Antioch, Apostolic Sending and Setting - Part 5

Not just on Sunday, but Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, for those that believe, we're together. Until we are in that kind of relationship, saints, that will take more than Sunday services, more than 10,000 Sunday services to obtain, there'll be no proper vertical alignment with God, for it's the desperation and need that is provoked by earnest living together that drives us to God, and an intensity and depth by which we would not otherwise have sought him. You following me? I'm enjoying the English language this morning. Every word is precise, there's no fat on this, there's no flab, this is lean, so I hope that you've been schooled and prepared to follow such communication. For example, one of the things that was painful for me in my Pentecostal earlier time was the monthly communion in which we were all given a little plastic cup and a little wafer and waited for the signal when we would eat and drink together. Well, we may have gestated and taken in something at the same moment, but it was anything but together. Alongside, yes, but together. Those that believe we're together is a much deeper statement than the proximity to one another impugns. So there I'm sitting with a stranger on one side, a stranger on the other side, holding my cup and wafer. It was an ordeal, not a blessing. But when we came to community, it wasn't once a month, it became daily, as in fact is my practice even now, daily communion. Why? Because we needed the impartation afresh of the life of God expressed in the bread and in the wine, which are much more than symbols. Symbols will never nourish you. But the life of God in the substance of the bread and the spirit of God in the substance of the wine mediates, brings something, for me, as your faith is so be it unto you, that was necessary and vital because we found out that being nice guys was not enough after the first two weeks. We could be nice guys for the first week or two. After that, we ran out of patience, sympathy, love. But we needed all of the attributes of God to be to each other what we must in the intensity of what church is when it becomes community. And until you become that, you'll not be able to receive the Jews that come. It may well be that the Jews that come is God's provision to compel the church to an apostolic mode of being that it would not otherwise have sought because, frankly, we prefer privacy. We prefer anonymity. We prefer merely to be alongside than to be together. They worshipped the Lord together with fastings. Not only were they different in their racial and ethnic origins and their histories of those things that had characteristically divided men, and now they were so unified that they could worship together, but they were also different in their callings, prophets and teachers. And if you think that those callings are compatible, you don't know. A teacher has scarce patience for a prophetic man. Prophetic man sees the large picture, the significance, the hidden things, but very careless in terms of line upon line, precept upon precept. And the teacher, so painstaking in his fidelity to the world, can't see beyond his nose. One is lost in the details, the other in the larger view. And that is the very nature that God himself has created and intended in those callings. So how do these two worship the Lord together is as much the question of how being Jew or Gentile worshipped the Lord together that needs to be a basis for reconciliation even in the callings of God. That can only take place at Antioch. Not because of its geographic location, except the being where it was geographically, it reflected and brought in the whole composition of diverse races, ethnic groups, nationalities that gave the church its genius. The first apostolic sending is not out of Jerusalem, it's out of Antioch. And so I need to ask, where are we here? This is Singapore. Is Singapore an Antioch? In the intention of God, I know in the intention of men it should be a great commercial center, but in the intention of God, what does he intend for the diversity that is represented here ethnically and nationally? Does it have the potential again to configure in such a way a reality of authentic union that is not, what's the word, ecumenical, that is not religiously polite, that has not come cheaply nor easily without men first bringing to light and to the surface the deep and hidden things that they have taken in with their mother's milk? I can't believe that Chinese believers have forgiven the Japanese, maybe politely, but in the deeps, without some first bringing out even things more deep than you yourself recognize. Do you know that there came a time when I met with Jewish believers, all of whom were in ministry, in Brooklyn, New York, we had a time of seeking the Lord together, and the Lord showed us that without exception, every one of us still bore deep-seated resentment and hostility against Christians and against Gentiles. Be grateful that the Lord brought deliverance in that day, or the words that I'm speaking to you today would be the same, only they would be barbed. There would be a hook in them. I would be unconsciously expressing through the words a hostility still resident against Gentiles and against the Church. It took a deliverance. I didn't realize how deep was this animosity. Why should it be otherwise? My mother only spoke about them, the goyim, the Gentiles, them, the enemy. They are different, other. Even though I could shun that off in my liberal view of tolerance for all men, still, the spirit of it, you hear it, you drink it, you take it in with your mother's milk, with the air. There are deep things. Ecumenicism is a fraud. It's a political, religious hoax. It's altogether superficial and cheap, that we're going to hug someone with a turnaround collar and that will affect a real statement of agreement. God's after something much deeper. You know what he's after? He's after the same reality of relationship in the Church with each other in their diversity as the Godhead enjoys with each person of the Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That we should have in ourselves the same quality of relationship, forbearance, love, and deference as the persons of the Godhead have one to another. The Father to the Son, the Son to the Father, the Holy Spirit to the Son. God wants to see replicated on the earth the genius of what he is in heaven, as someone said, God himself is a sweet company. I want to tell you, dear saints, you don't come from polite religiosity and tolerant acceptance and ecumenical union to this reality without pain, without a suffering, without a cross. God is the God of truth and not feigned and superficial imitation. The Church is the ground and pillar of truth.