Morning, brothers and sisters. I got this right. I’m okay. All right.
I was glad when Lane was doing announcements. He’s soft-spoken, and it’s good to have people that are all soft-spoken, isn’t it?
So, I have a few verses to read, and then we’ll pray. Okay.
Acts Chapter 7. Starting with verse 2. Stephen is giving his defense before the Sanhedrin.
Brethren and fathers, listen: The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in Haran,
and said to him, “Get out of your country and from your relatives, and come to a land that I will show you.”
Then he came out of the land of the Chaldeans and dwelt in Haran.
And from there, when his father was dead, He moved him to this land in which you now dwell.
And then in Hebrews Chapter 11, starting with verse 8.
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.
By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise;
for he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
And then one last verse. That’s in Revelation. It’s for everybody here at Richmond to feel comfortable. Revelation Chapter 21, starting with verse 2.
Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God.
And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying; and there shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.”
Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, this morning we just want to thank You again for saving us, for bringing us into Your kingdom, the kingdom of the Son of Your love. Lord, You put us there at great cost to Yourself, and we thank You.
And as we come this morning, Lord, we want to know more of what it is that we have been brought into. Not that we would merely have more knowledge, Lord, but that we would respond to You and to these things that You have done for us.
And so we ask, Lord, that You will open up the Word to us by Your Holy Spirit. Enable me to talk; enable us to listen. But most of all, Lord, enable Your Word to come out unadulterated, to come out in a way that builds up and draws out.
So, Lord, only You can do these things. We ask for this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Is it hot in here? Is it just—oh, thank you. I thought it was that time of life for me.
Okay, just a little review. I’ve been talking about the purpose of God because the thing that made me want to do this is that I heard in Toronto Dana Congdon give a word. He spoke that there are many of us, especially the younger people, who hear all these things all the time, but we have no idea what they really mean, or what they mean for me, or whether it is just a teaching to us.
And so I just felt that I would not want to live in the dark. And I do not want those younger than us, who are coming in, to live in the dark either. I know the Lord does not want us to live in the dark about things—about His eternal purpose and what He has for man.
And I am not a theologian. People call me a historian because I teach history. They say I am a historian. I am not a historian; I teach history. But I do not have the corner on these things. I am not pretending to have the corner on these things.
But I have asked the Lord, “Can You help us? Can You help us to see what it is that You really are trying to do, and what You are doing in Christ?”
You know, we are different than a lot of places. Other places really look for what God’s purpose is in our lives: why has God saved us? I know even Campus Crusade—I did some ministry through Campus Crusade once—and the saying was, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”
But all that is really kind of an individualized thing. It is a plan for your life. And I think when we think of the purpose of God, we think about what God wants for my life personally. Maybe He wants me to be a missionary. Maybe He wants me to be a doctor. Maybe He wants me to marry this person. Maybe He wants me to move to this place. But it is all personalized.
And we have no idea that God really has something in mind for everybody, for all of humankind that is redeemed in Christ Jesus. And what is that? I mean, because that really is the bottom line. This is our purpose for living.
Our purpose for living is not just to have a job, have kids, and have a nice retirement plan. You know, and then when we go, we go to heaven, we cross the Jordan, and we sing forever—or we sit on clouds. You know, that is not a purpose.
If that is the purpose, I mean, how many of us would have wanted to come to Christ if that was told to us? “Well, you know, when you die, you get to sit on clouds.” Oh, really? Would that have moved you?
No. And so we looked at it: What is the purpose of God through Jesus Christ? Jesus Christ has come to earth. We see what the purpose of God is first for man.
The first time we talked about it was that man, when God created him, was made to express who God was. And when man sinned, he lost that ability to do that. His view of God, because he lost that ability and that communion with God, was bent. It was different.
And so the picture of God that came out to the rest of creation was a warped picture of God—much like if you go to the county fair and go to one of those weird mirrors. You come out short or tall or fat or skinny, and you are all weirded out.
Man, left to himself trying to describe who God is and trying to show who God is, brings out a warped thing. And you can tell that if you look at history and look at the gods that have been made.
You know, biblically speaking, look at Moloch. What a terrible god. Who could have thought of a god like that? Well, man could. Maybe man just saw Him as a judging God, and this is all he saw, so you had to do this.
Or how about Bacchus? You have an inebriated deity. Who thought of that? Man did. You know, a god with flaws. What kind of god is that? But that is man. That is all that man could come up with.
And so, to help us and to save us, God sent His Son as a man. And as a man, He showed us what man was to be in God’s purpose. This is what God meant man to be.
And we looked at this man, Jesus Christ, and we saw that He was in every way like us, except for sin. We saw man as he is supposed to be.
And we also saw that we fell short of the glory that man was meant to have—the satisfaction that God was supposed to have with man. We have fallen short because we sinned.
And it was not that, in seeing that, we wanted to run away. But we were enamored by seeing this man, Jesus Christ. We were drawn to Him. We found ourselves wanting to be like Him.
And not only that, but we found out that we needed to be redeemed. That was one of the purposes of God sending Christ. The incarnation of Christ was to show us who man was supposed to be, so that we could see that we needed to be redeemed—that we are lost, that our ideas about God were just so far off.
And He brought us close to God again. He would restore us and recover what God has lost in man.
Then last time, we looked at man as being redeemed, or recovered back to that purpose, through Jesus Christ. Again, the purpose of God is all wrapped up in Jesus Christ. We hear it all the time, but what does this mean?
What does it mean that we are redeemed back to the original purpose? What does it mean that we have been recovered? And how have we been recovered?
Well, last time we talked about Christ dying. He came as a Lamb. But that was not the only thing. Remember, He was raised from the dead, and He comes and lives in us.
Last time we talked about how you get the humanity that Christ portrayed when He lived as a man. It is by Christ, the risen Christ, living in us. And that life in us is our hope of glory.
We found out that He comes to live in our house not as a passive spectator of our lives, but as the Captain of our salvation, to move us to will and to do God’s good pleasure.
And we also found out that it is not just Christ in us—that He lives in me—but we also talked about Christ living for me. The man Jesus Christ is in the heavenlies right now, and He is living for me in the sense that He is before the throne of God, interceding on my behalf.
So that I find out that my desire to be the one that God would have me to be in Jesus Christ has all the power of heaven behind it, having that hope realized. I should not call it a dream—this hope realized.
Most of us will stop there and say, “Well, that is a wonderful purpose.” And we would say this must be what full salvation is. But this is not the fullness of what God has meant for us to be.
You know, God never meant us to live a secluded life. In other words, it is me and Jesus. Okay? That is what we think: “As long as I have my walk with the Lord, I am okay. I am with God. And that is what God wants. He wants me to have that relationship with Him.”
And that is true. But there is much more than just a personal relationship that God has planned for man who is redeemed through Jesus Christ.
Because one man alone cannot really show what God is and who God is. It takes a company.
And you know this is true because if you look back in Genesis, what did the Lord tell Adam and Eve? He did not say, “I made you guys. Look at this wonderful place I have given to you. I want you to till the ground for Me, deal with the animals, and this whole place is yours. It is great.”
No, He did not. He said, “Subdue it.” And then He said, “Be fruitful and multiply.” Why did He want them to multiply? Is not two enough? I know when we were talking about having kids, that is what we thought: two is enough.
But no, because it takes a whole race to show forth who God is—the whole race after Christ, that is.
And so this morning, I want to kind of end this time of talking, because you cannot go beyond this. When God began His redemptive work, first of all He told Eve that her seed would step on the serpent. That seed was Christ, right?
And then, when He went out to start His redemptive work after the flood, He went to a man to start that—to bring in the Redeemer. He went to Abram.
He went to Abram, and God revealed Himself to him. I often wonder, how did God reveal Himself to him? Did He come in as—well, He revealed Himself to Moses in a burning bush, right? So how did He reveal Himself to Abram?
The only way I can think of how He did it is this: Abram was an idol maker, or at least his father was. You could have a flame-on kind of thing, because it is the God of glory, right? Flame on, and all of a sudden you have this big flame. But I do not think that is the way Abram saw Him.
I think when God revealed Himself to Abraham, He revealed Himself in a city. Because that is what Abraham was looking for.
And even though God told him, “I want you to go out to a land that you do not know,” where was he supposed to go? How was he supposed to find this land? Well, God would lead him, but he knew what he was looking for.
He was looking for a city whose builder and maker was God. And you know, if you go back—being a history teacher—the cradle of civilization, that is Sumeria, right? Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers. They were the ones who built cities.
So Abram was very familiar with a city. He lived in a city. He lived in Ur of the Chaldeans. But this city was like no other city he had seen.
It was a city in which he saw God. What did he see God doing? It is not that he saw God doing something; he saw that everything was under some type of harmony with who He was.
And that is what made him, I think, fall down on his face. Where can you find a city like this, where there is no revolution, nobody cheating and trying to get ahead of one another, no pollution, nothing like that? There is no murder. People are living as they are meant to live.
And they are all being governed, not by somebody just hammering them, but by this One who sits on the throne in the midst of them.
Now, I cannot picture that. It is kind of like when you read Ezekiel and he talks about the wheels within a wheel. How many of you have tried to picture that? I cannot do it.
I am a person that has to see. I told you about math: you cannot tell me how to do math; you have to show me. And even then I have trouble.
But what more can man have? What more can man be? Man can be a city. Because the purpose of God for man is not to be just one man, but to be a city—to be a multitude, to be a holy nation, a holy race of people that is in a city.
And so this is what I would like to end up with. God’s eternal purpose includes being in a city. And the city, a lot of times, we call the church.
A lot of times we hear the word church all the time. What does it mean? I know because my kids came home—I remember one time we were driving to the assembly hall. Notice I called it the assembly hall. And of course, what do we usually call the assembly hall? “We are going to church. We are driving to church,” right?
And I remember my daughters, who were about four and five years old, saying, “Daddy, we are not going to church. We are the church.” Okay? Now, I do not know if they understood what that meant, but they sure rebuked me.
And that is it. I think sometimes we hear church and have no idea what we mean by church, or the church. Really, if we look at the church, it is the same as the city. It is the city that Abram was looking for. It is the city that is coming down from heaven in Revelation. It is the church of God, of which Christ is the Head.
And so when God, the God of glory, revealed Himself to Abraham, He showed him a city, which is a church.
Now, like Abraham, we have been called out of darkness. Okay? We have been called out of darkness. We have come out of a realm of darkness.
What I mean by darkness is that there is no knowledge of what God is like. There is speculation, like I said, because man is bent, because man has sinned. There is only speculation of what God is.
Even to the point of saying, “There is no God. We are just in here making the best of what we can, whatever, and that is how we are going. Whatever happens, happens. But there is no eternal purpose. There is no God. There is no nothing. This is it.”
Which really, that is enough to drive you to the Lord, is it not?
But we have come out of this kingdom of darkness, where we do not know God and could never know God because we are in darkness. There is no light about Him until Jesus Christ came into the world, until somebody came to us and shared Jesus Christ with us.
Then all of a sudden light came into us, and we responded in a positive way and said, “I see Him as the Christ, the Son of the living God. I see Him as my sin-bearer.” All of a sudden our eyes are opened.
We are brought into a different kingdom. We are transferred out of that kingdom of darkness and into a kingdom where we can know God. We can know who He is, and we can have fellowship with Him directly.
There is no group of people—no priesthood, so to speak—that has some special in with God, and they are the only ones who know who God is and give God to us by piecemeal. No, we have direct access to God.
There needs to be nothing else there. We have direct access to God because of Jesus Christ. We have been brought into this place, this new kingdom.
And just like Abraham, we are called out of Ur of the Chaldeans. He was called out to a land that he did not know where it was, but he was looking for a city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
In other words, this is not a man-made thing. This is not a man-made city. This is not a man-made organization. This is made by God. It is a city made without hands. It is made by God Himself.
And Abraham knew what to look for because God had shown him that city.
Now, I am not going to do a lot of theological stuff. I just want to share three things about a city that I think might help us understand what God has brought us into.
When I think of a city, there are three things that I see when I look at a city, even if I look at it from an airplane, or in a picture, or read about a city.
First of all, in a city, I see a community. A community is, roughly, a group of people that live in that area. They live there not because of family ties, but for other reasons. Something else has brought them into this community.
They dwell together, and they dwell together in some type of unity, because they are not killing each other all the time. So there is some type of unity there in a city.
Secondly, in the city, this community manifests some type of government within and over that community. There is some governing force, governing person, something that governs it.
Thirdly, it is a place where business is carried on. When you go in an airplane—and I love flying in airplanes, especially when they are getting ready to land or taking off, because you are closer—I love to look at freeways.
I think it is like watching blood course through your veins. You have it coming and going. You have the arteries and the veins. They are just coming and going. I like looking at trucks. You can really tell trucks from the air because they are bigger than everything else, and they are carrying things. That is just a sign of commerce.
They are bringing stuff in; they are bringing stuff out. There is commerce in this city. The commerce, the trade, the business that is going on in the city, is to benefit those living in the city and also those living outside the city. There is benefit for both sides.
And in the city built by God, when we think of the city of God, Christ is manifested in a way that nothing else can manifest Him. Not one life can manifest Christ like a city can manifest Christ, because we are just too small and He is so great.
As a matter of fact, the Lord Jesus said—I think it is Luke Chapter 12—“I have a baptism to undergo, and how I am straightened.” In other words, how confined I am. Because He was confined in a body, in one body, and He is much greater than just one human body.
To express who He is, and to express who God is, He needs a race, a nation, a city. Okay? Now, let us look at these three things one at a time, and then we will close up.
Let us look at what the community is first. What is the community? I already said it was a group of people brought together to live among one another. They are living there because they have been drawn together by something.
There is something that has drawn them together to live in this certain area—something vital to their existence there, as individuals and as a group—that makes them come and live in this community.
For example, let us take Midlothian. That is a community, right? Why did people ever come to live in Midlothian? Does anybody know? Coal, exactly right.
If you go to Woolridge—or whatever street it is that goes down and has a little pond where they have a little monument—it has a little mining thing. It is all about coal. That is what drew people here: coal.
Why would coal draw people? Some black rock? I mean, it is slippery kind of stuff. Why would coal draw people here? What vital interest brought people to live around coal? They got jobs.
“I need work. I need to feed my family. So where am I coming? I am coming where the work is. They are mining coal here. Boom, I am here.”
Well, do you think Midlothian was only a bunch of coal miners that lived in Midlothian? Is that it? So no one was over twenty-one? They were all miners.
No, that is not it. These people need to eat, so people with food are going to come in there. Then they need to be clothed, and people are going to come in. Now you do not only have miners; you have tailors, bakers, seamstresses, businessmen, executives, coal-company guys, people who make wheels. You have all sorts of people.
And probably not only that, but a lot of times when there is work, people come from all over, not just Virginia. You could have had people coming from North Carolina, South Carolina, even California.
Wait a minute. Did we not have a big explosion because the steel mills were going really strong in the 1880s and 1890s? We had all these people coming over from Europe. So we had all these different nations and tongues and religions and everything coming to live here because of jobs, right?
That is what a community is: people coming because there is something vital to them that is there. They are all sorts of people. It is not just one type of people, not just one race, not just one religion, not just one language. You have all these people coming over here.
And not only that, but you will find that, in order to fit in with one another, they begin to let go of their old cultures and embrace a new culture. In American history, we call that the melting pot.
People were coming from all over the place. Especially the older people who came in, they always liked the old ways. But the younger people would say, “I do not want to.”
I tell this story: my grandparents came from Poland, and then my parents moved to California. They lived in a Polish community in Massachusetts, but we came to California, and there was no Polish community. But we were still Polish, right?
What do Polish people love to eat? Cabbage and potatoes. Cabbage and potatoes. No roast beef. Oh, galumpkies. Who said galumpkies? Oh, pierogi? No, galumpkies.
You never heard of a Polish hand grenade? That is a piece of meat cooked and boiled in cabbage and tomato. It looks like a little hand grenade, so they call them Polish hand grenades.
Pierogi is more kind of a pastry, you know, stuffed sometimes with cheese or something like that. But galumpkies had cabbage, and cabbage—now, I do not know how many of you boil cabbage. Anybody here boil cabbage?
What does cabbage smell like when it is boiled? It does not smell really good. It smells like you have not washed your gym socks for a while.
Every once in a while, my mom would make boiled cabbage. It was called kapusta. Every once in a while, she would make kapusta. You could tell she was making kapusta because we lived four houses from the corner, and once you turned that corner, you knew we were having kapusta that night.
My friends would say, “What is that smell?” And I would say, “I have no idea. I do not even know where it is coming from,” because I did not want to have part of that culture, because it made me look different, right?
So the idea is that we lose one culture to embrace the other. That is what this community is: a community that is no longer of the old, but is a community of the new. It is a melting. It is embracing the new culture, the new life, and putting away the old one because the old one is the old one.
Just like we talk about putting away the old man, this new one is vital to us, and that is why we are here.
Now, when Abraham saw that city, what he saw was a community. They were all there because of one thing. Like I said, there are different people and this and that and the other thing.
Now we, as believers, are drawn to community. It happens. If you have the life of Christ in you, you are going to find yourself being drawn to other believers.
Like I said, God never intended you—the life of Christ has never been intended—to be alone. It is always to be within community, because it is so great that one person cannot hold it all.
For me to have the benefit of all that Christ is for me, I need the community, because more of Christ is in that community. Christ is there in ways that I do not have yet, or do not see yet, or maybe never will have because I do not have that type of gifting. But someone else does.
Because that is vital to me, I want to be where those people are. That is what we are talking about by community.
Why community? Because in community, this is where we learn Christ in a way we could never learn Him otherwise.
Most of us, when we try to learn about the Lord, what do we do? We read a book. All right? We read a book. We listen to a sermon. We read our Bibles. But that is not the only way the Lord speaks.
The Lord speaks to us also through the community of believers. We see something of Christ through the community of believers that cannot become real to us just by reading a book.
We read a book and learn a system. Now, we might get enlightened. We might see something, and praise the Lord for that. But we see it worked out in life, in reality. We are brought into that community. That is what it is all about.
God never intended us just to pass on a teaching. It is never just a teaching, never just a law. It is a person. It is the person of Jesus Christ, and the person of Jesus Christ cannot be held in a book.
And He cannot be held in just one person. He is held in a multitude. So in this community, we learn Christ in a way we cannot do otherwise.
We as believers have to learn to see Christ in others. We have to learn to let Christ, who is in them—I do not want to say “the Christ is in them,” because then people will think I am New Age—but let Christ who is in them love us.
And we need to have the rough edges of us knocked off so that Christ who is in us can love them.
See, this is what eternal life is all about. Eternal life is not a teaching; it is life. It is life that is in us, given to others, and His life in others that is given to us.
That is what Kenny was talking about at the Lord’s table. That is what fellowship is: it is a sharing of that life together.
It is not just that we are talking about, “Oh, I got a blessing about this.” No, it is that life in real flesh and blood that is touching and can be touched.
That which we have seen,
that which we have handled,
we share with you.
My example of this, just to make this a little more real, is from experience. It is hard, especially when you have younger people, to give some example from ancient things or something like that. It is just another teaching.
When I first started really walking with the Lord, that was around 1974. After getting grounded in the faith, in 1976 there were eight of us who fellowshipped all the time.
We would go to a meeting. We had this Tuesday-night Bible study, and we were there. That is how we got to know each other. We would see each other during the week and stuff. Finally, we felt that the Lord would have us live together.
We rented a house for $345 a month. You can tell that was 1976, cannot you?
It was three bedrooms and an office. Two guys in one bedroom, two guys in another bedroom—no, three guys in another bedroom, two in another—and then we had one room that was like a bowling alley. It was about this wide and about this long. That was it. All you could get was a bed and a dresser in there.
But we felt that this was what the Lord meant for us. All of a sudden, we came in and lived with one another.
Among those eight, we had two intellectual types—or pseudo-intellectual types—who had no business acumen, although they had a gardening business. True.
We had two experiential Christian-like types. You know what I mean? They had experiences, this and that and the other thing. One was going to college to be a doctor, and the other one was a waiter at the time but was waiting to become an airline steward, going to class to do that.
We had one who was older than all of us. He was twenty-four, but he was the youngest of us spiritually.
If I were to describe him, he would be like a Scythian. A Scythian is like a nomad—not cultured. I am not saying this is a bad thing; I am just saying that is who he was. He named his truck Nimrod. He was a hunter.
Then we had another person who was just steady employment, steady guy, even-keeled guy. Nothing could fluster this guy. And he had a really pointed sense of humor. He could really point things out.
Then we had another guy who was emotional and intellectual. He was the cross between those other guys. Whatever person, whichever group he was with, he tended to be that.
Then we had one other person who came in from an assembly like this. He had ideas of how things should be.
Not only that, we had about three former Catholics, a couple of charismatics, a Lutheran, and this one guy who was kind of like a brother in an assembly. So this is kind of like it says in Colossians 3:11: Scythians, Greeks, barbarians, Hebrews—you know, all this living in one house.
What drew us together? Certainly not what we were, personally speaking. If you had that list of people, why would those people want to hang out with one another? What did they have in common? Not much.
But what drew us together was that we all wanted to follow the Lord. We all wanted to serve the Lord. That was the overriding thing that brought us together. The Lord was the One who brought us together.
Why did He bring about such a motley crew like that? What testimony do you have in that?
Because we needed to see that in Christ there is no Scythian, no Greek, no Jew, and no slave. We had to see that for ourselves, that Christ was in each one of us.
It was not our personalities, our jobs, and stuff that made any difference at all. The thing that we needed to see was Christ.
And it was not easy. Okay? It was not easy. Just like for some, getting married is not easy, or having children is not easy. It is because you are with other people who are not like you.
So it was a community, but we were all gathered around something that was vital. That thing that was vital was Christ—Christ in us.
The Lord says, “You have to find Christ in your brothers.” That is why you are here: to find Christ.
Because what we usually do is never look for Christ in each other. We just look at the surface. It is like Jeffrey talking about when Samuel was looking at the sons of Jesse. He looks at the surface: “It has just got to be the king,” right?
What does God say to Samuel? “Do not look at the outside. God looks at the heart.”
Some of us have a lot of flesh. We have to wade through a lot of stuff until we get to the heart. I am not talking about what we have to do; I am talking about our brothers and sisters. In order to see Christ, I have to go through a lot. And vice versa.
You guys do not think, “Well, I am just thin-skinned.” Yeah, maybe you are thin-skinned. That is a lot of flesh right there. But the whole thing is, we have to find Christ in one another.
We rubbed each other the wrong way and stuff, but in the end, we found ourselves caring for one another in a deeper way than just being the friends we were when we were only going to the Bible study.
And it did not happen overnight. We lived there for two years, and then four of us went to another house, and the other four moved away. Then some of us moved back. The whole experience was not something that happened overnight, and it was not something that was painless.
Community is not painless. There is suffering. Most of the suffering is this: it is the suffering of the cross, our dying to ourselves in order to see Christ in someone else.
That is not preached in a lot of places: that you have to die to yourself. You go to the other brother and say, “Brother, you have a problem with anger.”
But what does the Lord say? I think you have to take the log out of your eye first before you fix the other guy’s splinter. You always see in the other brother the things that you hate in yourself, and you really ream them on that.
But there is grace. When the Lord calls you into community, there is grace for it, because He is doing a work. He is not just doing a work for this time; He is doing an eternal work.
The character of Christ is made manifest in us. He can peel away and get to it. We have this treasure in earthen vessels, and the earth needs to be dusted away.
It is kind of like an archaeologist. He has to get the dust and use that little brush and scrape it off. “Oh, now I see what it is. Now I see what this is used for.”
It is the same way for us. We are called to community so that Christ can be uncovered in us, because Christ is in us. Just like we talked about last week, when we believe in the Lord Jesus, He comes to live and dwell in us as the Captain of our salvation.
But as Captain of our salvation, He leads us into community, because that is part of our salvation.
There was also a testimony to the rest of the neighborhood that these guys were different than the other guys who used to live in this place. “They are real different, and we do not mind our kids going over there. We are not afraid to go over and talk with them.”
There was a testimony of Christ going out. Even though they did not see the hurt we were hurting each other with—because when you are flesh attacking each other—they saw the fruit.
That is why we are a city set on a hill: to give light to Christ. That opened up a way to share the gospel with many of them just because of that community.
I have to hurry. Okay, I thought with fewer people you guys would listen faster, but you do not. You guys are still slow.
Secondly, there is a government in that city. Again, it is not a government that is over the city; it is a government that is in the city. You understand what I mean?
It is not as if someone is laying down a law from above, on high, from somewhere else, and saying, “Okay, here is what you do.” No, the government comes from within the city.
If you remember, when the city comes down from heaven, where is God? He is in the midst of it.
And just like us, we can say that the government of God is in us as individual believers, right? Because Christ has come into us, and this new life has come in to govern us—to say to us, “I do not want you doing that anymore. I want you to be doing this. I do not want you with these people anymore.”
We are being governed by this life within us. Well, in the community, there is government also.
I am not here to talk about elders and deacons and all that kind of stuff. God does set up—and you can read it in Scripture—ways that a fellowship, an assembly, a community is governed. But it is more than just that.
In other words, God does not limit Himself just to a few men. I am not saying that to say we do not have to obey the people who are in charge here. That is not what I am saying.
But God has given to us a discerning ear. “My sheep hear My voice,” right?
Government is to lead. That is what government is supposed to do, right? Lead and protect. If someone gets out of things, it is to admonish, to correct, to bring back into correction. We correct so that we can live in harmony, live in peace, and be protected.
We find in our own private lives that we are submitting ourselves to Christ, to the Christ-life in us. But also, we find that in the community, Christ speaks through anyone, because Christ is in all.
There may be times in our lives when we are not in the big part or in the core group. That is a way to say it, right? We might be on the fringes. Well then, where do we get guidance from? Where do we get protection from?
We get it from other believers who are walking with the Lord, who are caring about it. Those who are in leadership are overseers. They are looking over the flock. They are trying to protect them. They are trying to encourage them. They are trying to make sure they are walking on with the Lord.
Can you imagine if we have four brothers here, and all of us came to them with our troubles all the time? It would wear these guys out. I do not think they would live past forty.
I know you guys are past forty. You know why that is? Because there are other brothers and sisters in the fellowship that some people can go to and find guidance.
I am not saying this takes away from leadership. What I am saying is that the Lord has given us a protection. There is a life of the Lord in us, and when we see another brother in error, we might go to them and say, “This brother is in error.”
Or we might come to the leadership and say, “Brothers, I think this guy is in error. We need to pray for him.” Or maybe the Lord just sends us to that brother or sister to encourage or admonish.
You see, this is the way we get out of government. We say, “Well, you are not one of the big guys. Why should I listen to you?” Right?
I am not asking you to listen to me. I am asking: do you hear Christ? Do you hear Christ speaking to you?
It is not for me to say, “Hey, I am Christ. I have a word of the Lord for you.” It is not for me to say that. It is for me to be faithful to whatever the Lord is leading me to do.
It is for you, on the receiving end, to hear the Lord. And if you hear the Lord, to respond to Him.
That is what I am talking about: government. Yes, we do have government set up, but we have a government that is within the city. It is inside. It is not limited.
But it is not for those other ones to say, “I have the key to everything.” Because anybody who says he has the key to everything really has—why, he is outside the building. He does not even have a key.
Matter of fact, I only have a car key. I do not have the key to the building. So, Bill, you are going to have to lock up tonight, okay?
But anyway, we have a discernment in ourselves to be governed. You understand that? To be governed, not to govern others, but to be governed, because God is in our midst.
When I submit, I am not submitting to a man; I am submitting to Christ. We have to see that Christ is in us, because that is what the church is. The church is where Christ is, and Christ is in every member.
And then lastly—I am sorry, I could have spent more time—it is a place of business. What do I mean by it being a place of business?
Some of us, when we came to what we called Norma House, with those other brothers, had to do business with God. Some things were revealed to us about ourselves, and God was trying to show us, “Okay, now I have got it to the surface. Now let us deal.”
You have to do business with God. It is a business that is going to cost you something. It is the cross. But it also costs you this: the coin of the realm is faith.
When something is revealed to you and God says, “This has to be dealt with,” then you have to step out in faith and say, “Lord, I see that, and I will step out and do this because I believe this is what You want me to do.”
When you do that, you find whatever the Lord is trying to show you, whatever the Lord is trying to give you, whatever the Lord is trying to deliver you from.
So we make those types of transactions. But then there is the business that is His business, that we are to be about. Again, the coin of the realm is faith.
When God starts asking you to do things because He is trying to do something within the assembly, within your community, within the larger community of those who are not saved, then you have to act by faith.
I was talking to John Ecklund, who was here at the prayer meetings from the Bay Area. He just went down to Mexico, Mascota. I asked him about it, and he said, “I go down there only because I really felt the Lord wanted me to go down.”
But when you get there, the Lord does not say, “Okay, on your way over, this is what I want you to do.” You do not know until you get there. It is like step by step by step.
But you find with each step you take that the Lord confirms your faith. The coin of the realm is faith. We are to do His work.
His work could be going out somewhere. Maybe it could be sharing the gospel. His work could be going to somebody to pray for them. His work could be going to comfort somebody. His work for you might be to drive somebody to a meeting. His work might be to go and share the Lord.
But when you know what it is, when you have that sense, “This is what He wants me to do,” and sometimes it is confirmed by other brothers and sisters, you walk out in faith.
Your life then becomes a walk of faith. You go from faith to faith to faith to faith. But your faith is not confirmed until you step.
Once you have that step, the Lord starts opening up the doors. But He will not do it until you start stepping.
Then there is the prayer of faith. This is what I am really hoping for in my own prayer life.
Have you ever been praying and felt like, “How do I know how to pray that?” Have you ever done that? It is like it was really the Lord praying through you, and you had that sense that what you asked was answered.
Have you ever had something like that? I think that is the prayer of faith. I want that more and more. I want to be able to pray not a hit-and-miss thing, not what I think should be prayed, but I want to get to the place where I am praying things that are what the Lord really is aiming at.
I think that only comes from knowing the Lord.
I have been asking, “Lord, even when we come to prayer meeting, when we are praying for something, can You give us a word that shows us that we are on the right track, or a word that will get us in the right place, so that we can latch onto that word with faith?”
Because we have faith on that word, bring that thing to pass. It is business. This is the business of God. The business of God is done in the prayer meeting.
It is also done as we go out and be the brothers and sisters we are supposed to be in the community. What we are supposed to be in the community is not just a Bible teacher or somebody to teach. Sometimes it is just being a comforter.
Sometimes it is just going over to pray. But it is being there. It is being part of the community and being aware of the community around you.
This is what God’s purpose is for us in being together, in being in the church. This is what it is: a life that is not a solitary life. It is a life that has been brought into community.
In the Catholic church, we used to have the Apostles’ Creed, and one of the things was, “I believe in the communion of the saints.” What is the communion of the saints?
It is our being in community. It is our fellowship. It is sharing the life—not just sharing a teaching, but sharing the life of Christ in me and receiving the life of Christ from someone else when I need to be ministered to.
It is knowing that I am not by myself because I am in community.
This is what the city of God is. We are meant to be in the city of God. We are called into the city of God.
If we are not finding ourselves gravitating there, we are stubborn and rebellious, because it is the Spirit of God in us who brings us into community.
I might say sometimes it might be kicking and screaming, but once we get settled into that community and we learn Christ, we find ourselves filled with joy.
And is that not the fruit of the Spirit—joy?
That is how I want to end. We are a city. We are to be a city. We are not to be strangers and aliens to one another; we are fellow citizens.
The wall of partition is torn down. I am not Californian; I am in Christ.
It is a wonderful thing to do. It is a wonderful thing to realize. It is a wonderful thing to experience even more—not just to realize, but to experience the community that we are meant to be.
Now, this is not to get all huggy-feely. You know what I mean? This is not saying, “Oh no, we need to hug each other more,” and do stuff like this.
But this is something to take to the Lord and say, “Lord, I want to be in the city. I want to be functioning in the city.”
And there is another word we have to deal with, right? Functioning. I want to be part of the city. I want to be a participant in the city. Because Your life is in me, lead me there.
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, we want to thank You that You have not left this to ourselves. You did not call us to be hermits or monks or cloistered out with nobody around, but You called us to Yourself.
And in Yourself there is a multitude of people, a multitude from all languages and walks of life. Lord, we thank You. We thank You that we are called into this community of Christ.
Lord, we tell You that we want to see that, and we want to be a part of what this is all about—of what Your eternal purpose is, of being in the church, of being in this community.
We want to know more about it. We want to be drawn into the experience of the revelation of Christ in us. Lord, deal with us.
Lord, time is short. We do not want to be stuck with the teaching. Lord, I am the biggest criminal of that. I love just the teachings. It is just so easy for me to stand up here and talk.
But Lord, it has to be brought home. Bring it home in my heart, Lord, I pray. Bring it home in ours, Lord. Have what You want in us: a city where You dwell in the midst.
We ask this in Thy name.