Category Archives: Church Relevance

Going on Without the Camp

by Michael

Crowded CampingNow Moses used to take the tent and to pitch it without the camp, afar off from the camp; and he called it, The tent of meeting. And it came to pass, that every one that sought Jehovah went out unto the tent of meeting, which was without the camp.
(Exo 33:7 ASV)

Have you ever gone out on a weekend camping trip to experience God’s undefiled creation only to end up at a camp sight that is soon crowded with other campers, their screaming kids, barking dogs, blaring boom boxes, roaring dirt bikes and ATV’s, etc., and you end up wondering what it means to “get away from it all”? Well, for may of us our first attempts at following Jesus Christ was not much different. In our pursuit of God’s created church there was soon so much noise and confusion among other Christians that we could no longer hear the voice of the One who had drawn us away from the world unto Himself.

The following is from T. Austin-Sparks and I couldn’t have said it better about what it means to go on without the camp…

Let us go out to Him, outside the camp, and bear the disgrace He bore. (Hebrews 13:13 NLT)

We can organize our movements, lay our plans, and draft our schemes. We can lay it all out according to the New Testament and it can be dead, ineffective…. You see the difference between a traditional system, whether it be Judaism or Christianity, and a living thing coming all the time in a living way out from the Christ Himself by the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit Himself doing it. Well, this is going to cost something. See what it meant for these people. At the end of this letter you come on this: “Wherefore, Christ also… suffered without the camp. Let us therefore go to Him without the camp, bearing His reproach.” The camp was Judaism, and He suffered without the camp because He repudiated Judaism and stood for the realization of all God’s thoughts as in Himself personally. He gathered up everything into His own person, “I am.” It is the Christ who is the full sum and embodiment of all God’s thoughts and ways, and that take s the place of Judaism, and He, therefore, repudiated Judaism and suffered without the camp. “Let us go to Him without the camp.”

What is the issue? If you are going to take this line you are going to repudiate organized Christianity, going to repudiate Christendom as a traditional system, going to repudiate that order of things which is made, and going, therefore, to suffer reproach and be outside of the camp suffering His reproach. In other words, we are immediately going to come up against that force of antagonism to stop what has come in through the death and resurrection and exaltation of the Lord Jesus, the heavenly thing. Is it not sad that these people met it through God’s historic people, the people who claimed to have the oracles, to be the elect, to be the favored of the Lord? It is always like that. “A man’s foes shall be those of his own household.” Do not narrow that down to the limits of a family where one is a Christian and all the rest are not. That is not the point at all. It is his own household, the Christian household. You will meet the antagonism to what has come in from heaven as a heavenly thing; you will meet the antagonism amongst those who are the traditional people of God in this dispensation. That is how it will be. That is going to be the cost of a walk in Life with the Lord and not with man, knowing the Lord for yourself.

By T. Austin-Sparks from: The Kingdom That Cannot be Shaken – Chapter 2 

Relevance and the Gospel

by Michael

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Writing about the fallen state of the visible church is not my favorite subject, but I was confronted with something this last weekend that I must address. How long has it been since you have heard the good news of the Kingdom of God preached in a church? How long has it been since Jesus was so presented to you in a sermon that all you wanted to do was get alone with Him and press ever deeper into His presence? Do we even know what our high calling IN Jesus Christ is, “In HIM we live and move and have our being”?

How far will we take, “being all things to all men” in the name of “relevance”? I went to visit a brother and his family in a near by state over the weekend and he invited me to “go to church” with them in a nearby large town in the area. It was called “Skull Church.” I kid you not! The “pastor” (a young guy of less than 30 years) wasn’t even in the building but telecasting his sermon live from another location to the satellite churches he had started (so much for a close pastoral touch or home visit… and they call them “shepherds”?).They had a very loud rock band that did the “worship” and the place was painted in dark colors and in the dark during the “worship” and the “sermon.” All this was to attract the youth and appeal to them and their feddish for loud rock music and wearing white skulls on their black clothes and on the back of their vehicles. And get this, the sermon was about Satan. As Satan continues his onslaught on the world and our youth are turning wholesale to homosexuality and start wearing falex symbols on their clothes will the churches follow suit that they might be relative? How far must the testimony of Christ be drug through the dirt in the name of reaching those in the dark?

I finally got up and left after about half way through “the sermon” and felt totally drained. How much lower will churches go under the guise of being “more relative” to the world in its fallen state? Whatever happened to being relative to the kingdom of heaven and giving the lost a choice between the devil’s kingdom of darkness in this world and God’s kingdom that is illuminated by His light? Did Jesus sleep with the halots and collect taxes for the publicans so they could relate to Him? Did He help Annis with his bazar and money changing tables in the temple that He might be more “relevant” to the religious Jews? Not hardly!

Of the apostate church of the last days we are warned:

And he called out with a mighty voice, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! It has become a dwelling place of demons, a haunt of every foul spirit, a haunt of every foul and hateful bird; for all nations have drunk the wine of her impure passion, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have grown rich with the wealth of her wantonness.” Then I heard another voice from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues; for her sins are heaped high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities.
(Revelation 18:2-5 RSVA)

Jesus said,

“I am the light of the world: he that follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” (John 8:12 KJ2000)

He was a shinning Light in a dark world and was in the world but not OF the world and the true body of Christ is called to carry on in that same Light until He returns, not hide that light under a bushel.

Frankly, I think the salt has lost its savor and that Jesus has left the building and it is time for us to do the same.