I posted this up yesterday to my Wordpress site, but I know not to just share a link to that here. I do want your prayers and feedback -- and frankly, your encouragement -- because I'm rather undone.
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"Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.” Matthew 24:2
In Matthew 21, Jesus entered the Temple in Jerusalem and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, turning over tables of merchants and money-changers and prophetically condemning them as robbers in the house of prayer. He left, went to Bethany, and returned to the Temple later. At that point in Matthew's narrative began a spiraling climax, a standoff between the powers-that-were in Jerusalem and the King of the Jews. The absolute war of words between Jesus and the Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, and priests, etc., stretched into Matthew 24.
In Matthew 24, Jesus left the Temple for the last known time. After having just declared the house "desolate” (Matthew 23:38), Jesus' disciples, apparently not absorbing His point, "came to point out to Him the buildings of the temple” as if to say, "You've got to be kidding.” Jesus flatly responded, in essence, "You see this? It's coming completely down. Not even one stone of it will be left on top of another.”
A desolate house, like a divided house, cannot stand. A house devoted in name and indwelled in vain cannot stand. A house whose builder and maker is not God cannot be devoted to Him because He will not keep a house whose occupants reserve to themselves any right or power for their own gratification.
In 70AD, the Roman general Titus, with perhaps four legions of soldiers under his command, set Jerusalem ablaze after a long siege that saw many inhabitants of the city die by starvation and disease. The fight that preceded the burning was hand-to-hand, house-to-house. When soldiers finally reached the Temple, they were so enraged and determined to destroy the Jewish people that they hastily set fire to the Temple before all of its gold treasures could be removed. Gold and silver melted in abundance and poured through the cracks and gaps in the stones of the Temple walls. The walls themselves became a mine of sorts that, soon after, would give way to Roman pry bars while those same soldiers dismantled the whole structure as they separated from it the molten riches held therein. Not one stone was left upon another.
Jesus said of the church, "Upon this rock, I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Matthew 16:18. The rock Jesus referred to has been variously labeled, but suffice to say that He is the foundation of His church (1 Cor. 3:11). The church of Jesus will not lose to the onslaught of hell.
His church is a house not built with hands. (Acts 17:24). "The Most High does not live in houses made by human hands.” Acts 7:48. He is not worshiped by our hands. (Acts 17:25). His church is the "household of God...built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone” which grows into a "holy temple in the Lord”, built together for "a habitation of God through the Spirit.” Ephesians 2:19-22
His people, though, are pouring themselves like melted gold into the cracks and gaps of houses built with human hands. We are lighting afire the structures of our own designs and wasting the precious gifts of God, inviting invaders to take us away like merchandise for their own exploitation.
I'm holding nothing back in these remarks. My wife and I left a fellowship months ago because it had run Pentecost aground and made it shipwreck. (If you're at all interested, you can read my earlier post from early this year, "What's Wrong With Pentecost?”, which forms a backdrop yet again for what is in my heart today.) We started attending another local Pentecostal/Charismatic church in our hometown. For six months, we attended and today [Sunday, 9-20-15] in the middle of service, we looked at each other and said, "Let's go.” We just got up and walked out.
I told my wife, "I think I'm through with Pentecostal churches. And I'm heartbroken about it because of God.” You see, the Pentecostal Holiness movement that truly started with the Great Awakening and into the late 19th century and blossomed into the 20th is no longer. There is little discernible hunger for God in truth in what is left of the churches born from that movement.
I am wrestling in my own heart to such an extent that I am willing to lay aside all labels about myself as a "Pentecostal” this or that. The term, as precious and precise as it was as an identifier of a certain kind of Christianity that loved Jesus above all and sought to glorify Him in the earth in a humble witness of power and orthodox Biblical truth and practice, is now a meaningless brand name that is being rotated out of consciousness. Whenever it is used, it is largely misused. Conversations with anyone anymore that include the word are all but impossible.
And, it is true that our churches that appropriated the name ”“ or even that of its illegitimate cousin, "Charismatic”, and even the more recent and even more nebulous appellation of "Spirit-filled” churches ”“ have become desolate houses fit for dismantling.
In fact, we don't yet collectively know it, but the blazes are already burning in them and the fires are not the revival kind. Tripe as praise. Pep rallies as prayer. Sermons fall in one or more of a handful of categories of abject hellishness: alliterated lists of points that do not deliver the uncircumcised heart to the cutting edge of the word of God; scream-fests; hipster speeches by hair-gelled boys or even crunchy-haired old men that are aimed at being "relevant” rather than the transformation of regenerated wretches into reflections of the Person of Jesus; angst-ridden talks to make middle-class suburbanites feel better about their first-world struggles instead of leading them to daily death to self; and Joel Osteen who is now a genre rather than just a guy. We are on fire within and whatever of that which remains precious and of God is being melted for separation from the stones of our monuments to self that we shamefully still call "churches”.
As I sit here in bewildered disgust at all of it, one thought resounds in my heart and mind: Where is the prophet of God to declare LOCALLY to each town, community and city in this nation for God's people to come out from its cocoon of worldliness and false doctrine and repent because the time of the Day of the Lord is at hand? Where is the fear of God in us? Where is the burden of the Lord among us? Do we even know Him at all? Where is the one who will stand as starkly as Jeremiah, willing to be called "crazy”, "idiotic”, "subversive”, "out of his mind”, "liar” ”“ all for the sake of obeying the Lord and making His true testimony of Himself clearly known so that all who reject it are without excuse?
His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clear His threshing floor; and He will gather His wheat into the barn, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. Matthew 3:12. He is ready to separate the chaff from the wheat with His winnowing fork. Those who truly belong to Jesus and who are ready to suffer loss of all personal comfort, advantage and even family are like winnowing forks in His hand. His prophets make clear who He is and what He says so that anyone who denies Him has no excuse. Anyone who delays their full, immediate submission to the actual authority of Jesus Christ now is without excuse, and cannot be identified among His own. They are chaff, separated from the wheat. The wheat is the true grain of the true Sower, bearing fruit in the Holy Spirit in His due time. The sweep of the fork of the declared prophetic word separates the chaff from the grain and the winds of culture, the winds of the ways of the world easily carry the chaff to the side where it can be gathered for destruction.
The church as we see it in America is extremely flammable chaff. That sounds like the whining of a disgruntled rabblerouser. But it is still true. The church is unaware of itself as chaff because it relies for its identity on so much other chaff that thinks it is still part of the grain. We have sized ourselves up, seen ourselves so favorably, assessed ourselves as the people of God, yet we've been blown about by culture, into the popular demands of "church growth”. We're sold on being a "this kind” or "that kind” of church that embraces and tries merely to redeem the world's ways instead of repenting of them. It manifests itself in the music of the church and the ministers of the church. And, I submit to you that the so-called "Pentecostal-Charismatic” or "Spirit-filled” church in America has been blown so much farther afield from the heaps of the grain of Christ that the fires among us may consume its false witness first.
By the mercies of God, may He grant an awakening and a spirit of repentance among us quickly.
