A Syn and Melchizedek summary.Part VIII

I have now made this From the Mystery of Sin to the Mystery of Syn Part VIII

The two recent series dovetail into one another and I wanted to hammer home a few of my findings over the years.

The word Pathology means the branch of medical science that studies the causes and nature and effects of diseases .

Living a more or less continuous stretch of my life in Christian community, brought me face up to the window with my own spiritual pathology and that of a community's. I wanted to find an answer. I had to find an answer. I believed from the Word that there was an answer. But I was aware that we hadn't found it. Not in our daily living.

One of the best early keys came from a leadership couple called Stan and Averil Warren. They seemed streets ahead in this living business which is why they were chosen to lead the Bible House.

Stan taught from Amos "Seek Me and Live". In other words any failure, or any attempt at moving on into our vision of what we wanted from life was going to come out of our Seeking God.
And I would have to say that most of us found a lot from God in this way. Firsthand. On our insides. And not by rote-learning off other people teaching techniques.In fact when I got the breakthrough I was looking for,this was eventually how it came. I only subsequently learned through Norman Grubb and his Zerubbabel group about "what had happened" and was able to verbalise it in the 1989 tape "Third level Christianity".

Averil used to say something interesting. Whenever we made errors in the house, or bondages in our life were being exposed....she wasn't primarily interested with just getting those issues right.
She would say simply "We need to pray God into that area of your life. You just need more of God."

Subsequently I have found out more about the detail of why these two details are absolutely correct. So rather than learning completely new stuff and starting some new weird sect or something, I'd describe it in the words of Ed Miller as just "turning the light switch on" in a room I already knew.

Sheila Atchley had an alternative image for my one about "the suspended orb of God's Word". She used the picture of a curtain rod. You've got the flowing and beautiful line of a curtain, but only because it is tensioned correctly overhead with a curtain rod.

In February I was restringing a Bechstein piano in Kegworth and only had one week to do all the strings, all the hammers ,all the dampers and then regulate the thing so that the new parts worked properly....oh and tune the thing to stability a gazillion times!!! And I facebooked people saying how tough it was "re-stringing when the tuning pins had not arrived". Because Bechsteins
have these little fixing holes in things called "agraffes", I was able to cut some of the strings to length at least, and have them sitting there loosely in position.But they do tend to flop around and obstruct each other.

So what's the punchline? Yup. The strings need to be tensioned by the presence of tuning pins at the other end. Maybe they are not up to full tension yet. For that you have to have restrung the whole piano! The whole piano shares the downstrain evenly so that one portion is not overtensioned. A fully tuned midsize Bechstein has a collective tension of 25 tons! (that by the way is another prophetic Church image)

But even putting strings on, there has to be this tension in order that strings do not foul each other.

How does that relate to us? Well, for grace teaching to really work on our insides and produce the Jesus life, we do need covenant. We do need law! But not this time as a tool for condemnation to show us our need for a Saviour. This time it is the leveraging tool that Christ uses to believe "Who we are" against.
Imagine a hippy called "Death" who a couple of us met in Amersham,round his house,witnessing to him.I was 15 or 16. The guy didn't believe in paying his way. Didn't believe in working. He had taken over a couple's house and was squatting in it. He only believed in medicating his feelings with hash. He didn't believe in marriage, only living with who he chose when he chose. If his partner had kids, then as long as it suited him he would sort of be some kind of parental figure.
Until the child crossed his will, and would be bundled out of his way.

What was going on here? He was one of the most extreme versions I have ever met of a guy who was stripping his life of every covenantal boundary. Milder versions are now everywhere you look.
People think freedom is not being shown up for being what you are. A lazy,good for nothing,non- producing,selfish ,twisted, non-relational island who demands the whole of external humanity meets him on his terms and only his terms...or stuff them all!
Death had tried to rid himself of all external measuring devices which would read back to him what an idiot he was.

We need covenantal measuring devices. They are good for our lives. This is one of the functions of the local Body of Christ. To be light to us. About ourselves.
But unless local believers know who they are in Christ, you get the opposite extreme occurring whereby far from being a House after the Order of Melchizedek who are helping you with the very real covenantal issues of life/family job etc. they are making up laws of "tithing mint and cummin". They are tethering your life to all sorts of false covenants that work to destroy your life and keep you from the very real covenantal responsibilities God has given you.

Which brings us to 2 important questions which at first seem unrelated.

Why is Body life not the same as socialism?
And is Pariotism a good or bad thing?

Here is the answer to both.
If each individual is living his or her life as Christ as me in my form...Body life is Syn Life...is collective divine life....you're living out a mystery together. And Patriotism is the healthy expression of corporate life on a national scale.

But conversely..
if each individual does not know he or she has died with Christ and his or her life is now hidden with Christ in God the Father.....
then put that bunch together and you get socialism. You might as well be atheists. You will be expressing the life of your father the devil just as ably as any Russia or China under communism.
And your collective Patriotism will be a "super" representation of your false ego image of being a god in your own right, either expressed in a Russian or Chinese form of demonstrating your atom bombs through your streets on a yearly basis, or in the more benign but even more deceived version of America, appointing itself as Big Brother nation to defend other causes,(but only when oil runs out, or its own interests are threatened) namely Iraq, but not Zimbabwe or North Korea for instance. This deceit was ofcourse highlighted 20 years ago in the album "Joshua Tree " by U2.

So to the Free Believer's network I would say the answer to bad church is not no church, it is rather church run in the order of Melchizedek.