A Call To The Remnant

In my younger years I was a bricklayer. I laid bricks for twenty five years from the age of 16. I served my apprenticeship for three years. The apprenticeship was developed by the City and Guilds of London which was established around 150 years ago but represented craftsmen and guilds that had been around for over a thousand years. I also went on to take my advanced craft course. In the course of my career I have built many arches, all kinds of arches.

Some were small, spanning windows and doors and smaller openings, and some were as large as thirty feet wide. There is a great amount of skill and knowledge required in order to erect this kind of structure. One of the critical parts of building an arch is building the temporary frame or template that would hold the arch. You can see a small example of a template in the above picture. Imagine the complexity of building a template for huge arches that span great distances and will carry great loads.

Even although I understood the forces that bore down upon an arch and how those forces were transferred outwards towards either end and onto the walls or columns at either side, I was still always nervous when removing the template or the supporting frame once the mortar had set up. Was it going to hold up? Would the structure collapse once the template is removed? Thankfully that never happened. Can you imagine what a structure would look like if the temporary wooden template remained? It would look terrible and defeat the whole purpose of the arch.

I would like to suggest that so much of Christendom consists of the frame and the template. It has never been removed. That which was supposed to be temporary while the structure was being built has never been removed. The template has become an integral and permanent part of the structure. Can I suggest that the buildings, the four walls, the organizations, the denominations and much of the frenetic activity has been at best, the mere template. The bricks and the stones themselves do not require the template to stand.

Jesus is the keystone which holds the arch together. It is the keystone which is the strength and the vital component of the arch. If you have it, the arch works and you can remove the template. If you do not have it you can never remove the template, you will have to rely upon that which was only ever meant to be temporary forever because without the keystone the whole structure would collapse upon removal of the template.

Jesus Himself is the Keystone. He is the preeminent vital part of the structure. With Jesus we need no temporary supports. With Jesus the arch is complete and the templates are removed and there the structure stands in all of its glory, just as it was designed to. As denominations fail and churches have been shuttered and fellowship have, for many, been denied, we have come to discover just who has the Keystone in their arch. God Himself is removing templates all over the world. Will your structure stand?

The remnant saints of God have discovered that with the Keystone in place, the template can be removed and the structure stands. The template has been in place for so long, we consider it part of the actual structure. The mere suggestion of removing the template has been met with blinding fear and rage. Saints, trust the structure that the Lord Himself has designed and built, it was built to stand and so it shall. It shall stand forever for the Lord Himself is the builder.