The Household of God (14 - Postscript)

Postscript

It is my understanding and belief that in the household of God, Jesus is Prophet, Priest and King and the Spirit is the primary teacher.  I may have gifts, calling and ministry as a teacher/prophet in the household, but I do not see that as justification to tell people what to do or to issue commands.  At best, I am a secondary teacher.  I have done my job when I have finished what the Spirit (as the primary teacher) gave me to do.  Therefore, it is not my place to say what others should do.  I know what I have to do, and I know and trust the Spirit of God implicitly that He will do what work He needs to do in the lives of those who are, in truth, my brothers and sisters on the road.

When we actually live as ecclesia (an exclave of the Kingdom of God), we slot into the passion, the vision and the mission of God for His world.  If we learn the principles of Mosaic, Ecclesia and Trapeza (see early posts), all of us will know what we are to do – what is our unique place in the household – without feelings of inferiority or superiority.

If you are expecting or wanting me to map out a “how-to” of what I am writing about, you will be disappointed.  I do not do “how-tos” specifically because that is the job of the Holy Spirit, as Jesus clearly pointed out to his disciples: “When He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come.  He will glorify me, for He will take of mine and will disclose it to you.  All things that the Father has are mine; therefore I said that He takes of mine and will disclose it to you.” (John 16:15)

This is practical stuff.  This is how we are to learn to live as ecclesia.  Living together as a household according to the Spirit; preferring others over ourselves; submitting to our Head and Lord and elder brother; following the wind of the Spirit; listening to the apostles prophets and teachers God gives us; serving the family in our unique mix of personality, talents and Spiritual gifts; not hesitating to bring to the table (trapeza) what the Spirit quickens to our spirit in the course of our walk with God.

What I practice and what I encourage others to practice is to see the truth of ecclesia, of Paul’s “living according to the Spirit” (Romans 8), of Spiritual gifts and talents, of Paul’s “gifts, ministries and out-workings” (1 Corinthians 12) – to see these things not as theologies and doctrines but as practical realities.

Ecclesia is not some mysterious fantasy but the practical reality of living together as the household of God.  Living according to the Spirit is not the practice of a few mystics in a monastery but the practical reality of a dynamic day-by-day relationship with God more real than our best human relationship.

Every human being – whether redeemed or not – is a mixture of physical traits, personality, talents and special abilities endowed by God as a unique individual manifestation of the image of God our Father – in the same way our offspring are unique individual manifestations of us as biological parents.  The Spiritual (or second) birth is at least as real as the natural (or first) birth, and we share the DNA of our Spiritual Father.  As I have said in an earlier post, the substance of salvation is Christ-likeness: coming to actually experience, in real time, being made like Jesus in every respect except that He didn’t require a second birth – he is the unique once-born son.  When we – and these aspects of who we are – are redeemed, we become manifestly powerful instruments of the Spirit in the business of God’s household, the ecclesia.  God doesn’t change who He made us to be, but in Christ, we become the best possible version of ourselves, for His glory.  In the vast majority of cases, the church only serves to limit, restrict, suppress or kill the Spiritual person God made us to be.  It does this because it represents religion (the re-binding-up of one made free by redemption and justification) with a fetish for control.

Every human being really comes into his own when the unique combination of personality, physical abilities, Spiritual graces (“fruit of the Spirit”) and special abilities (“gifts of the Spirit”) are permitted their full unrestrained outworking.  “Outworking” is a very good English translation of the Greek word energema used by Paul in 1 Corinthians 12:6 – “There are varieties of effects, but the same God works all things in all.”  This is a practical reality in the life of every human being.  Redeemed – and restrained only by the will of the Father and the power of the Spirit – each one becomes an actual manifestation of the Spirit for the common good, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:7.

Again let me stress: this is intensely practical stuff, it is not theory or doctrine or theology.  The writers I have referred to throughout this blog are practitioners, not theoreticians or theologians.  David Watson in I Believe in The Church and I Believe in Evangelism; René Padilla in his presentation to the 1975 International Congress on World Evangelisation Lausanne, “Evangelism and the World”; Gene Edwards in How to Meet; Neil Cole in Organic Church; Frank Viola in his series of five pivotal works including Reimagining Church; Paul Vieira in Jesus Has Left the Building; Floyd McClung in You See Bones I See An Army; David Orton in Snakes in the Temple; Greg Boyd in The Myth of a Christian Nation and the Myth of a Christian Religion.

Add to that list the ministries of men like A.W. Tozer, Leonard Ravenill, George Warnock and others.

And finally, I will add my own name to the list.  I have a commission in God for the household of God – as we all do.  When we live as ecclesia instead of church and follow the Spirit instead of religion, we will execute our commission and the truth that Paul talks about in Ephesians 4 will blossom before our eyes.  We as individuals will be seen honestly for who and what we are (brothers and servants) and the name of God will not be blasphemed but honoured and praised.

I tried to be an evangelist, but it didn’t work.  I tried to be a pastor, but that didn’t work either.  So I went off ‘into the wilderness’ to be alone with Jesus.  There I found not only Jesus, but Paul and so many other men and women of faith; and there I found the real me.  Jesus didn’t say to me, “you are a such-and-such”.  Instead, he took my face in his hands and lifted it to his eye level and looked at me.  He showed me who I am, but more importantly, he showed me who I was when I was conceived in my mother’s womb.  I saw that he saw me – as part of the huge rope coil of the Father’s household.  Then he simply said to me, ‘I want you to go where I send you, say what I give you to say and do what I give you to do.’

I can’t tell you what to do in terms of specific ministry or calling.  I can tell you my story; and I can encourage you to do what I did.  I did what Jesus and Paul (and many others) did: I went out into the wilderness to sit with my Father.  He initiated me into His tribe, gave me my true name, gave me my equipment, and returned me to my village no longer a child, a boy, but a man on a mission with a commission for the good of the household and the world.  And, like Jesus, I simply tell people, “I must be about my Father’s business.”

What I can say, in terms of what to do, I have said throughout this document and in other places, like the early papers in this series [They MET for instance].  But, equally importantly, the works of the other practitioners I have mentioned throughout are vitally important: Frank Viola, Paul Vieira, Neil Cole, Floyd McClung, Greg Boyd, Gene Edwards, David Orton, David Watson, A.W. Tozer, Leonard Ravenhill.  At the heart of the matter, what we need to do, in general terms, is stop building ‘church’ and start living ecclesia, the household of God.  And if we are living ecclesia, we need to see ‘church’ and ‘building church’ as toxic to humans and to the work of the household of God.

Imagine the world if we all put our time and effort into that instead of into religious activities and church buildings and programs.  We would hum like a well-tuned machine instead of limping along like a car with square wheels.  Back-yard-built machines with improvised mechanics and key parts missing is not the way to make a world-class automobile, but this is how the church is and behaves and thinks.

I believe it is way past time to abandon our back-yard project called church as the failed experiment that it is and get with God’s program of ecclesia.  My commission is about seeing “this gospel of the Kingdom preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations and then the end will come” and I know that I am not alone.  There are millions with complementary commissions from the Father.  What’s wrong, I believe, is that we are playing in the sand-pit building models from man’s visions and plans while God’s actual house remains in ruins – and we seem to not care or to be totally unaware of what is going on.

And I believe the problem is not that we don’t care but that we are blissfully unaware.  We have failed miserably to listen to the apostles prophets and teachers of ecclesia (the equivalent of Micaiah in 1 Kings 22), preferring to listen to the pastors and evangelists of church (the equivalent of the King’s ‘prophets’ in 1 Kings 22).

So many times I hear the excuse, ‘But you have to be practical’.  But Church is only seen to be ‘practical’ because it dominates the scene.  Take a look back at the graphic of the magenta, cyan and yellow lights.  Sure, we can imitate all the colours of the rainbow, but we’re not making a rainbow, only a fake or a faux.  And in the process, the true light (the small segments of red, blue and green) are just an after-thought, an unimportant consequence of our actions.  The problem is that the centre is black; darkness and not light.

We can be ‘practical’ in the things of man and give birth to wind.  Or we can be genuinely practical in the things of the Father’s household and the Father’s business and work to the pattern of dominant red, green and blue (apostles, prophets and teachers) that produces light.  The good thing about this is that when the red, green and blue are focused on the same area, the entire thing is light and the magenta, cyan and yellow (false apostles, prophets and teachers) disappear – and darkness is dispelled.

Church is practical in a few of the things of man.  But I have little interest in those things.  What’s more, you cannot build the house of God (gold, silver and precious stones) using the materials of man (wood, hay and stubble).  Neither can you accomplish the work of the kingdom of God using the methods of the kingdom of man.  And if you work to the pattern of Jesus and Paul, you will not build church or the kingdom of man but ecclesia and the kingdom of God.

Let’s be truly practical – which to me is to stop wasting time effort and money on church (the religion of man) – and put our whole being, body soul and spirit, into ecclesia (the household of God).  No special buildings, no special language, no special rituals, no special times, days or seasons, no special programs, no special clothes, no special laws – nothing but our raw selves given over to the headship of Jesus, the power of the Spirit and the will of the Father.

If we want a reputation and a legacy that bears our name, we can build church and churches.  If we want no reputation but His and no legacy but to be heirs of God and joint-heirs with Jesus, we can lose our life for his sake and find it in His household.  Unfortunately, we tend to think we can do both; have a foot in both camps as it were; have a bet both ways.

There was a time when church could have served as a kind of tutor to bring people to Christ – like the law.  These days, it seeks to bring people to itself and prevent people from living ecclesia.  Its day is past and gone forever.  The household of God is calling and inviting us.

On the fourteenth of February 1966, Australia switched from the British Sterling money system to decimal currency.  For a short time, both currencies were legal tender, until the notes and coins of the old currency was exchanged for the new.  After that time, only the new currency has real value and is the legal tender.  In a similar way, the legal tender of the household of God now is ecclesia, not church.  We can expend great effort accumulating church, but it has no value in the kingdom of God since it is not the legal tender.  Its only value is as a museum piece.

Note:

If you were to travel to Avila Spain, you would be able to visit Los Cuatro Postes (the Four Posts).  The structure is a shrine to St Teresa of Avila.  This ancient structure graphically illustrates well the concept of the Household of God I have been talking about.  The foundation and fixed base, the four columns, the central (empty) cross and the canopy.  I have added the four words to the four columns - these represent the core business and the four pillars of the Household of God.  To me, the cross is the centrepoint of eternity, of time and of God's household.

Meet you in ecclesia - the Household of God.

Blessings to all,
Kevin.

The Household of God (13 - Conclusion)

Series Conclusion

Let me reinforce here – in this matter of ‘church’ there is, I believe, a complete and utter separation between organisation/institution and the people who populate it.  We humans are God-creations.  Ecclesia is a God-creation.  Church is a man-creation and can be dispensed with without spiritual loss.  Church, like law, may have a use to shepherd people towards Jesus, but historically the record of this is not very pretty and not very positive.  It has always been some form of ecclesia, not church, that has borne the gospel to far-flung places and carried people into the embrace of God.  This makes sense because ecclesia is God’s idea, church is man’s idea of God’s idea.

For a moment, I want to draw your attention to something we all live with that serves as a wonderful illustration of this point: the nature and use of colour and light and paint or ink.  This is, of course, from the perspective of a science “layman”.

Pure light that hits a prism refracts into the full spectrum of colours that we observe in our world.  And any colour imaginable is possible by varying the amounts of pure red, green and blue.  Most of the early model colour TV sets came with a badge made of tiny panels of red green and blue.  In simplistic terms, to make yellow light, you blend red and green and so on.  You will see this used to considerable effect in stage theatre.  And when you focus equal amounts of red green and blue light on the one spot, the result is
normal ‘white’ light.

Looking at the graphic above, one can see how theatre lights work: the spot where the red green and blue all meet is normal ‘white’ light.  And in this particular picture, the areas of red, green and blue dominate while the magenta, cyan and yellow are smaller areas.

In this graphic, the area where red and green only overlap gives you yellow; the area where red and blue only overlap gives you magenta; and the area where green and blue only overlap gives you cyan.

However, this is light, not paint or pencil or crayon – or printer ink.  We can only reproduce the colours of our world with these media when we work with the complete negative of the colours of light.  We can reproduce any colour we want, but we have to blend the colour-negatives of red, green and blue.  And what happens when you blend equal amounts of magenta, cyan and yellow on the same spot?  Black – not white.  That’s how your ink-jet printer that uses only the three cartridges can print this page and make it black on white.

Now in the graphic above, I have ‘negative-ised’ the earlier picture and what is the result?  The area where magenta and yellow only overlap gives you red, and so on.  The dominant areas are now magenta, cyan and yellow, the areas of red, green and blue are quite small and the central overlap spot is now black.  This is the complete ‘negative’ of light – and it is how we reproduce on paper or canvas the spectrum of colour of our world.

God is light.  Earth-bound man can see and appreciate and even reproduce light shows, but he is not creating anything, but inventing something that demonstrates the nature and character of God.  And when we want to precisely reproduce what we see in our world with paint or ink or pencil, we do so by using colours from the negative counterpart of light.  Light can overcome darkness, and darkness is the blocking or hindering of light.

Ecclesia is like light, born of God with its past present and future in eternity; church is its negative counterpart, born of man, that at best can attempt to imitate the results of ecclesia; at worst, can obscure, obstruct or oppress ecclesia.  Ecclesia is the original, church is the copy; ecclesia is the genuine, church is the clone.  Church is the hindering or blocking of ecclesia.

Let me reinforce a key point of this entire blog – it is a complete lie and deception that “ecclesia is the Greek word for church”.  That idea came about by the man-made church inserting itself into the divine communication tool we call the bible.  It was the church’s way of self-legitimisation (a type of self-righteousness) and it is a corruption of the highest order.  We can justify and vindicate ourselves, but God is misrepresented in the process.

In Romans 2:24, Paul quotes from an unidentified source and says, “as it is written, the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.”  He clearly says that he was talking to and about Jews.  Unfortunately, the exact same description fits many so-called christians.

You … rely upon the Law and boast in God, and know His will and approve the things that are essential, being instructed out of the Law, and are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of the immature, having in the Law the embodiment of knowledge and of the truth.  You, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself?  You who preach that one shall not steal, do you steal?  You who say that one should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery?  You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?  You who boast in the Law, through your breaking the Law, do you dishonor God? (Romans 2:17-23)

It is worth a quick refresher on Jesus’ definitions of some of these issues as recorded in Matthew chapters 5 to 7 – for instance, lustful looking is adultery and hatred is murder.

Who will deny that “the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles” today because of ‘the church’?  How then can ‘the church’ be the ecclesia?  How can God’s own ‘body’ (Jesus and the Bride) be responsible for the blasphemy of God?  It is both logically and theologically ridiculous!  Ecclesia is the original, born or God.  Church is the copy, born of man; is it any wonder it blasphemes, dishonours and misrepresents God?

In Australia just this week we were reminded yet again of the horrors of the institutions of church pretending to be the household of God.  We find members of 'the clergy' not just engaging in child sexual abuse, but defending the perpetrators and preventing the truth about what happened from coming to light and being judged by the law.  The question the magistrate was

A line I am known to often repeat is that, in Christ, everyone is an original – there are no clones or copies.  However, one of the things church history teaches us is that when we do not see the fruit we expected to see from our ‘christian’ work, we often manufacture fruit and pin it on our church tree (which we also manufactured) in order to give the appearance that all is well with our church, even when we know deep down that something is not right.

For some reason, we don’t seem to see that we are not right.  We are rather like the truck on its side pretending that on its side is right – the way it is supposed to be.  And since we know we cannot deliver our load of goods to where it was supposed to go, we set up shop by the roadside to market the goods to passers-by.  All the while, we act as if this is God’s will and plan and vision.

We need to come clean.  Man does not need church!  He cannot survive as a Jesus-disciple without ecclesia, but he doesn’t need church.  Indeed, even that is missing a key point.  The ecclesia is the people; the people are the ecclesia.  Unlike church, ecclesia is not something people join, it is a divine creation that God joins people to by adoption and grafting and ‘new birth’; it is the very household of God.  Having church or belonging to a church is an entirely separate matter, utilitarian in nature and an organisation that people can join and un-join at will.  I do not know if D.L. Moody was speaking by the Spirit or out of his flesh when he said, “the church is the voluntary association of the saved”, but, from where I sit, it is spot on the mark.

I believe the passion of God is His household.  As members of that household by the kind favour and generosity of God and the sacrificial work of Jesus, it is our passion, our vision, our gospel, our life commitment.  All the peoples of the world need (and deserve) to hear a gospel that contains no church, no religion and no hierarchical order.  That gospel is the gospel of the household of God as instituted by Jesus and witnessed to and faithfully delivered by Paul according to his commission and mandate.

But what have we seen?  Every corner of the earth, with few exceptions, has been bombarded with what Paul called ‘a different gospel’ (Galatians 1:6-7); a gospel that comes with the trappings of religion and ‘church’.  For many people, church has become synonymous with the gospel and then described as bringing religion or christianity to every corner of the world.  This is quite astounding given that the word church does not appear in the original text of our bibles at all – not even once!

We have even taken to training people in evangelism by “planting churches”, a concept that doesn’t exist in the New Testament at all.  Paul didn’t “plant churches” – he didn’t even use the term ‘church’.  He saw himself as planting, but not churches.  He planted the gospel of the household of God.  And he taught the new disciples to practice ecclesia, not church.

Our flawed practice has resulted in not millions of cells of ecclesia (the household of God) or Kingdom Embassies (exclaves of eternity), but a world full of religious organisations and institutions pretending to be ecclesias and teaching people to practice religion and ‘live by the book’.  Paul did nothing of the kind, and his teaching was that the ecclesia lives ‘according to the Spirit’ (see Romans 8).

“Church Planting”, as we call it, is essentially the antithesis of the apostolic work of preaching the gospel and facilitating ecclesia; it is the manufacture of faux ecclesias.  And if we are in fact preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God and facilitating ecclesia, we have no business calling it “church planting” because it isn’t – and it is an insult to the gospel and the ecclesia and the kingdom, and therefore to God.

Imagine what would happen around the world if the US Embassy in Kampala Uganda started running public meetings to preach Che Guevara or the Iranian Ayatollahs.  We don’t seem to understand that this is much like what we are doing.  We are running so-called christian meetings and preaching “a different gospel” from the gospel of God and His kingdom, while claiming to be an outpost of that very kingdom.  The US Government would probably call it treason.  We call it evangelism.

So you can see, many things change when we sit with God and allow His Spirit to be our primary teacher.  And for me, many things must change.  Indeed, I like the title of Brian McLaren’s book, Everything Must Change.  From where I sit, the future that God has been building for His people to this day awaits a time when the gospel of the household of God (not the gospel of church, religion and bible) has been preached to all nations – then the end will come.  We’re a very long way from that; nevertheless I hope – and I will continue to work for that end.

This hope, this end, will not be achieved by the church because it cannot, because the church does not have the imprimatur of God.  In fact, I believe it is just another expression of Judaism.  What Paul says about the Jews in Romans 9-11 might well apply to the institutions of the church.  In Paul’s day, there was a kind of third way, between ecclesia and Judaism.  It was ecclesia plus the rituals that made one a good Jew.  Apostles Paul and Peter had a falling-out over it.  And perhaps the liberty of ecclesia is designed to make the church (and the Jews) jealous and abandon their religion and strictures for the gospel of the household of God.

If we actually understand ecclesia as seen in Jesus and Paul, the church is its antithesis.  Perhaps there is hope – but the hope is not that church can be redeemed (because eternity future does not seem to contain institutions), rather that the people who populate it will know and experience the salvation, redemption, righteousness and justification of Jesus.  I sometimes use Paul’s words in Romans 10:1-8 (regarding the Jews) as a prayer for the populace of ‘Christian City’ and Religion Inc.

Brethren, my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them is for salvation.  For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge.  For not knowing about God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.  For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness for everyone who believes…  The man who practices the righteousness which is based on law has to live by that law.  But the righteousness  based on faith says, ‘The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart’ – that is, the word of faith which we are preaching.

For Paul, it was unthinkable that disciples would not know about the righteousness of God because it was central to the gospel and he and other apostles preached it.  But when was the last time you heard someone preach the gospel of the righteousness of God – even just preached on righteousness?  We have generations of people just like those Paul was talking about here: they don’t know about the righteousness of God, so they go about establishing their own and so do not subject themselves to the righteousness that saves.  People get saved and know this truth not because they’ve heard it preached but because of the grace of God – despite our preaching!  Very sad; very true.

And please don’t kid yourself that righteousness is not important.  Few of us would be able to maintain normal life without righteousness.  We don’t think about it often, but we are able to stand and face the world, and life in general, as well as our families, friends and work-mates because we are able to justify ourselves.  And unless we have some standard of what is right and proper, we are unable to do that.

In the movie Wall Street by 20^th Century Fox, Michael Douglas’ character Gordon Gekko says that famous line, “Greed is good; greed is right; greed works.”  This is a powerful illustration of the point I am making.  ‘Greed is good and greed works’ is Gekko’s fixed seat of truth, his righteousness, his standard of right.  With it, he can justify himself and pursue greed without compunction or guilt.  At the same time, those who do not share Gekko’s standard of rightness do not justify him or what he does, neither do they justify themselves by his standards.

In the absence (or ignorance) of absolutes or any fixed objective standard, we humans manufacture our own so we can be justified in our own eyes and in the eyes of those we want to impress (or those who pay our bills).

Ahhh … if only Gekko had understood the righteousness of God, he might not have created his own righteousness – and perhaps the Global Financial Crisis (the GFC) would never have happened!

Many people clinically diagnosed as mentally ill suffer from a similar thing.  Their brain won’t work properly and give them a fixed compass point, so they struggle to find a meaning and justification for their life.  Many such people can spin out of control and head towards homicide or suicide, depending on their pre-disposition and circumstances.

Let me say again, righteousness and justification are not religious items or theologies, they are issues of human nature and go to the heart of our being able to maintain normal life and relationships.  We go off course when we do not have what I have been calling a ‘fixed seat of truth’ that sets us right and enables us to justify ourselves.  We run into real problems when, like Paul said, we do not know about the righteousness of God and so seek to be self-righteous.  When we self-justify on the basis of self-righteousness, we can end up wildly off-centre.

God’s desire for His children is that we know about His righteousness which is available to us in Christ.  On that basis, we become Christ-righteous instead of self-righteous.  When we are Christ-righteous, we are justified by God, not by ourselves.  And we are justified freely by His grace, not by law – any law.  Paul makes the point that when we are justified by God, no-one can condemn us - not even ourselves.  And that justification is not only good for this life, it is a foundation stone of eternal life.

So, as far as I am concerned, this is the entire business of eternity past, of our earth-bound life, and of eternity future.  God is about His love, His light, His truth, His kingdom, His household, His family - and what brings it all together: His salvation, redemption, righteousness and ustification.  The business of the household of God arises out of the nature and character and passion and will of God Himself.

According to Frank Viola (From Eternity to Here), God’s passion is for a bride for His son, a home, and a family.  I agree entirely – and ecclesia (not the church) answers to that passion.

My way of expressing it is that God’s passion, arising as it does from His nature and His character of love, light and truth, is to establish His kingdom, build a household and create a future – and ecclesia (not the church) answers to that passion.
Cheers,
Kevin.