Godhead

The Church God Uses

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What is “the Church God uses,” and how do we become that Church?

Lately, I’ve had numerous encounters with fellow believers who espouse a Christianity that makes no sense to me. It makes no sense because it misses entirely the role of the Church in the world. How that’s possible, I can’t understand. The New Testament can’t be understood unless we grasp what God intended when He called the Church into being.

To become the Church God uses, we must rediscover the one distinction that sets the Church apart from all other groups and institutions on this planet. We can talk about what the Church does, its commission, its command of the things of God, but none of those define the Church.

What makes the Church The Church ? The Holy Spirit.

Have we forgotten the mind-blowing reality of Pentecost? The Eternal Creator God came and indwelt men and women! He sealed them for eternity as His people. He empowered them with charismata by His Holy Spirit. The charge Jesus Christ gave could now be fulfilled because He lived inside those who believed on His name!

The Muslims don’t have the Holy Spirit. The Hindus don’t have the Holy Spirit. The Rotary Club doesn’t have the Holy Spirit. The United Nations doesn’t have the Holy Spirit.

The Church of Jesus Christ alone has the Holy Spirit! That radical truth quakes the world and demolishes every misconception we hold about the task Christ charged those of us who have the Holy Spirit.

The Lord speaks:

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
—Acts 1:8

The transcendent power of the Holy Spirit took a handful of human rabble and used them to turn the world on its head! God-filled people tore down the wisdom of the philosophers. God-filled people raised the dead. God-filled people touched the untouchable and loved the unlovable. Why? Because God put His Holy Spirit in them—and us today–to accomplish His will on earth.

Christ gave us a commission and provided Himself living in us to make it happen. All we must do is say yes to that commission.

All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.

—2 Corinthians 5:18-20a

He gave us the ministry of reconciliation. He didn’t claim that ministry for Himself, but charged us to do it! And we can do it because He empowers us by His Holy Spirit.

Think of it—we are His ambassadors!

An ambassador comes in the name of the king of his nation, for the king has empowered the ambassador as his full representative. The ambassador embodies the law of the king, the words of the king, the ministrations of the king, and the power of the king, for the king Himself has imbued the ambassador with his title. When others receive the ambassador in their homes and palaces, it’s as if they receive the king himself.

Do we understand this, Church? Do we understand our ambassadorship as the people who minister King Jesus in all His glory? Do we understand what He has given us and the price He paid for it so that we can establish His Kingdom?

Some would say the need for fully-empowered ambassadors passed away once the initial establishment of the Church came to fruition. But that’s a grievous error. For the Church of Jesus Christ is forever being established until the Great Day of the Lord when He comes again in glory. The Church is still being established in people groups and nations that have never before heard the Gospel. And the Church is still being established from generation to generation. Because the Church is perpetually being established on earth, we ambassadors of Christ continue to be imbued with all the gifts, truths, and power to meet the commission of Christ as those first Christians on the day of Pentecost. None of those tools and gifts used to establish the first church have passed because the Church continues to be established!

For as Peter quoted from the Prophet Joel on that Day:

“‘And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on my male servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy. And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke; the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.'”
—Acts 2:17-21

The empowerment of the Church to do the work of Christ continues unbroken and in full until the perfect King and Kingdom come in full revelation on the Day of the Lord, just as it says in the Scriptures. We are His ambassadors in the complete charge and power that He gave us until the end of time.

And we are to do the work.

But some don’t believe this.

If you’re a parent, you know that sometimes kids don’t always do what you ask them. Take cleaning a room. You ask the child to do the work of cleaning the room, you provide garbage bags, dusters, shelves and closets, and even a vacuum. And yet how many times have we all heard that precious little child look us square in the eye and say, “No, you do it!”

I think I speak for every parent here when I say that insolence doesn’t make mom and dad happy.

But it’s worse than that. Far worse.

Imagine that you literally wrote the book on cleaning. All knowledge and power to clean resides in you. You then tell your child that you will make the cleaning a snap to do because you will come live inside him/her and make it possible to do the work, even if it seems impossible. You lay your hands upon your child and confer all your cleaning skills in a moment. Afterwards, your moppet looks you square in the eye, folds those little arms, and says, “No, you do it!”

Watching, waiting to see who will do the workFolks, sad to say, that’s today’s Church. God gave us His Holy Spirit to work through us, but we continue to resist doing the work. We keep going back to the Father and telling Him He needs to do the work Himself. Even though He empowered us to do it by His Spirit, we’re sitting this one out. Or we’re picking and choosing when He can work through us and when He can’t, asking Him to bypass us to do the work when it seems too tough.

I’ve said this more times on this blog than I care to think, but if the Church doesn’t do the work, why do we think God’s going to step in and bypass us to get it done? When the widows and orphans of the Book of Acts needed to be fed, did God do it by raining down manna from heaven? No! He used the Church to feed them because God tasked the Church with that job and empowered them to do it.

Take a look at one man the Lord chose to do that work:

Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” And what they said pleased the whole gathering, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch.

—Acts 6:1-5

And Stephen, full of grace and power, was doing great wonders and signs among the people. Then some of those who belonged to the synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called), and of the Cyrenians, and of the Alexandrians, and of those from Cilicia and Asia, rose up and disputed with Stephen. But they could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he was speaking.
—Acts 6:8-10

God chose a man full of the Holy Spirit, an ambassador of His Kingdom, to wait tables filled with the lowest of the low, the widows and orphans of Palestine. Why? Because He trusts that kind of man to do the work.

Folks, God equips us for a reason: to do the work. We can’t sit back and act as if He’ll bypass us to do it if we sit this one out. Nor can we tell Him we don’t want Him to use us in impossible or supernatural ways. If that’s the way we think, then we should pack up the Church and go home.

The Scriptures exist so we can do the work:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.
—2 Timothy 3:16-17

Faith exists so we can do the work:

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.
—James 2:14-18

The Church God uses understands this. It understands it’s empowered by God to do the work. It knows that apart from God we can do nothing, but it also knows we do not stand apart from God! He lives in us by His Spirit, and He is perpetually rewarding those who do the work with a larger container to hold His poured-out Spirit. And from that growing container, greater works will be done so that even the mountain cannot remain if told to be cast into the sea.

The priest and Levite who passed by the robbery victim lying near death on the side of the road were of Israel, but they didn’t do the work of their God. Instead, they passed the work back to God and insisted that He do it. But the Samaritan, filled with the kind of love that only the Holy Spirit can instill, saw the need and did the work. He didn’t pray to know what to do. He saw the need, understood the love of God within him, and did the work. He didn’t need to ask if he should do the work, because the Lord had already said yes. And the Lord always says yes to doing the work.

Every day, God brings others in desperate straits into our lives. They might not know Christ. They might be destitute. They might be facing disease or discouragement. God gave us His Spirit to do the work. His Spirit does not change, nor does He flinch in the face of the work. He empowers to do the work today exactly as He did 2000 years ago because the work has not changed and neither has He. We have to trust the Spirit.

If we want to be the Church God uses, we have to do the work. If we want to be the Church God uses, we must see the need and meet the need. If we want to be the Church God uses, we must not toss the work back to Him to do apart from us, but understand that He will work through us because He lives in us. That’s our reason to exist. That’s our worship.

If we want to be the Church God uses, if we truly want to be with all our hearts, we will be.

Are we ready?

Becoming Spiritually Literate

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For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.
—Hebrews 8:10-13

I don’t normally jump all over someone else’s posts. Nor do I encourage rancor in the Godblogosphere since it (100 percent of the time) accomplishes nothing good for the Kingdom. But I saw something this weekend that just made my jaw drop.

Over at the Council of Reforming Churches, Tony Carter wrote an innocuous-looking post entitled “Reasons for Reading.” As an avid reader, I fully support reading. If I can look back on one good thing I did for my son, it’s that I got him reading at a young age—and enjoying it immensely. He goes over to another kid’s house and scopes out the books before the toys. If nothing else I do for him educationally, at least I know he’ll have a love for books.

No, what troubled me more than anything was Carter’s reasoning for why all Christians should be avid readers:

[Reading] is the primary means through which God has chosen to communicate to his people.

In short, no. Not even close.

Now before I get a hundred Scripture verses tossed my way, let me make a very simple (and historically) accurate statement: The reason that reading CANNOT be the primary means through which God has chosen to communicate to His people is that for most of human history, very few people could read. Illiteracy is the primary state of most humans throughout civilization, and only the cultural and governmental elite possessed a literacy rate worth mentioning.

I shouldn’t have to draw out this conclusion, but if most people in human history are/were illiterate, than that goes for most of the people labeled “Christian.”

This poses a horrid problem then, for if what Carter says is true in his statement, then most Christians were fundamentally cut off from communicating with God.

Let’s go even further and understand that even for those Christians who could read, very few of them had a Bible. Even during the days of the early Church, only a few households had any written Scriptures at all to select from. The situation gets worse when we consider the plight of the Gentiles, who had little access to what were then considered Jewish writings.

Further historical analysis shows that Christianity swept through the Roman Empire largely through the poor, who rarely had the kind of education that would allow them to read or write. The common people who embraced Christ so readily had almost no reading material of any kind, much less anything considered Biblical.

More to the point, it would be a millennia and half before the printing press even made owning a copy of the Bible possible, and still possessing copies of the Scriptures lay beyond the reach of the large majority of Christians.

So simply from a historical and sociological standpoint, it’s impossible to claim that reading is the primary means by which God communicates with His people.

But if not reading, what?

Well, for one, we know that oral communication made up much of what the people heard of God. Those few who could read may have been able to use that skill as a stepping stone to teaching others the Gospel. Again, history shows that the leaders of the Church possessed some level of literacy, or at least the ability to pass on what they heard orally. This explains the need for solid preaching—many people had no access to the Scriptures except from the preaching they heard.

But even this poses problems, for the second you remove the leaders from the life of the Christian, the common people end up deaf to God.

No, what is needed is the ability to always come before God, to hear Him, and to communicate with Him in such a way that even the most powerless, poverty-stricken disciple can talk with Him. That ability must not discriminate. It can’t be reserved for one special group or another. It must be available to all.

So what is God’s primary means of communicating with His people?

The Holy Spirit.

Not a believer exists who exists without the Spirit. Access to Scriptures may come and go. One may be able to read the KJV with total comprehension or one may be unable to even read or write one’s name. But no matter what, God gave us a means of communicating with Him and with each other through the Holy Spirit.

Need more proof?

When did the Church come into existence? At Pentecost. And what was the sign of Pentecost? Tongues of fireThe Holy Spirit coming to indwell Man. And what was the sign of proof for that indwelling? A communication gift—tongues.

Even better, what distinguished the Church from the old Temple-based system in Israel comes down to access. The Temple system demanded literacy and was restricted to a priestly class of elites. The glory of Christ’s sacrifice to gather to Himself a a Bride is the rending of the Temple veil and a Holy God making his home in even the lowliest person. By the Holy Spirit alone are we made equals. Literacy or illiteracy, the Holy Spirit is the equalizer, transcending man-made barriers.

The Bible itself states that there are limitations to the written word:

Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.
—John 21:25

Truthfully, those books have not been written in pen and ink. If we consider carefully, those “books” are you and me, in that what Christ has done in us by His Spirit fills those unwritten books. Not by any means that can be read in print, but in transformed lives that “speak” and attest to the power of God by the very fact that you and I testify to Christ.

But it all comes by the Holy Spirit.

Because the depths of the wondrous workings of Jesus in our lives hasn’t been codified in its entirety (as is evidenced by the concluding statement of the Gospel of John above) , no limit exists to what we can know of the Godhead or His wonders. And who reveals the depths of the Lord to us?

But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”– these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
—1 Corinthians 2:7-16

I wrote a few weeks ago that we in the American Church continue to give short shrift to the Holy Spirit. Instead, let’s cherish the Holy Spirit and give Him the rightful place as the primary means by which God communicates with His people.