A Call To The Remnant

Ask the average pastor in the land if he would like the presence of God to come into their gathering and he will invariably say yes. This brings to mind a couple of things. First, the Lord does not come down to enhance the ministry of men. He comes down when He is exalted, when He is glorified and when He alone is lifted up.The Lord must be preeminent in our gatherings. You can have perfectly pleasant meetings week after week, hear good sermons, have good bible studies and so on and so forth and feel good about all of that, but this has nothing to do with His preeminence and our encountering Him and His manifest presence.

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves.(Mat 21:12)

We see in Matthew 21:12 that when Jesus came into the temple, the first thing He did was clean it up. He threw out everyone who was making merchandise out of the temple. If you are in that temple and were making a living out of it, you were unceremoniously ejected. It would have been shocking and humiliating for the Son of God, with a “scourge of small cords,” to whip you and drive you out right there in front of everyone. So in our day of the industrial church, huge buildings, mortgages, coffee shops and bookstores and a multitude of “ministries,” to be supported, what would He do with all of that?

Men cannot have Jesus be preeminent in their gatherings, for in a moment of time most of their programs would be scrapped. Those making a living wage would be fired and the coffee shops and book stores would all be demolished. A huge amount of men, delivered to the spiritual industrial complex from seminaries and Bible schools which are part of the industrial complex, would be driven out. The idol of the pulpit would be destroyed. Men who have became mediators to a vast collection of spectators would be replaced. The gathered people would be participators and not passive nodding heads with the occasional amen. They would be compelled to rise to their feet in the glory of His presence and cry Holy. The Holy Spirit would lay upon a man’s heart a wonderful exhortation and upon another a scripture and a teaching. Someone else would have a song.

Let us look at the exact word our instructions from the unchangeable word of the Living God. If any man speak in an unknown tongue, let it be by two, or at the most by three, and that by course; and let one interpret (1Co 14:27) Now brothers and sisters, is that ambiguous or is not rather straightforward? Stop right there and consider the words of this scripture. Do you have an objection to it? If yes, why? If you accept this as true. what hinders you in fulfilling this? Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge(1Co 14:29) Hard to understand? Ambiguous? Agree with the word of God? Yes? What hinders you in fulfilling this? Are you not without excuse and do we not cast Scripture’s instructions aside in favor of the traditions of men? All of this would only take place if Jesus was preeminent among us. So, is Jesus in your “temple?”

I say all of this to the established “church,” for in fact we the saints are the “Church,” we are His temple. Church is not a place that you go to, church is something that you are born into. The Body of Christ is just that. Not a place but a people. We have our marching orders from the Scriptures on how the Body should be when it gathers. What has happened is that we are so far removed from the truth of that and the reality of the gathering, that if there was a genuine desire and attempt to Biblically worship and gather together, it would not be a reformation but rather a revolution. The first thing that happens in revolutions is that the old order is replaced ( or in secular revolutions probably something worse) The definition of the word revolution is “the overthrow of a government, a sudden and grand change or the movement of one object around the center of another object, an example being the movement of the earth around the sun.

Given the above examples of revolution, we see that many of them fit into our conversation. The overthrow of a government. This would be the dissembling of the denominations and the old order of meeting. A sudden and grand change would describe what it would take to return to the organic and biblical gathering. And the last example would be coming full circle, completing the revolution and coming right back to where it all began. Jesus would be the center of it all and everything would revolve around Him, everything. Man would be replaced from the center, the pulpit would be replaced from the center and Jesus would take back His rightful place and the Holy Spirit would elevate Him in the hearts and minds of the people. The same Holy Spirit would edify the saints in the manner He has already prescribed in the Word. The Word never changed, it was we who left it behind in favor of our own traditions. We elevated men and we shuffled the Lord Jesus off to the side. We relegated Jesus to where He was a mere adornment.