The Consummate Church
The Consummate Church
"One day, today is going to become The Day." This is a little "chant" of mine, which I think some churches might well be heartily sick and tired of hearing me repeat? But recite it I shall, if possible (Deo volente!) right up and into that Day...known to the Prophet Malachi ("messenger of Jah") as "the great and dreadful day of the Lord"! (4.5)
It is that Day of days, when the Lamb of God (once so sorely "enthroned" upon the Cross on Golgotha) will be vindicated by His "coronation" as the Lion of the tribe of Judah on the Temple Mount in Israel's Jerusalem.
And before today crashes into The immovable and unyielding Day, there will be ever-intensifying collision between the advancing Kingdom of Heaven and the retreating powers of darkness. This, the soon-coming King Himself calls "a great tribulation"! (Mt 24.21 & 29)
Last year, I wrote and published the e-book, "THE TRIBULATION CHURCH" (www.thetribulationchurch.co.nz). Its key points are.-
1) There will be no Rapture (escape) for the Church before or during the final "great tribulation".
2) Before his fate is sealed by the Return of the King, the devil will hurl every vile thing and employ every foul means to evade his doom by trying to annihilate God's People Israel and God's People the Church.
3) The Church's experience in Hitler's Germany (1933-45) is one of the most powerful and significant prophecies for the End Times. It insistently teaches us two indisputable facts.-
(a) Church as "organisation", maintained by administration and events, is comparatively easily seduced and neutralised by antichrist. Its congregants are meeting-dependent, and require ever-increasing doses of re-assurance and/or excitement from their authority figures...the ever-changing, latest-greatest, "hero" of faith and power. When the crunch came in the 1930s, the German Church just could not compete with Hitler's torch-lit pageants, spell-binding oratory, and promises of "heaven on earth"!
(b) The German prophet, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's message to his own and our day (communicated by deed even more than word) is that God's People are above all an "organism"..."a body with connected interdependent parts sharing a common life" of prayer.
"The church, which is His body." (Eph 1.22-23)
"Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Saviour of the body." (Eph 5.23)
Dietrich was charged by those of God's People who resisted Hitler, with the training of their pastors. He was led, with them, not into programmes of greater intellectual achievement, more efficient business practices, or more skillful event management. The Spirit of Christ trained them for conflict with antichrist by pilgrim-ing them together into " 'a well ordered and well regulated life' hinging and pivoting upon prayer"!
It is my well-considered and now implacable conviction, that that alone which will remain and prove to be Church at the end of the End Times, will be made up of those who have determined to be, and have been made by the very grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, "a house of prayer for all the nations". (Is 56.7, Mk 11.17)
What this will precisely mean practically, for this or that local church in a particular city or nation...I would not arrogantly pretend to know. Nevertheless, I am determined to continue to push and keep on advocating (no matter how unwelcome!) the message of "THE TRIBULATION CHURCH" www.thetribulationchurch.co.nz
I am prepared to press and agitate to the uttermost, for the following to take place.-
A) Every local church to view itself and understand itself first-and-foremost as being, not an organisation which holds meetings (no matter how well-attended or "anointed") or provides social services...but as a family that prays together daily.
B) Every local church to form and support a prayer cell in its "heart" (not just a tolerated, fringe activity!) which undertakes night-and-day corporate prayer based upon the Psalms. This will radically alter the origin of a church's true motivation; prayer, rather than board meetings and flow charts, will become its constant "genesis" and dynamo.
As the Scottish theologian, Peter Taylor Forsyth (1848-1921) has asserted, "There is no such engine ('driving force') for the growth and command of the moral soul, single or social, as prayer...It sets us also at the very centre of the world in God, which gives us the true hierarchy of things."
The German contemplative and martyr of the Nazis, Edith Stein said, "Official history is silent about these invisible and incalculable forces (of prayer)...Our time is more and more determined, when all else fails, to hope for ultimate salvation from these hidden sources (of prayer)."
This need not in any way-shape-or-form threaten or undermine a church's leadership structure...provided its leaders are not merely praying lip-service to being a house of prayer. If they do "play games", and continue covertly to "rule" (Heb 3.7) from their offices rather than their knees, then such deserve to feel discombobulated and should expect "unrest and base actions"! (Jas 3.16)
I say "prayer cells" situated within the local body, rather than an organisation. It has ever been God's way to bring necessary change, not by grand-scale, impressive, wholesale restructuring, but by the "seed" principle. Thus King Jesus describes His Kingdom.-
"How shall we picture the kingdom of God, or by what parable shall we present it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the soil, though it is smaller than all the seeds that are upon the soil, yet when it is sown, it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and forms large branches; so that the birds of the air can nest under its shade." (Mk 4.30-32)
In the world, "great" things begin in a grand way...all trumpets and drums. In the Kingdom of God, they commonly begin microscopically.-
"The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened." (Mt 13.33)
God will reform His Church into an authentic "house of prayer for all nations" in readiness for the last of the Last Days, through strategically placed, white-hot "coals" of night-and-day prayer. Each might only consist of three or four pray-ers, for whom adoration and intercession are their "meat and drink"! They will most likely be quite unimpressive and unassuming folk, who have nevertheless proven to their own satisfaction that, "God will direct other men in Spirit to provide us with all that is necessary for this life (of prayer), such as food and clothes and everything else, when He sees that we refuse to leave off the work of His love to busy ourselves about those things." ("The Cloud of Unknowing" Anon 14th C)
And because such believe absolutely that the local church is God's basic and irreplaceable building block for His Kingdom, their prayers will.-
(i) Fly like sparks out into the wider church, kindling more and fiercer fires of praise, worship, and intercession.
(ii) Slowly but surely elevate the overall water table of prayer and community across the whole Body.
To those who retreat from this prospect muttering about "mysticism" and "Rome", etc etc...I would say as crudely and bluntly as is decent, "Grow up!" If someone offers you a glass of cool, clean water, do you feel obliged to chew up and swallow the vessel after you drink? If you did, you'd be pretty dumb...if not mad!
I simply couldn't care less how God's good and holy gifts come packaged. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was accused of compromising his Reformed faith. But at the end of WW2, his students gratefully testified just how well his training (living a life of organised, corporate praying of the Psalms) had prepared them for Gestapo prisons and concentration camps.
Only Eternity will finally and fully reveal what fires were lit and what sparks flew out into the Nazi darkness, from Dietrich's "primitive...underground" seminary which was "buried" in the "tiny" Baltic village of Finkenwalde. His "school of prayer's" first abode was described as a "neglected pigsty" which the students themselves made habitable. How are we preparing today, for our own inevitable time of trial, tomorrow?
"For who has despised the day of small things?" (Zec 4.10)
"But now for a brief moment grace has been shown from the Lord our God, to leave us an escaped remnant and to give us a peg in His holy place, that our God may enlighten our eyes and grant us a little reviving in our bondage." (Ezr 9.8)
"And He spoke to the man clothed in linen and said, 'Enter between the whirling wheels under the cherubim and fill your hands with coals of fire from between the cherubim and scatter them over the city.' " (Eze 10.2)
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