The Bible as Left-brain How To manual : It's rubbish

If you are looking for the How to /Dummies Guide To Christianity don't bother with the Bible. It's not that type of book. It’s a Ruach book of humans becoming the manifest sons of God.

Facebook entry (by Chris Welch)

Last week I was reflecting on how useless the Bible was as a "how to live the Christian Life" manual. The leaders of my church had asked me to explain my views on a double page A4 paper. I wrote that Romans is perhaps the nearest we get to this approach, but even then, not really. It is all most unsatisfactory for seminaries who wish, over the course of a neat packaged three years to transfer a packet of learning to distribute to future flocks.

But then I grasped this. If growth in the Spirit really is in the three phases alluded to in 1 John. If it is really more to do with the revelation of Christ in me, a species called Chris Welch, that is unique, and whose version of Christ in human form will have to be learned by me, and only me, we can see that the "children and young men stages" in 1 John 2 may have been able to operate still to some extent in recipe form - In Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil format. Do this and this, and you will get this. However as we cross the line of Spirit, this isn't so true any more.

And this is the type of Bible we have. We have a Bible that faithfully records God taking up residence in human form. And quite staggeringly so, even in Old Testament format. Each life so different, yet as we mature, the more we can see that, in the Spirit much is the same. God wants a habitation. This is the grand finale in the Book of Revelation.

But in the Old Testament we see completely different life details. Noah’s task and life was totally different from Jacob or Moses. But each heard God on their insides and obeyed. yet if we superimpose Peniel, on top of the burning bush incident, on top of the birth of Isaac, we can see a multilayered version of what maturity in the Spirit looks like.

It is a Name change. And that really is all we are discussing here. It is a burning bush, that never burns up. A commissioning that brings the I AM Presence into the people of God. And this is SO different from the American “Moses Ministries International”. No, all Moses brought with him via his simple shepherd tools, was the Name I am. Norman Grubb shares these things on rather muffled tapes from house meetings.

Now a lot of us have been through a whole pile of Christian groupings over several decades, and each manifestation was God showing more of Himself, both through the positives and the negatives. And we, sure have been though negatives.

THE BIG THING I feel I have is the consciousness that these three levels of maturity are not just being worked out individually. THE CALL on our generation which came loud and clear prophetically in the early Fountain Trust meetings, was that WE WERE the ones charged with raising up the Highway of Holiness in the wilderness.Of raising up the former devastations, rebuilding the cities laid waste, and many other like scriptures from Isaiah. This was a corporate reclamation, which was going to go a long way beyond some kind of Ishmael version of:

Christians invading Republican politics in America

and other versions of Kingdom Now theology which were very suspect.

If anything at all, this is something God Himself is building. As He said to David “I will build you a house...” And so this continues every generation.

Chris sharing 3rd level Christianity as corporate vision in 1990 to around a dozen university reunion friends

So this is the quiet confidence I have even here on Facebook. That a third stage of growth is emerging corporately. In one sense this is not new, for I believe the early apostles had this growth, they all had “this message of that which I have tasted and handled concerning the Word of Life..”, but the stunning thing seems to be that in all the world’s shakings, people now seem to be coming into the Body of Christ more willing to learn about Living on the Rock. A lot of us Christians have spent decades of our walk , until we decided internally that this may be a good idea....what with the way all our houses disappeared without trace in various storms. Maybe, just maybe, this story meant more than a kid’s entertainment in Sunday School.