Churches all around the world are going through a transformation. Some for good and some for worse. The main problems seem to be repetitive, one church after another. The devil has been getting good at this game and we so foolish. The main problem with the church is a tunnel vision in everything. While it is sometimes good in some areas, a tunnel vision is the root cause of failure for most churches. Most problems start out internally at the core level. Most are silent killers.
1) Revelation : We are special. We have a unique revelation. We have something no one has. None of these thoughts are neither correct nor helpful. It is sometimes called the Elijah Complex. A special ministry. A special call. A one in a million call. While its good to have a call like this, most are fooled by the devil to a level that it comes to a stage where they can no more accommodate fellow brothers nor look eye to eye at a brother from the church across the street. What are we making us to be? What we are actually doing is cultivating intolerance among the body of Christ. We are saying God is only operating in my life or in my church, We are truly grieving the Holy Spirit. Main problem we fall into this trap is true failure to understand callings.None of this comes from true understanding of the nature of the Lord Jesus nor are we representing the nature of the Lord Jesus.
2) Calling : We have no true understanding of the nature of callings. All we know is our calling. So an evangelist sees only souls. A prophet sees only intimacy. We are not accommodating about the callings of others. But instead we shove our callings onto someone else. If they are not doing what we are called to do, they are not doing anything. To an evangelist, souls is the only thing precious to the Lord. Souls is the currency of heaven for them. They fail to understand that the other offices exist because they are absolutely necessary. And it is together with all the gifts and the offices that the body is complete. If a church is lop sided on any one office, this will slowly catch up to them just like a vitamin deficiency would catch up with a person. If a person would only have food that has vitamin B and lacks all the other vitamins in his diet, it may not be visible in one or 2 days. But in the short run, they come down. They cannot move long with out being balanced. This body that is the church, whether the local church or the whole, needs to be balanced in its diet. No matter what you do, you cannot survive on just one office. A good church must strive to have good pastors and teachers who know the word. Ignoring the word of God or trying to replace experience with sheer enthusiasm is not going to bring in any long term fruits. A single super hero based church fails in the long term, if the leader does not know to understand the other callings and does not step down so that a balanced functioning is possible. A good leader always has a good balance. Like in any enterprise, a good leader is one who can do his work exceedingly good and finds, entrusts, and retains others who are good in their respective capacities. In a church this can translate to finding true giftings and standing just visible enough so that as a whole, it is balanced. We must truly understand that its not our church. It is His. We are not building it. He is. Sometimes in our excitement and enthusiasm, we forget this.
3) Misplaced enthusiasm : We all have a place in the body. Every believer. Our calling or a project is not the opportunity to shove things on someone else's back. The church is not a military base. It is a wrong and misplaced metaphor. But rather, church is home. It is the wellspring of joy and brotherhood. Everything in it happens by love. Not by duty. There is no call of duty in the church. But while it is true that the church is not a military base, every believer is enlisted himself to a military, called the Kingdom Of God. These two are not the same. Your supreme Commander is God. Not your pastor. You are not there to fulfill your pastors calling. Every believer when he is called of God, into the body of Christ, has a duty and a calling. A duty to march forward and take over enemy camps. Destroy the works of the enemy,the devil. It is a war. It is a do or die. If you don't learn to attack and take over enemy territories, its not long, the enemy will start to attack you. The duty of the church is to equip the saints to fight their battle. Not the other way around. The church exists to equip the saints. Not the saints exist to sustain and enlarge the church. It is not biblical nor is it Christ centered. These comes from human thinking and self centered motives even though these are done with good intentions. Equip the saints and release them into the world. Not to build your church but to build the kingdom of God. Yes, a pastor will not get any glory, but that is a call, the pastor has to take.
4) Personal Experiential Christianity : Christianity is more and more being based not on the Word of God but rather personal experiences. Though we shout from the top of the houses that we are not moved by what we see but what we believe, a new generation of believers are going the new age way. While experiences are extremely important, experiences should not permit us to draw conclusions about God. We cannot put God in a box based on personal experiences. We cannot draw general conclusions nor make a law out of things based on personal experiences or visions or encounters. Some of the more prevalent practices born out of such are commonly from the financial and prosperity bandwagon like the law of sowing and reaping. While such a law is no where mentioned in the bible, we are forced to take up false teaching, to accommodate a handle we have acquired through personal experiences. Putting God into our boxes so that God is like a vending machine. You put in 10 bucks, you get 1000.
Sowing and reaping has only been mentioned in the bible in the sense good and bad. You sow goodness you reap goodness. You saw badness you reap badness. This is not anything new in the new testament. The bible always emphasized this theme all throughout. This had nothing to do about sowing money to get back money. The Galatians 6 that talks about sowing and reaping has been taken completely out of its context to promote egoistic self centered men to more of the same. Something to consider in the same league is, when you were born again, God sowed spiritual into you, and your body the bible says is positionally dead (romans 8) and the body and the soul is still the same, then how come we are still speaking prosperity? If God sowed spiritual, are we not expected only to get spiritual? Cos if we put money they say we will only get money. I'm not against prosperity, but just measuring by the same stick. Just because it happens some time, I believe it is absolutely heretic to say that if you give money , God will give you more money because it is Gods law. You know neither God nor His laws. A law by definition is that which would work with out fail irrespective of who does it. Or why or his faith. You take a legal law. Irrespective of who stole or murdered, be it the president or the janitor, you both are going to get the same punishment. It does not matter what you both believed either. Now take a natural law - gravity. No matter what you believe or who it is, any one who would jump down a sky scrapper is going to find out they would hit the ground with bad consequences. The only exception in this is miracles. So a law works for all in general unless in the rarity of a miracle. So if this so called sowing and reaping was a law of God, irrespective of who or how they sowed, their money would come back to them multiplied. But what we see is that this is not the general nature but in exceptional cases that it does. So what we are terming a law, was in fact a miracle. When we twist the word of God or the truth of God, and try to fool the people into giving out money by false promises that don't hold water, is this Jesus that we are representing? These usually happens because of the lack of knowledge of the Word of God and general contempt at trying to understand the word of God. These people generally take their experiences more valuable than something the Lord Jesus said would never change. This comes from spiritual blindness.
Again on the same topic, if I had to give to receive, then this is pure works. Now you want to call this faith? If I told you circumcision was an act of faith would that hold water to you? Spiritual blindness. If your prosperity depended on your giving, you are dependent on your works. This is not the gospel of grace. The bible says, He was made poor that I may be made rich. Not by what I did. But purely by what He did. I know, the bills at the church don't get paid by preaching this. But this is the truth. If the church itself truly believed this so called law, all they had to do was not to beg, but to simply put this to practice. The church could simply give and expect all their needs to be met and be a testimony time and time again so that people would also learn to give without hesitation. Does the church have faith to give all it gets, month after month to prove this law? Another verse taken out of context is Luke 6, Give and it shall be given, good measure, shaken together....First of all, this verse says nothing of giving to God anything. It talks about giving your fellow man, your brother, your neighbor in need and that if we do that, men will give us. Again a sowing and reaping is mentioned here. Doing goodness and receiving goodness. Sowing in to the needs of your pastor is a just and noble deed too. And God will fulfill His word. Sowing goodness or badness is always to another man. not to God. You cannot do good nor bad to God. You cannot make Him more better than He is, nor can you harm Him in any way. Yes now since all the usual new testament verses are out, they now take out Malachi. How convenient. Most of these preachers never preach one word from the old testament, except the convenient Malachi. Always wondered why Duetronomy and Malachi was the only book in the old testament in some people's old testament bible. The challenge in Malachi was addressed to a spiritually dead generation whose only motivation in doing anything was physical gain. They only understood materialistic gains. Their heart did not have the capacity to understand anything else. But Jesus changed all this. The bible says, He changed the stony heart in man and gave us a spiritual life within. That is why materialistic gains were not mentioned explicitly by any of the new testament writers. It did not really matter to them. Paul said he did not care. They could live without it. It did not matter to them. It was not important to them. They knew one thing. They had received something much more precious than all the silver and gold in the world. Peter said, silver and gold i have not, but what I have ....
Jesus said, everything we need would be provided us and we are not to concern ourselves with it. Jesus said, it is the gentiles that worry about daily needs but the Father who feeds the birds of the air and clothes the lilies of the field knows all our needs and will provide us all we need. He said, seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you. (Mathew 6)
Still on the topic of sowing and reaping, another verse that is usually taken out of context to support heretic doctrines are from Mark 4. The Thirty-Sixty-Hundred formula. Give and get back thirty/sixty and a hundred fold. Some take it to extremes of 1000 fold. The verses quoted has absolutely nothing even remotely that you can connect it with money. But this is a verse that is usually talked about just before an offering. The Word is very clear that what was sowed was the Word. And it has nothing to do with the sower. It is not what the sower put but rather where he put it. How could anyone with the right conscience teach you that this verse is talking about financial benefits?
5) The other side to this coin are the churches that don't give much importance to the free working of of the Holy Spirit in miracles and signs and wonders. They are too bound up in the written word, that they bind the Holy Spirit to operate in their life and churches only to an extent they can understand the bible. These churches are also stuck in a rut with false teachings. They want to naturalize the spiritual for the human mind to comprehend God. They draw up conclusions on who God is and what He can do. They define perimeters for the Holy Spirit to work, based on their understanding of the word and the natural things of the world. These churches are not dynamic but static. They are happy with the little things happening around them. Christ is not the last name of Jesus. It means Jesus the anointed One. Any preaching of Jesus without His nature of the anointing is a dead static movement.The promise of the dunamis power by Jesus Christ, when the Holy Spirit comes, is the promise of the dynamic ability to change things. If you say, you believe in the Holy Spirit and are empowered, there must be something to show for it. The kingdom of God is not in words but in power. Let us not try to decide how God is and how He can respond. When you expect the supernatural, you get the supernatural.
Satan has been hitting from all sides. And the lay believers are left with a myriad of doctrines, teachings and revelations. What does this all mean? False teaching. Yes, the greatest and most rampant evil that is in the churches today is false teaching. Most have no time for Word meditation and the rest don't think much of it. They all say they are moving in the Spirit, yet cannot agree on anything much with a church across the street who also claims they have the only truth. Can it be that the same Holy Spirit would tell some thing to one pastor and then tell something against that to another? Everybody is speaking divine words. But most of these contradict the nature of Christ and the Word of God. The spirit of religion has crept into the churches and is choking the life out of it. When will we rise up ? When will we see? Hear the Spirit of God, oh you blind and deaf generation. Seeing you don't see. Hearing you don't comprehend. Shake off your complacency and lean on Me says the Spirit of God. For by every idle word you utter you will be judged. Every little one of mine you have led astray by your false teaching, you shall give account for. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God.
Jesus said in Luke 15:4-7 of God's Word, "Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, 'Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.' I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent."
We were supposed to live centered around the One who gave us our life. Instead, we've lived with ourselves in the center. Sin is deadly and the Bible says it literally carries an eternal death penalty.
