the Lord’s table or something. You know why? For most of them, it’s because they really love the Lord with all their heart.
What’s the matter with the rest of you?
You know what? If you don’t take the cross, you won’t be spiritually prepared.
You might think the brothers are top-heavy and they’re always doing everything, just to preclude you doing anything. But we’ve had meetings where we let you do things, and we were so ill-prepared, or flying by the seat of our pants, that the meeting went way off the rails.
Which isn’t the Lord’s presence either. You see what I’m saying? We all have to take the cross.
If we came into a prayer meeting spiritually prepared, it would be a knockout for me. Why do we come together and pray? “Because we’ve got to get things done. We’ve got a list of people who have needs.”
No, no, no, no. We come together to pray because, as two or three gather together in the name of Jesus Christ, we hear from the Head, we get a sense of what He is desiring, and we pray it. Then we see it happen. Amen.
What an exciting prayer meeting. But if we’re not careful, without the work of the cross, a prayer meeting becomes, “Who’s got the list?”
“Okay, this brother’s sick. This brother’s numb. This brother’s sleeping.” And we all take a nice doze. One by one, people pray. The faithful ones are there to pray. The younger ones aren’t there to pray because there’s just no life.
But it takes spiritual preparation to have life, and it takes the cross to have spiritual preparation.
When people come together and have some preparation, it makes such a difference. I meet with a small group of people there in New York City, and they’re all young people. Not a one of them—well, actually, two of them are over thirty—but they’re all young.
We come together every Thursday night, ten or twelve of us, for prayer meeting. Here’s what we’re doing: everybody who comes to that prayer meeting is mutually disciplined together. We are reading through the Bible in one year.
We’re reading the same Bible through the year. We’re reading the Oswald Chambers Bible. We’re reading the same devotional things. We’re reading the same Scriptures.
When we come together on Thursday night, it’s like popcorn. “What did you get from the Lord?” “This one—ah, 2 Chronicles.” “Oh, that touched me too,” because we’re all reading the same thing together.
The Lord is using it to give us some kind of array as we come to the Lord in prayer. What a wonderful thing. It took some discipline, though.
We’re all reading the same portions together through the week—the daily reading thing—and we come together on Thursdays and share what the Lord has spoken to us. Whoa, it’s so rich.
I wonder why we don’t do that. We come together: “What have you got?” “I don’t know. What have you got?” “All right, anything else we need to pray for?” Nobody’s got anything.
Here the world’s going to hell in a handbasket, and over there in Lebanon the place is getting blown up, and these Katyusha rockets are coming into Israel. We’ve got nothing to pray about.
I think we’re not alive. But Jesus the Head is very alive too. We’ve got to get in touch with Him here.
It takes some people to spend the time doing it. I talked to Lance quite a bit about this thing of prayer, because he’s really got an angle on that thing.
At Halford House, where he lived for so long in London, they had a tremendous prayer ministry. I was always touched every one of those six times, or whatever, I was over there. What a prayer ministry they had.
You know what I found out in the background? By the way, their meeting at the times I was there was approximately 200 people. You know how many people were there at prayer meeting? Two hundred people.
It was the most exciting meeting they had. But behind the scenes, there were six people clipping articles out of newspapers, praying about them, and then calling a person and saying, “What do you think? Should we pray about this situation going on in Baghdad right now?”
Somebody said, “Yeah, I’ve got a Scripture about Baghdad.” By the time they came together for the prayer meeting, they had some impressions and some burdens. They shared it, and the people joined in.
Not everybody has that time, but some dear sisters and some dear brothers prayed every day about the prayer meeting and what the burden of the Lord was.
No wonder they prayed and miracles happened in Nepal, because they were alive to what was going on in Nepal. Somebody was checking. They had a person writing correspondence to those missionaries in Nepal. That’s how they knew what was going on.
What a wonderful, living prayer meeting I experienced over there.
But you know what? It’s actually easier than all of this. It’s that when we leave our first love, and He’s not in the center, ah, you can call it whatever you want.
When He’s in the center—He is the way, the way of our life, the way into the presence of God—it doesn’t matter what you call the meeting. It’s meeting God.
Our hearts have to be renewed in this. Our minds have to be renewed. If our minds are renewed to understand the simplicity of the church and what it really is—spiritual reality—then we’ve just begun.
Because then we have to go down into the valley and live that life for forty years, like Moses did, with the actual people. There we know that the way of the assembly is the way of the cross, as we deal with one another.
I don’t have time to go into all of that, because you already know about it. That’s what half the epistles are all about: how to get along with one another in the assembly, where you’re all one together; how to appreciate one another instead of criticizing one another; how to love one another rather than avoiding one another; how to be equal in your love for everybody rather than showing preference to one another.
You should know all those things. When we gather together here, there should not be cliques, but there are. It bothers me that among the young people there are cliques. There shouldn’t be. It hurts those on the outside, you know?
Yet some young people are so precious: they embrace those outside the circle. We need the cross.
These things aren’t right. Here’s the problem: the Lord has arranged in the body a great diversity. But except for the cross, we like homogeneity.
He’s put together spontaneous acts with those intrepid people who just plod along; punctual people with those living in eternity.
In the assembly I meet with on Sunday, we have almost fifty Brazilians now. Almost every one of them is late. It’s the nature of a Brazilian, you see. They live in eternity.
We have this wonderful heterogeneity, diversity. We’ve got faithers and feasters, adventurers and carefulers, impressionists and realists, people with big-hearted compassion and disciplinarians, all together.
People who broad-brush things, and people who are architecturally punctual and exact. Oh, praise God. Thank You for the diversity, Lord.
So we squeeze out those people. “I don’t like that other strand of just fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants spontaneity. Ah, we need a plan.”
A lot of times in leadership, those guys successful in business become the leaders, and they’re bean counters. The next thing you know, we’ve got something set up. All of those spontaneous people are sitting in the back saying, “Well, I don’t even know how to get into this meeting.”
But we’re supposed to have that kind of diversity. How wonderful it is.
God has an even greater joke, because He puts into the leadership of an assembly really diverse brothers. You know what? The enemy usually chases out the diversity.
The brothers try to hold on to one another, but there gets to be some fight. Instead of it being a recognition that our personalities are different—like Euodia and Syntyche, the two sisters in Philippi—they say it’s a spiritual difference.
“That person comes in late because they have a demon.” The next thing you know, that late person doesn’t come anymore. Oh, what a shame.
Sometimes I see an assembly of God’s people, and it seems to me like God’s worked fifteen years to get just the right mix of guys together. The enemy comes in, knocks out two or three of them, and throws the whole balance of everything all out.
We need the cross. We will face very critical challenges in the assembly. The way of the assembly is the way of the cross.
But we come humbly back to the Lord when we go through a critical time, and the Lord says, “I am the way through this. Hold on to Me. I am the way.”
Well, I’ve said enough. You may think I’m on one side or the other, but actually I’m not. I know that we have to hold some kind of balance between complete spontaneity and some kind of organization.
But we need that in the Lord, and not just in ourselves. There’s a lot of undoing and a lot of encrustation that needs to be broken—sometimes even in youth fellowships, and just with the adults.
How same we get. What’s the matter with us? What is it about us? Is it that faith is too scary a thing?
O Lord, help us. It all comes back to simplicity. “Lord, we don’t know the way You’re going. How do we know the way?” He says, “I am the way. How about taking Me as the Head?”
By His grace, He takes us through the cross, and by that cross, we come unto glory. Then the bride is prepared.
Brothers, your responsibility is this: He’s given us grace. He’s gathered us together. Now you get Him to glory.
Don’t say, “I’ll call out to God.” Oh no, it isn’t. He’s looking for intercessors standing in the gap: “Show us Thy way, Lord. Show us Thy way.”
Leaders who are on their face as the assembly is glorified and prepared as a bride to meet her Husband.
We are held accountable, every one of us, to be responsible to see that the simplicity of Jesus stays in our midst. If we’ve got it too complicated, you start praying, and you repent of your own complications.
We need His presence more than anything. In the last day, without the torch of His testimony in the midst, then we’re just bogus, and we’re headed to become Babylon.
Lord, we just come to You and thank You that You have led us in Your living way. You opened it up by the blood of Jesus when we were saved.
That living way takes us right to the throne of God. We remember how immediate and how wonderful it was to come into the presence of God in our lives individually.
Lord, I remember the day, after living and being part of and serving in organizations, I touched the true organic church, where Your presence was in the midst of the brothers and sisters in the body of Christ.
What a day of liberation for me that was. Oh, all the complications of ministry seemed to fall off my back, and I realized that You were doing a work and that You were real among Your people.
Lord, bring us back to the simplicity of devotion to Christ.
Forgive us, Lord, for, in our best fleshly efforts, organizing Your life out of the whole thing. Forgive us for our wanderings and saying, “I want my castle thirty miles away from the next Christian.”
Oh, give us hearts that want to meet in order to discover You. Give us lives that are given to You in true devotion as we come to our various services and meetings.
We pray for Your infusion of Your presence in our Bible studies, in our worship times, in our gospel meetings, and in all that we do.
Lord, it isn’t a question of some complicated way. It’s a simplification.
O Lord, You are the Head of Your church. Would You take over our assembly and lead us in the way of the assembly, all the way, even unto glory?
We ask in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.