The modern day church is our ventilator.
Posted by appolus on April 18, 2020
Many of us have learned a lot in the recent weeks about ventilators. They dominated the headlines as it seemed there was a great shortage of them. In many ways we came to equate ventilators with life. In actuality, up to 80% of patients who are ventilated die. So what exactly does a ventilator do and what are the dangers? Ventilators “breathe,” for the patients. They have to be sedated. They push air into the lungs and extract that air back out. In effect, they are inflating and deflating the lungs because you cannot. It is mechanical breathing. The dangers are many and they include organ failure, infection, over-inflating and long term lung damage. The longer one is on a ventilator the less likely that they will be able to come of a ventilator.
Breathing is life. Without breath we die. Without breath there is no life. In Genesis 2:7 we see that God formed man from the dust of the earth, but that man had no life until God breathed into Him. God’s breath is life. No one ever died when God breathed into them. In Ezekiel 37 the question is asked about the dry bones in the valley “can these bones live?” And upon these bones appeared flesh and sinew but without the breath of God they had no life. It was God commanded breath that brought these dead bodies to life.
In countless churches across the world and institutions of men, there sits in the pew bodies, yet these bodies have not the breath of God in them. The church itself is like a ventilator. It does the breathing from them. And as in the natural ventilators these church ventilators force air into the lungs. These patients are also required to be sedated. They are lulled into a world where they are not required to move, little realizing that the longer this goes on their dependence upon the “ventilator,’ grows and every organ in their bodies begin to be damaged by this artificial air as opposed to God’s breath.
The roots of our understanding of the Holy Spirit come from the word “ruach,’ meaning wind or breath. People often speak of the wind of the Spirit and we see Jesus breath on His disciples in John 20:22 and they received the Holy Spirit. The essence of all of this is that we cannot do a single thing without the breath of God in us. It is how we operate as individual saints and it is how the Body of Christ was also designed. The Body needs God’s breath. The Body of Christ needs the breath of the Holy Spirit in them to operate. Without it they will die, or perhaps worse, end up “inside,’ a ventilator called church where the breathing is mechanical and counterfeit.
If you know that you are dying within the confines of a building that has sedated you, meaning all the teaching, all the preaching, all the sharing all the worship, all the Words of knowledge, all the exhortations and so on are done for you, the longer you stay there the greater the dependency and long term damage there will be and of course it will ultimately lead to death. The breath of life dwells solely within God and His Holy Spirit. Without that, our bodies of congregations will be no different than a body that cannot breath for itself.
Get off the ventilators and go find the breath of life. It is out there, it does exist, it is not mechanical, it needs no smoke machines nor does it need to dim the lights or entertain us. What we all need is His breath. Oh Father in Heaven blow upon your children, open up the eyes of those who are ventilated and yet who yearn to breath free. Can these bones live oh Lord? You know. Come from the four winds, oh breath, and breathe upon these dead that they may live.
A Call To The Remnant 
lcbrack said
This is so insightful. Thank you. Loy Leslie
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appolus said
God bless you sister………………bro Frank
lcbrack said
Lori, this is like what I was writing to you that I am seeing about the church today.
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Robert Taylor said
Brother Frank, i have been reading your articles for more than 15 years. All of them have been good, many of them have been excellent, and a few have been exceptional. This one you posted today is above exceptional. I am saying that witho9ut being flattering. I am saying that to encourage you to keep putting out the word of God in this dry and desolate desert that the church hs entered into. I am going to use this one from the pulpit.
appolus said
I would like to hear that sermon brother :)…………………bro Frank
AFChief said
Good word Brother. My wife and I left the 4 wall church 5 years ago. I was an elder in an up and coming Charismatic Church. The longer I stayed in the Church the more my heart was continually grieved. Something didn’t not feel right. If felt like I was just going through the motions every week in this Church. In our meetings with the Pastor I continued to see a “spirit of pride”. It was ALWAYS his way or no way at all. I have been a Christians since 1982 (I’m 59) and have see this “spirit of pride” in every church I have been in. I left a church before this one where I was the Youth Pastor because I saw pride in the Pastor’s heart. The Holy Spirit opened my wife’s eyes at the same time as mine as with both knew it was time to leave. The other Elder in the church left with us and we started a home church where we meet whenever we want to. It was such a relief to leave the 4 walled Church and just be in relationship with other Christians with no pressure to have a bible study or anything else. Just to get together and fellowship, pray or what anyone wants to talk about.
This website here http://homechurchhelp.com/biblical-pastors showed me how Pastors actually hinder growth and that it is a terrible thing to pay a Pastor to preach to us. It was a real eye opener.
Also Brother, I don’t know if you remember or not, but I asked for your prayers 5 years ago as I was dealing with cancer. God healed me from Cancer and opened my eyes to what I was eating was causing the cancer. The book “God’s way to ultimate health” by Dr. George H. Malkmus saved my life. If you or anyone dealing with any kind of disease I highly recommend you get this book. They way we are eating today is causing disease and killing us.
Lisa said
What a great article and good analogy of the ventilators vs church. There’s a good read by Peter Whyte called “Come out of her my people”. It’s also talking about the church system. God bless you brother!