In One Sentence.......errrrm

My friend Paul asked me if I could say in one sentence what the difference was with what I am calling thirdlevel Christianity?
by Chris Welch Facebook Note on Wednesday, 09 March 2011 at 18:50.

Yes and No. I came up with 2 words...which was better than a sentence. But then took a whole page to explain them. Rich Novek has just done a post on Normal Christianity as per Watchman Nee

http://www.facebook.com/notes/rich-novek/the-normal-christian-life-part-i/10150426405615167

You see, in the Bible and in the Spirit there is only one type of Christian Life. It is lived by Christ in us, and He sees to it that it comes to pass. All we have to do is learn about what has already long ago been accomplished on our behalf and believe it. It's just that on earth right now are churches at all sorts of stages of believing fragments of this gospel, and attaching other things that just simply are not anything to do with it at all. Do we study all the abberrations or do we just return to the template?

Then there are the growth levels of 1 John 2. And this is how I refer to church types as well. The end destination. None of us begin at the end destination, but it's kind of easier if you know where your church is heading to, like the direction sign on your bus. I am in Havant area. I can catch a bus to Guildford,London or say York. If I want a bus to York I have to go to London and change there. And we can always change churches en route too. But how confusing it would be if I picked a bus that said York in the North, but actually it was only going to Guildford. And this is how it is with churches. They all have grandiose signboards, but the believing in the churches is quite different. Charismatic churches which I call secondlevel have this annoying habit of making out they will get you to maturity, yet 50 years of tithing later, you are not in ministry, you don't know how to minister, and you are a tongue talking pew-sitter, and no one even asks why. Evangelical churches , I call them 1stlevel churches have great Word content, and because of this you actually get a certain proportion that actually believe the stuff, and reach an incredible maturity, it's just that rudely shoving the working of the Holy Spirit out of their meetings, everything takes decades and decades, if it ever happens at all.

read more here: http://080808onnowto.blogspot.com/2011/03/why-must-we-doggedly-stick-with-this_05.html

Here is my reply to Paul

1st/2ndLevel v 3rd level

I can do better than a sentence Paul. One word. Separation.

Or two words

Separation for the first two, union for the third level.

For ages loads of us were racking our brains trying to work out why Richard Wurmbrand could say "could I have a cuppa tea?", and we'd feel blessed, and some of our UK ministries could preach at great length and it left us flat.What's the difference?

Wurmbrand is an extreme case....look what he'd been through in Communist jails? But really it all boiled down to him believing his new identity no matter what was thrown at him. He was so fixed in that new identity , he had real authority in Christ. Any verse he shared it was as though he'd just written it.

We come to Christ believing wholeheartedly in the "separated gospel" of the Devil. We believe that we have separate godlike existences to God. It is also why we feel the alienation all existentialists write about. The truth we can't accept early on in our Christian lives, because separation is such a gorgeous thing to us....is that the "bad feelings" we feel, the depressions, the bleakness, are all the junk the devil wanders round with continuously. Since the Fall he has made us "children of wrath" like him , by virtue of this baloney "separation " existence. When after a long stint of Romans 7 activity in our life, we suddenly realise......hey hold on....all this isn't me.....I'm just a vessel ,a container.....it's "Sin in me". In our desperation our innards cry.....who can set me free from this law of sin and death?

Oh ....you did already....Thanks be to God through Christ Jesus etc etc


It's a blessed relief when we realise we actually are OK. Provided we're not hooked on living in separation ever again. And each time we try....zoom....some bad fruit of the fall slips out again.

Without fail an atheist is totally pseuded out by the devil on the condition of man. Because an atheist only sees separation....cos he sees no God....he naively ascribes every wrongdoing, every sin to man alone and

in many an atheist's words

Nietzsche, Stalin, Mao.......Man is crap

No, man is glorious. It's his "separation theology" he learned in Genesis 3 that is crap, and by virtue of marriage to a false usurping spirit, begets children , or sins, that are hideous. But at no point is the container itself hideous. It was declared "very good" in the Garden

1st and secondlevel churches preach law. Trying harder. Doing more Bible stuff. 2ndlevel churches like ours, when they are not preaching, but are being open to the Spirit, are actually already a good deal further on......until they start preaching again. The moment the conscious "following the Spirit" stops, perhaps when the music does everyone returns to their "gospel of separation".

3rd level churches ( and I've never been in one) don't seem to care so much about "getting into the presence of God"....because they live there. They live from that conscious union of their new identity in Christ. But I guess when they do worship it's like David taking the Ark back to Jerusalem, because everyone "has a testimony" by this point. It's one thing to know you're sins are covered.....it's quite another to know that your whole innard's bias towards sin has had such a blasting, you are now just occupied with being Christ in your form, and learning how it works. Obviously, like Corrie Ten Boom, Watchman Nee,Witness Lee, Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Richard Wurmbrand,Ed Miller,Norman Grubb you want everyone you meet to know the same victory. I mean why would you bother with anything else?

The whole irony is that when the real gospel is preached in the Spirit, it sounds like another gospel. That's because the one we've heard in our churches is a dead letter version of the New Testament. It has no Spirit and Life in it. It's like Paul describing the Jewish synagogues......"every time the Law is read a veil covers their mind".

Spirit preachers have such spiritual warfare just to read out passages of the Bible in most churches. People's capacity to hear the real Word is so small. It is increased by breakthrough in worship, so if there is a thirdleveller around you can almost see them jockeying for position to make use of the Spirit opening while the going is good. In an early conference a guy Daniel Yordy and I know called Eldred Linden dived into preach at such a point, but he had the discernment to refuse the translation offered into Spanish. Even though his Spanish was worse, he knew that if he let a 2ndleveller translate for him, they'd literally translate everything he said back down to 2ndlevel format....the format of separation. Jorge Pradas muttered once about Eldred that he preached a different gospel. Jorge was learning very fast, but at that time he was still completely into separation still. Actually Eldred preached word for word what the Bible actually says. We re-translate everything back down to "separation" format. About modifying our behaviour, struggling with this, old man that. Virtually no time is left for simply believing what the Bible actually says about us



Just as this was what was radical about Andrew Wommak when he taught on healing, I believe Andrew now teaches grace properly in the same way.....preaching those Bible verses we get so rarely in Havant. Or up until now anyway.

Hopefully that's given some idea of the 2 words Separation and Union. So the words were shorter, but the explanation longer!!!

Chris

Comment by Daniel Yordy on FB

Interesting concept - explain the third level (feast) in one sentence. That's the kind of challenge I like. Yet it's an exercise that we can try more than one set of words to accomplish.

Here is one attempt, I found this sentence in somethin...g I started writing recently, but did not finish.

"From 1978 until this day, the revelation of Jesus Christ, me, Daniel Yordy, personally being included in the manifestation of the sons of God, the Lord Jesus Christ revealed fully in me without limitation and beyond all measure, right here upon this earth in this life and in this age, has not left off its mighty grip upon my heart."

The third level is the fullness of Christ revealed without measure in us right now upon this earth. There is a simple dividing line. Most Christians believe that it can't be, that the fullness of Christ must wait until "heaven." That unbelief blocks their hearts and dulls their minds. Once a person believes for all the fullness of Christ, including victory over death, for us right here, right now, then the heavens are opened, and that person can begin to see all that God speaks.

That dividing line of believing is the primary difference in the anointing that comes upon a word such as Chris described with Eldred Lindon.

Boiled down to a simple equation. Do you believe that God fulfills all that He speaks in us right here right now? Or not? There is only one simple difference between the manifested sons of God moving in all authority upon this earth, and us. They believe what God says and we do not.See more
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