Antioch, Apostolic Sending and Setting - Part 12

As a nation, what are we? Who are we? And only now we are beginning to understand Antioch of Asia. And I'm glad that the Lord had brought that to the heart of His servant this morning because that's exactly where we are right now. Some of you know Love Singapore. I'm part of the Love Singapore movement. And this year, especially the year 2001, we are looking at this year as a year of transition. For the last five, six years, Love Singapore has given itself to Love Singapore. But this year, we are in transition. And next year, we are sensing that God wants Singapore to become Love, Love Singapore to become Love Asia. And with that, the Antioch of Asia call comes into being. But right smack in this year, 2001, as we are transiting between Love Singapore and Love Asia, this year, the year 2001, we are sensing that there is a pause in heaven, that heaven is attempting to say something to us as Singaporeans, as a nation. So while we are quite well-geared on the horizontal axis, picking up strategies after strategies after strategies in the years past, that has brought much favor from heaven and favor among men, and we have seen the gospel advance in our land, somehow personally, this is a personal statement, I felt that while the strategies have been laid out, the substance of being the Antioch of Asia was in lack. What I mean is this. You cannot really separate the character and the calling of being the Antioch of Asia. So while we are pursuing on the horizontal axis as the Antioch of Asia strategies, we cannot ignore the vertical axis of it, that with the calling comes the character. You cannot separate the two. So we are not just becoming the Antioch of Asia, we have to be the Antioch of Asia. And this morning as Brother Katz was sharing, I was receiving what he has to say, as giving us substance as opposed to strategies. Now strategies is what we have in this land. What we need to hear now is that will add substance to who we are as a nation, the Antioch of Asia. So in the sessions following, I ask you to have your hearts wide open, and allow God's servants to add substance into our being, because this is where we are in our journey right now. We need to pick up some substance as to who we are, the character part of it. The calling and the commission is there, but the character must be there, because without that launching pad, we are not going anywhere. So I'm asking you fellow Singaporeans that do not separate what you are hearing this morning, and say this is not what we need to hear, this is precisely what we must hear at this time. So I'm asking of you as fellow Singaporeans to have your hearts wide open, and receive what heaven has to say. Thank you Brother. No, I didn't know it. Would you like to make any response to what Brother George had commented? I appreciate our brother's comment, very encouraging, and I like the way he's phrased it, the substance, the character. That's true, that's the work of the cross. And someone had asked me in the break time, how do we attain to this? And I would say to the ministers in the room, this is your primary challenge, to put before the Lord. How do we move from where we presently are in the conventional configuration, which we know to be as church, the familiar design, to come into this antiochal apostolic reality? How do we move from where we are to come to this? And certainly it's not going to be by a stratagem, or step one, step two, we're not going to do this by principle. But God is going to have to unfold and reveal. I can recommend to you a precious book by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, everybody know the name? You've read The Cost of Discipleship, classic, but have you read a book called Life Together? It's a very slim volume, you'll have to seek for it, get your bookstore to order it, I hope it's still in print. It's the book that he wrote coming out of living underground, at a time when the Nazis were pursuing them in their secret seminary during that time, and they were compelled to live together in an intensity that Lutherans would not otherwise have sought nor desired. And in that experience, being in an underground seminary, avoiding detection and having to be called to an intensity of life together, the Lord opened to Dietrich Bonhoeffer an understanding of a way of perceiving community that is absolutely golden. We have, I won't say we have lived from that book, it's not a manual, but one of the profound quotations that have helped us greatly, because we were called to community. What was my background, what did I know about community 25 years ago, when the Lord spoke to me when my foot came over the chain of that property, End Time Teaching Center, community refuge, that I can say with complete confidence, no community, no refuge. We just came, and He mediated His wisdom to us in our time together in prayer, morning by morning. Our first and best part of the day was given to God extravagantly. We were not occupied with what should we do, you know how we can be intimidated, even by Christians, well what are you doing, as if we need to find a program and activity that justifies what we are about. Community is not going to be an overnight phenomenon that we can perform by principles and by doing. It's going to be an organic phenomenon that is formed by the Spirit over a course of time, through struggle, through disappointment, through heartache, through a suffering of accommodation, seeing the variable condition of the saints, their immaturities, and all of the things that have to be suffered as we wait one for another to come of age. So, my recommendation is, seek the Lord, come together in prayer, even in fastings, and put before Him, Lord, if this is your intention that we be this antiarchal reality for Asia, and we evidently are not yet, how do we move from where we are to the forms that have been communicated to us, maybe largely by American missionaries, to the design that was the church at the first, where your house was filled with your glory, and where the very shadow of Peter falling on the sick brought healing. It was such a demonstration of power in the reality of the truth in which the early church lived. How do we get from where we are to that? And to be willing to be brought from where you are to that. So, for example, I'll speak about our daily prayer times. Prayer hardly describes what God gives us every morning for two hours. And someone will come up to me and say, oh, I covet what you're describing, but I'm living on the other side of town, and there's no way that I could, on a daily basis, meet with other saints, because my home is too distant. Oh, I say, really? Then move. Give up your little nest that you like because it's secluded, and it's what you've always wanted, and it's away from urban congestion, and move into the urban congestion. What are your values? What do you esteem more and desire more? Your privacy and the enjoyment of a setting that you have labor to obtain, or the intimate and frequent relationship with the saints because you're in actual proximity with them. You can even walk from house to house daily breaking bread. I gave a message like this in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. I had a half hour before having to fly out, and I was speaking to some elders just along these lines. I came back a year later. I was picked up at the airport and brought to an apartment building in downtown Kitchener, Ontario, and the entire community had purchased the building and moved into it. Every apartment was occupied by another family of that fellowship, and the basement had a common laundry room, food storage, a nursery for children. They were a community of believers in the heart of Kitchener, because they came from the heart of Kitchener.