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The War for the Soul of the Church
While it is fitting that many Christians have focused their attention on Heaven – we all want to go there when we die (and also share our faith with unbelievers so that they may ultimately go there as well) – there is more for us to think about. God wants us to consider not only Heaven, but the Earth as well; He has a plan to fill it with His glory. In other words, as important as evangelism is, there is more to God’s purpose than to simply bring a vast number of believers to Heaven when they die.
When we read in the Scriptures the writings of the apostles and the prophets, we see the Lord’s distinct yearning to construct for himself a house for His own habitation. Jesus promised that He would build His Church and that Hell would fail in its best attempts to overthrow it (Matthew 16:18).
And to be clear – a house is more than a pile of gathered stones.
God’s plan is not to simply gather together and then quantify the building material. Such material must then be integrated together by the power of the Holy Spirit. And then He must bring His house to completion. Over the last two thousand years, though heavenly construction has been going on, many seem not to have noticed.
Starting on the day of Pentecost, the Lord began His building program. He so filled 120 disciples with His Spirit that onlookers thought they were drunk. In addressing the crowd’s confusion, Peter brought clarity.
But this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh.”
According to Peter’s words, the last days had begun. And God’s plan was to pour out His Spirit not just in Israel, but worldwide. A chief characteristic of Heaven’s work in Church history is that the Lord will simply arise in the power of His presence everywhere.
The problem is that whenever He manifests His presence, creation begins to shake. Indeed, mountains melt like wax before Him (Psalm 97:5). In our own generation, the recent economic and political tremors among the nations all reveal an agitation on Earth because of an initiative from Heaven.
God is arising into the Earth because He has a plan. And He is taking the whole planet on into the next phase of His work. And like the onlookers in Acts Chapter 2, we need apostolic clarity in these days.
And just like the Lord called three thousand Jewish onlookers on the day of Pentecost to come to know Him, so today the call is going out worldwide for men and women from all nations to turn from their ways and draw near to Him.
But there are oppressive powers of darkness seeking to cloud the issues, to turn many against the gospel of Christ, and to specifically oppose and discourage believers. When the apostle Paul despaired even of life itself in the city of Ephesus, his own words were that he had been in conflict with spiritual wild beasts. And when he did not even have the strength to lift himself up off the ground, the Lord arose on his behalf and brought him into new dimensions of godly insight and power. Here is our hope – Heaven’s commitment to the building project.
God knows exactly what He has to work with when it comes to the building material of His house. He knows our weaknesses, our doubts, and our failures. Yet He has committed himself to abide in us, to preserve us, and to bring us to His stated goal. In fact, He is using us as the parchment upon which He is writing a word to the nations. And He promises that the ultimate glory of this venture will far surpass the glory of His previous writing project on tablets of stone.
Since Christ is God’s present word to the nations, and since history culminates in His personal return, then what God is writing into our hearts today is the present gradual unfolding of history’s conclusion. In other words, the Lord Jesus intends to both presently and in the future come into greater clarity among His people before the eyes of the nations introducing the final day. And since one of Jesus’ concluding acts on the final day will be the destruction of lawlessness in His house, His present and increasing revelation of himself among us expresses His current warfare against such lawlessness today. To put it another way, He is arising to destroy everything in and among us that distracts attention from Him. After all, it is His house that we are participating in. And He is building it according to His own specs.
But there is and will be persistent resistance to this process. What began as a mystery of lawlessness in the Church two thousand years ago will culminate in a “fleshing out” of that mystery in a corporate expression or “man” of lawlessness whom Jesus will slay and bring to an end by the appearance of His coming (2 Thessalonians 2:7-8). Two mysteries – one of lawlessness and the other of Christ will be increasingly made known among God’s people, and all who name the name of the Lord Jesus will have to make choices concerning which one of these they will align themselves with in the coming years.
Along these lines, one of the functions of a restored New Testament apostolic and prophetic ministry will be to help congregations make that choice. And just as significantly, one of the clear indications of false apostolic and prophetic ministry done in the name of Jesus will be to draw believers to make the wrong choice on specifically this very issue. The false apostles that came among the Corinthian believers exalted themselves and undermined the work of God as they opposed His servant Paul.
Paul’s response was not so much that he defended himself, but that he revealed Christ through word and deed. Through both the spoken and written word, God granted the grace necessary for the church at Corinth to make the proper choice and then turn in the proper direction. Here is where spiritual discernment was necessary. Who accurately represented the Lord? Was it Paul or the “super-apostles”?
Similarly, many ministries in the coming years will manifest great power through the gifts of the Holy Spirit. But if they have chosen to move in a way of self-promotion and self-exaltation, those to whom they minister may be blessed (by receiving words of knowledge, being healed, experiencing miracles), but they will not at the same time experience clear insight into the life-changing and character-transforming power of Christ. While they may applaud powerfully delivered messages, they will not see their need to change to become more attuned to the humble character of the Lord, because such humility will not be the motivating heart attitudes of those ministering to them.
To put all this another way, God will not allow proud and self-promoting men and women to build His house; He will only let them build a sect, a stream, a movement, with themselves as the “head” and the main force behind it. But such streams will increasingly have to come to grips with the need to change and receive Christ in His role as the true head of His Church.
Among all the wars presently being fought on the Earth in our day, the most significant one is the conflict over the Lord’s house. Indeed, a war for the soul of the Church is already underway. Two men are emerging: a corporate expression of lawlessness and the corporate expression of Christ. In order to facilitate this war, God has begun an invasion of His own house. Through the influence of false ministries, many believers have been led to build fortifications or strongholds in their minds to protect wrong ways of thinking. But God will develop and release among us a multitude of apostolic and prophetic ministries with the authority to tear down such strongholds and to take captive the thoughts of many to the obedience of Christ.
And let us be clear. The Lord Jesus Christ within us wants us to respond to Him with humble obedience just like He did unto the Father two thousand years ago. He did not come to glorify himself, but to reveal the glory of the One who had sent Him.
And as He concluded His earthly ministry, He cried out to His Father that those He loved could have with the Father what He himself had. Even as the Father was within Him, and He was in the Father, He asked that His people could be plunged into God as well. With God in them and they alive in Him, a new entity would be revealed on earth. Christ would have a body with its members integrated with one another and with Him. And the resulting miraculous oneness would so stun the world that many among the nations would turn to Him and believe. Israel as well would then turn to Him in those days releasing the final great visitations of God among the nations before the end.
Here is the key to the glory of God filling the earth as the waters cover the sea. When Israel views the Church she must see Christ, her Messiah revealed in a corporate body. The exaltation of the names of mighty men and women of God will simply not suffice. The organizing and institutionalizing of Christianity will not suffice either. God is again preparing a body for His Son. Whatever among us that distracts attention from Him undermines the whole process and must be removed.
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