picture: the doorway to Narnia
And in fact, unimpressive it is.....
The first "thirdlevel" Conference I attended was in Fisher'sPond ,Colden Common just outside Eastleigh Southampton in 1979. The then current names of the house church movement were there like John Noble. The Conference was held in the UK End Times Community under the "covering" of Sam Fife and his movement elders, widely referred to as The Move, and End Time Farm communities, or Wilderness Communities.....
The "outer" form is nolonger relevant. We have moved on. You can forget the last paragraph unless you are detail-minded.
But this point remains. The Conference was totally unimpressive to me. The leaders were unimpressive. Sparks were not flying like in a Morris Cerullo meeting or Rheinhard Bonnke meeting.
So what was it that arrested me?
Some of the most incredible Word I had heard to that point. The preached Word actually began to sound like the letters of the New Testament. Since I was baptised in the Spirit in 1972, I had noticed that there was a huge gulf between the Word we read in the Bible and the rather segmented Word that actually makes it into most pulpits. Mostly emasculated of the visceral quality of Covenant, of Blood, of Death and Life, of the Extremes of God's Word, where like Abraham, we walk between the carcasses of animals and birds surrounded by Blood. Genesis 15:9-21By the way, if you want a sense of this and feel you have missed out...get hold of the various Covenant teaching series by Kenneth Copeland, where he relates his Red Indian Covenant background to Blood Covenant.
The third level Word doesn't really have much hoopla!
It didn't when Jesus did an early foray into the subject, but withdrew until some time later, because it was too much for people to hear. This was when He introduced the words "Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood , you have no life in you." Everybody but the disciples cleared off, and He turned to them also and asked if they wanted to leave. But they held on.
We like the "outer stuff", Jesus doing stuff that is incredible. But some time, Jesus has to address what went wrong in Genesis 3. Now Genesis 3 was also subtle. There were no whizz bang moments. Everything that went wrong happened internally to begin with. Now, when we reach that stage Jesus wants to make "everything right"....this too is an internal Word. Outwardly unimpressive.....but you know it is the most impressive thing of all, because after a while the very surrounding universe begins to shift in sympathy with the internal changes.
After a time of walking in this Word, we go back to the "young men" whizz bangs and while the whizz bangs are impressive, they are usually only "room-sized" whizz bangs. Individual healings.Situations in people's lives suddenly completely and stunningly rectified. While appreciating the whizzbangs, the odour of "independent self" coming off the armpits of the believers is incredible. Suddenly we realise that what seemed so unimpressive as a Word 30 years ago, has made such a difference in our lives.
Jesus as you is literally
filling out
the efficacy of His own suffering
on the Cross
with more of the same.
You see, before we were very happy in such environments:
where the left hand really knew all about the right hand in terms of giving
where we really did address people as Father or Rabbi.....but there is only One True Father
where we really did "tithe our mint and cummin" and do extraordinary religious circuitous hoops and loops, but we never really did right by our families who we hated.... and so on and so on.
The other thing we don't realise in all of the unimpressive outer form of the third level Word is the incredible boundless Power that is hidden within this GOD Word and teaching. You see the "young men" stage is often graced with room-size hoopla. Third level hoopla is on such a giant scale, you don't really notice it on the ground.
Rees Howells was trained in intercession through individual cases of a drunkard here, a sick person there, but his calling was to stop the Dictators in their tracks to preserve free and open communications for the gospel. This actually happened on such a huge scale, no one will ever know for sure humanly.
Ed Miller refused to go another step as a missionary to Argentina unless he met God. He was fed up of his lack of fruit as a Pentecostal ministry. Some time later he has only triggered the first great wave of revival in a totally Catholic South American nation.
You'd never really notice Mother Basilea Schlink humanly. She kind of skipped around in a childlike way for a 70 year old....yet she locked horns with chairman Mao, who wanted to invade Europe,the period that I was there in Darmstadt.....and the next thing we knew Kissinger and Nixon were being invited to China.
You say...no one can prove these things. How are such things possible?
Spoken in another context is the verse :
I give nations for your love
and
I will give you the treasures of darkness.
Paul describes it all as the "might which works within him".
Once you've got past you living your life as an independent self, you live your life as a Romans 12 container, a life laid down. This is no passive thing, for God's life TAKES YOU. As a willing vessel you are put into crushing situations that no man can engineer, arrange or even plan. And HIS MIGHT works within you, out from your very centre, to sustain you,to literally keep you sane, to keep you alive, while inwardly every moment it seems like you are dying. Humanly as a vessel you are capable of nearly nothing, but God's MIGHT works through this weakness as ALMOST total Strength to swing back huge doors of Darkness.The Powers of this present age MUST YIELD. Jesus as you is literally filling out the efficacy of His own suffering on the Cross with more of the same. "That which was lacking" writes Paul. But it is Jesus Himself in you doing it.
Secularism and world church structures are all about the figleaves of how,why and wherefore there is a fundamental disconnect between what our philosophy/doctrine is and the outer world that surrounds us.
The true Jesus and Romans 8 is all about how there is no disconnect, the inner marries the outer.
That's why we have confidence in the 3 stage journey gospel of 1 John 2.
Any counterfeit or shortfall gospel just doesn't work.Period. Other people get their doctrine checked up on by denominational exam boards,
or pyramid apostle structures,
we are like St Paul , we get ours checked by the surrounding universe in Romans 8. Facebook Note Chris Welch
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