The Anabaptist View of the Church

Let's pray. Father, we come to you in the name of Jesus, and we can do nothing without you. Thank you for the reminder of the woman in sin who had repented and who had received forgiveness and loved much as a result.

Help us to be among those people, to recognize our own sin and receive your forgiveness and love you much. And Lord, we thank you that we can cry to you now in times of need. And we just call, join with others who are praying for the Lindsay Mass family and pray for healing there.

And we also pray for the Schaum family, Steve Schaum, Eric Schaum, his mom, his siblings. I pray, God, that you would just comfort them in their time of loss, also with whatever other stresses are on their plate right now. We just pray that you would work in their behalf.

And Lord, I pray for my brother Jeremy now as he gets ready to share a message that you laid on his heart with us, anoint his mouth, anoint our lips, and just guide us through this next little while that we have together. We just pray, Lord, that you would build your kingdom. Your kingdom would come.

Your will would be done this morning. In Jesus' name, amen. You may be seated.

God bless you. Thank you. Good morning, everyone.

It's good to be here. For this morning, I'd like to, I, brother, well, I guess it was Caleb that read the verse, Ephesians 5.27. If you would turn there, that is going to be our theme text, you might say, for today. Ephesians 5.27. And here, Paul is talking about the church.

You can see in previous verses, he's talking about husbands loving their wives like Christ loved the church. But in verse 26, it says, actually 27, it says that he, speaking of Christ, might present it to himself, a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that it should be holy and without blemish. I want to continue this morning on the series I've been doing on anabaptism and what they believed.

The burden for preaching this series is, this is an anabaptist church. It is an anabaptist church and it has anabaptist beliefs. And I think it's a good idea for us to understand why and what the anabaptists were about.

What was their mindset? What was their theology? How did they approach the scriptures? I wasn't raised anabaptist. I was raised Baptist. And so when I joined here, I joined a set of belief systems, a set of values.

And I think it would be important for us to know and understand. I want to speak a little bit this morning about some of the things I've been reading over the last month. If you remember the first sermon, we talked about, we kind of talked about history coming up to the anabaptist movement, what the culture was like, what was happening.

The second sermon, we talked about some of the early Swiss brethren, Conrad Breville, and Felix Mons, and George Blarack, and some of the things that happened there and how they were true disciples of Christ. We looked at the slight, I'm confession. And then the third sermon, we talked about their concept of Golossanheit.

Does anybody remember what that German word means? Golossanheit? Say it. Somebody. What's that? Surrender.

Yes. Their concept of Golossanheit. And so today I want to continue on and I've titled it the Anabaptist View of Gemeind.

Does anybody know what that word means? Gemeind. In German. She probably is.

Yes. What does it mean? Church. Or, it really means, see the Germans had a word Kirche, K-I-R-C-H-E, which was what they would use for church.

But Gemeind means community. And the brothers, the Anabaptist brothers used this word over the word Kirche because it represented something to them that was very important. Something very different than what the Protestants and the Catholics were setting up.

So, this morning I want to tell you about a couple of books I've been reading. A lot of quotes this morning from these books. I'll try to make them interesting.

I've really enjoyed this book and I would love it if as many of us would read it as possible. It was written by a man named Robert Friedman and he, here's, I think I have a picture in the back here, a picture of Robert Friedman here. He was a Jew.

He was a secular Jew raised in a Jewish home, from what I heard, or at least a liberal Jew. And he went to the University of Vienna and was studying, he was particularly interested in studying the smaller groups of the Reformation. And he was so intrigued that his professor gave him three original, or maybe they weren't original, but three manuscripts from the Anabaptists and said, you should read these.

And he read through those and was so intrigued by them that he ended up becoming a Christian and when Hitler started coming around in the area, he was actually imprisoned for, I think, seven years and they somehow miraculously got out and he came over here to the U.S. and he joined a Mennonite church and for the rest of his life he taught on Anabaptist history. He studied it immensely. And so this man, Robert Friedman, he wrote this book, The Theology of Anabaptism.

Very interesting book. I'd highly recommend it. In fact, I bought one for somebody here.

But another book is The Anabaptist View of the Church by Franklin Littell. And then also a couple quotes from Arnold Snyder. He is another historian.

And Harold Bender, I'm sure you've heard of him. He wrote The Anabaptist Vision. Very good article.

And he wrote a lot of articles in the Mennonite Encyclopedia, which I will be quoting from. And so I want to start off with some of this from Robert Friedman. What was The Anabaptist View of the Church? That's what we're going to be talking about this morning.

It starts off here. The idea of the Church, for the Anabaptists, represented the very center of Anabaptist theology and thinking. What a profound statement.

The concept of the Brotherhood Church represented the very center of how Anabaptist theology went and how their thinking went. He goes on. One understands Anabaptists best when starting with the concept of the Gemein, the Brotherhood Church.

He says it's one of the most essential elements in Anabaptist thought. And so, if we're going to understand Anabaptists, if we're going to understand what they were about, we have to understand what they thought of as the Brotherhood Church. As what they thought of the community of brothers.

Now, I can attest to this in my life. I can attest to, you know, even, I think sometimes we fall into this. How do we think of the Church? We come here on Sunday morning.

We hear a good sermon. We sing some good worship songs to the Lord. We might pray on Wednesday night.

But the question is, you know, is that really the Church? Is that what the Church is all about? Is that what God is looking for in the Church? Harold Bender said this. For the Anabaptists, the Church was neither an institution. Now, an institution is something that has hierarchy.

It has plans. It has sacraments, like the Catholic Church. He said, the Anabaptists, the Church was not an institution.

He goes on. Nor the instrument of God for the proclamation of the Divine Word. Now, sometimes we might think of Church as being a place we come here to hear the Divine Word being proclaimed, right? A good sermon.

That's what the Church is about. Come here, hear a good sermon. Harold Bender says, for the Anabaptists, that's not what the Church's main focus was.

It wasn't the instrument for the Divine proclamation of the Word. Or a resource group for individual piety. We might come here this morning and think, you know, I've been walking with the Lord all week.

I have this time where I've been, you know, connecting with Him and I know Him. And so I come here to the Church to be encouraged in that walk with the Lord. He said, that's not just what the Anabaptists thought of the Church either.

He said, it was a brotherhood of love in which the fullness of the Christian life ideal is to be expressed. A brotherhood. That's what Gemeind represents.

It represents the idea of a community. A brotherhood of love in which we can express the true Christian life. That's a pretty big mouthful.

And so I want to start off with a drawing here. In this book, Robert Friedman drew a drawing. And I'll start with the first part of it.

We're going to start out with... These represent the believers. And if you remember, he said... And we'll put God up here. And the Protestant concept of the Church was a place for individual believers to come and hear the proclaimed word, correct theology, and they have a relationship with God.

And that is the Church for them. The Church is really a place that it's strengthening them in their personal relationship with God. Robert Friedman said, the term... This was an interesting quote.

The term, the Kingdom of God. We hear a lot about today, Kingdom Fellowship Weekend, Kingdom Christians, Kingdom Theology, Kingdom everything. He said this, the term, the Kingdom of God, does not appear too frequently in Anabaptist documents.

Interesting. He said, but when we point out to the concrete idea of the Gemeind, the Brotherhood Church, otherwise unknown in the Protestant world, it is a gathering of the reborn, an attempt to translate the Kingdom idea into practical forms of everyday living. And so, it says, they pointed more to, in their documents, more than any other, even more than the word Bruderhof was the word Gemeind.

This idea that the Church, the Brotherhood, this little church, for example, is the concrete, visible expression of the Kingdom of God. It is how the Kingdom of God is expressed to mankind. They understood the Church as the nucleus for the Kingdom of God.

It was the outward expression. In fact, they struggled with the concept of even an invisible Church. They wanted a visible Church.

That's what they talked about. Arnold Snyder says this, For the Anabaptists, the biblical model of Christian community was the congregation Now, he's going to explain what this biblical model is of Christian community. Was the congregation of yielded, that's Colossianite, regenerated, born again, faithful, baptized, committed, and obedient believers.

A community of saints. He goes on. The anchor of Anabaptist theology and spirituality was this community.

This anchor of Anabaptist theology and spirituality was the community. It was the anchor. Formed first by the spiritual.

So, let me explain this. First by the spiritual. First, when you came to Jesus, you were born again.

In your own heart, you saw your sins. Like the lady we read about this morning. In her own heart, she saw her sin.

So, it's first formed by that expression in your heart between you and God. Second, he goes on to say, by believer's baptism in the water. Third, maintained by a fraternal, that means brotherly, admonition or warning or reprimand.

So, it's maintained by a fraternal admonition and then nurtured by the supper of the Lord, by communal worship and visible expressions of love among the members. Now, what that means, that last part, almost all early Anabaptists had some form of community sharing. Now, they weren't all communal like the Hutterites, but they had some form of sharing with each other, of giving of their goods, of giving of their strength.

You'll even hear it today. A lot of Mennonites will say, in our community, it's a concept that's very deep within them, of brotherly love, of sharing of one another's resources. Whether or not we all live in the same house or in the same property, we can still have a heart of brotherly love towards one another, sharing of our things, our resources.

In fact, have you ever noticed in the Lord's Prayer, it doesn't say, my Father who art in heaven, forgive me my sins. It says, our Father which art in heaven. Interesting, that's how the Lord taught us to pray every day.

Our Father, which signifies brotherhood. Forgive us our sins. And he goes on, give us this day.

He says, ye are the light of the world. Not you, singular, but ye, plural, are the light of the world. He goes on, a city.

Think about a city, it's not made up of one person, it's made up of many people. The church, the Anabaptist, one of the Anabaptist writers would talk about the church being a lantern. And it was a lantern that shined out into the dark world that others could see the light of the kingdom of God.

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God. Plural, all together. Menno Simons, an early Anabaptist leader, said this, the holy Christian church must be a spiritual seed, an assembly of the righteous.

And I'd like to ask you this morning, think about this ideal as he says this. Is this what we are? An assembly of the righteous, a community of the saints, which seed is begotten of God, of the living seed of the divine word, and not of teachings, institutions, and fictions of man. It's not just about sermons and about institutions, sacraments, it's about a church that's truly born again, that's truly a divine seed, that's truly an assembly of the righteous saints, not sinners.

He says, yes, they are those who are regenerated, renewed, and converted, who hear and believe and keep all the commandments and will of God and have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts taken from Galatians, who have put on Christ Jesus and reflect him and become like unto him and are heavenly and spiritually minded. That's a pretty high ideal, if you think about it. Mano Simons, that was his definition of the true church, what they wanted to see.

They were coming against the church of their day, which was full of hypocrisy, which was full of unrighteousness. I was reading in the Martyr's Mirror on page 484, two men were being inquired upon and they were asking back and forth and they said, what do you think of the Holy Catholic Church? And his response was, I have in all of my life never been part of a holy church. He said, I've never been in a holy church.

In other words, it's been unholy, it's been filled with unrighteousness. When they were putting those two men to death, some of the common people cried out, this was a pious Christian. If he is not a Christian, there is not one in the whole world.

It's interesting, I've came across these quotes from Martin Luther and, you know, Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation and he taught this concept of grace and toward the end of his life, he started having doubts whether what he taught, the concept of what Protestantism stood for worked out so well. And this is what he said. He said, evangelicals, talking about the Lutherans, now put yourself in Martin Luther's shoes.

You were starting out this church, you had good intentions, you wanted a church that was holy and righteous and this is what he said, are now seven times worse than they were before. Because after having learned the gospel, we steal, tell lies, deceive, eat and drink to excess and practice all manner of vices, all manner of evil. This is what Luther was saying of his own Reformation.

He said we're seven times worse. In fact, another quote he said, we had one devil when we were under Catholicism and now we have seven devils. He said, as soon as our gospel began, decency and modesty were done away with and everybody wished to be perfectly free to do whatever he liked.

Another quote from Luther, the more and longer we preach, the worse matters grow. And finally, who would have begun to preach if we had known beforehand that so much unhappiness, tumult, scandal, blasphemy, ingratitude and wickedness would have been the result. That's what Luther thought towards the end of his life and there's many more quotes I had, I just don't want to take the time.

But he said even of himself, he realized that he had grown less in contact with God than he was before when he was under Catholicism. Now you might say, well, that was then. Well, what about today? I ran across this book.

It was called this. Listen to the title, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, written back in 2000.

Think about that title, The Scandal. Of the Evangelical Conscience. The idea that the conscience that the Evangelical Gospel preaches somehow is scandalous.

Listen how the book starts. How about, how bad are things? What is the depth of the scandal? Unless we face these questions with ruthless honesty, we can never hope to correct things. Whether the issue is divorce, materialism, sexual promiscuity, racism, physical abuse in marriage or neglect of a biblical worldview, the polling data points to widespread blatant disobedience of clear biblical morals, demands on the part of people who allegedly are Evangelical, born again Christian.

The statistics are devastating. He goes on in the book to say that in 1990, George Barna, this was in 1990, I don't know what the rates are today, but he found that born-again Christians were getting a divorce at 26% of the time in a born-again Christian's life. And the non-Christians were 22%.

More Christians, born-again Christians, not just Catholics, but the born-again Evangelicals were getting more divorces than the world. In the book it goes on and says that a professor, Brad Wilcox, said this, as compared with the rest of the population, conservative Protestants are more likely to divorce. The governor of Oklahoma, one of the cities, one of the states in the Bible Belt, 70% of his population go to church, said this, these divorce rates are a scalding indictment of what isn't being said behind the pulpit.

What about materialism in the poor? In the 1990s, the average church member according to Barner, gave 2.5% of his income. 2.5%. They did a survey of eight Evangelical denominations back in the 60s. And they were seeing how much percentage do you give? They found out that they gave 6%, but by 2001, those same Evangelical denominations had dropped to 4%.

4% of their income were they giving to the poor? Were they giving to the church? The book goes on and says, as we got richer and richer, Evangelicals chose to spend more and more money on themselves and give smaller and smaller percentages to the church. And he went on to say, speculate, if people would just give the Old Testament 10%, that it would solve many of the crises in the world. Billions, $143 billion would come in and would solve many of the basic central needs that the poor people in this world need.

What about sexual promiscuity? In 1990, the New York Times reported that the percentage of unmarried couples living together was much higher in the Bible Belt. People living together before marriage was much higher in the Bible Belt. In 1993, they did a survey across all the youth in the Southern Baptists, and they said, will you make a pledge to stay faithful to not have any kind of stay faithful to marriage? 2.4 million youth signed the pledge.

2.4. They came back to those youth several years later and did a check-in with them and they found that only 12% of them kept their pledge. They said that the Barna went on to say that people living together before marriage was 33% in the world and 25% in born-again Christians. When he did pornography, it was about the same as the world.

The scandal of the evangelical conscience, something's not working there either today. Back in their day, and I'm not saying that Anabaptists were perfect. They were far from perfect.

They have their problems for sure, but the concept is the model they were trying to go after. Zwingli had to say about the Anabaptists, he said, if you investigate their life and contact, it seems at first contact, irreproachable, pious, unassuming, attractive, yea, above this world, even those who are inclined to be critical will say that their lives are excellent. This was the reputation the early Anabaptists had.

And when you read The Martyr's Mirror, it is shocking to see what their lives were like. The preachers in Canton wrote a letter, in the Canton of Bern, wrote a letter to the council. They said the Anabaptists, these are the preachers of the churches in Bern, they said, the Anabaptists have the semblance of outward piety to a far greater degree than we and all the churches which unitedly with us confess Christ and they avoid offensive sins which are very common among us.

Harold Bender said this, there is abundant evidence that although the original goal sought by Luther and Zwingli was an earnest Christianity, that's what Luther and Zwingli wanted in the Reformation, the actual outcome was less. For the level of Christian living among the Protestant population was frequently lower than it was before when they were under Catholicism. And so here's one more, this is an early Anabaptist writer, he said this about the church, he said, we confess that God, through Jesus, chose and accepted and sought a people for himself not having spot, blemish, wrinkle, or any such thing, but pure and holy as he himself is holy.

Therefore, is such a people, community, assembly, or church gathered and led together by the Holy Spirit, which from henceforth rules, controls, and orders everything in her, leading all her members to be of one mind and intention so that they will want only to be like Christ, to partake of his nature, and diligently do his will. And so they, we can see here they desired a holy church. They desired in reality, and this is what Harold Bender, or not Harold Bender, Robert Friedman, this is what actually made him want to become a Christian.

He called it existential Christianity. He said what he saw out there as Christianity as a Jew was not that great, but when he read what he saw in the Anabaptists he said there must be real Christians out there, and it made him it made him want to become a Christian. Harold Bender said this, when Anabaptists were questioned in front of the courts, in front of the trials by church leaders either in free discussions or in court trials as to the reason why they separated from the Catholic church or the Lutheran church, this is what they said.

Repeatedly they said this is the reason we left the Catholics, we left the Lutherans. Their lack of discipline. The state church could not be the true church of Christ because it tolerated in its midst all kinds of sin.

They saw the need for a disciplined church. Now what's amazing about the genius of Anabaptism is they wanted a voluntary church. They didn't want to be compulsed upon you.

They didn't want you just to be born into it. They wanted to be voluntary. They wanted it to be genuine.

But they wanted a disciplined church on the other hand. Somehow they needed to find the balance and the tension between these two ends. Voluntary, disciplined.

Harold Bender again says this, the church or the gamind according to the Anabaptists is a voluntary and exclusive fellowship of truly converted believers in Christ committed to follow him in full obedience as Lord. It is a brotherhood not an institution. So I want to draw up on this board a little bit what is an institution.

Now if you think of the Catholic church, we'll put God up here again. And I'm going to draw the Catholic church like this. So we have the Pope.

Anybody know what's here? Yeah. Cardinals. What about here? Archbishops.

And then next? Bishops. And then next? Priests. That is quite the system, right? I'll just put deacons here too.

Okay, so then the laity was down here, right? So we'll put these people here. The laity. And this is what they had to go to.

They had an institution, right? We'll put believers. They had this institution. The Catholic church.

An institution of Pope, Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. They came here for the sacraments. They had to take the Mass.

They had to confess their sins. They had to partake of Jesus' body and his blood to actually stay saved. This is the Catholic model.

This was the Protestant model. Membership in both of these churches at the time, now it's not so much anymore, but was compulsory. You were born into it.

That still tends to happen and can happen here too. The idea of being born into a church. You'll hear people say, I'm Catholic.

I go once a year or something like that. That's the concept. And so the Anabaptists wanted a voluntary, as Harold Bender said, exclusive fellowship.

Exclusive. That means not everybody's invited. That means it's certain people.

An early Anabaptist writer wrote this, Christ's people are a free, unforced, and uncompelled people who receive Christ with desire and a willing heart. Robert Friedman, this guy here, said, nothing could be further from Anabaptist thinking than compulsion of any sort in matters of faith. For coercion would destroy the unity of the spirit and render the Anabaptist way meaningless.

If we would start forcing people into being Christians, it would destroy the very fabric of what Anabaptism was about. Now this is, like I said a minute ago, this is where Anabaptism gets very interesting. A voluntary church, but they were also very strong about a disciplined church.

See, for the Anabaptists, when they believed in voluntarism, they believed that you would come to a place where you saw your sin before the Lord, you repented of your sin, and then you would come to the brotherhood, the church, and you would say, I want to lay down my rights now, I want to lay down my will, and I want to blend with the rest of this brotherhood and be a part of the kingdom of God, expressing Christ to the world. And so Robert Friedman says this, actually, I just read that, so here's this early Anabaptist writer, I always cannot say this name right, but Balthasar Hubmeier, he says this, through baptism, one publicly and orally vows to God and agrees in the strength of God, the Father and the Holy Spirit, that he will henceforth believe and live according to his divine will. So the Anabaptists believed, as you came to baptism, you were making a vow before God, and we actually do it, if you ever notice, we go out in the water and we say, do you, will you, this and this and this, from the world and the devil and all of those wording.

We make a vow to God that we will from now on live according to his divine word and then, this is what they believed, this is still from Balthasar Hubmeier, he says, and if he should trespass herein, he will accept brotherly admonition according to Christ's order. So the Anabaptists had a concept that as you came in with baptism and you submitted as a member of the brotherhood, you were saying to the rest of the brothers, I want to be corrected. I want to be admonished.

Franklin Lattell from this book here, he said, the church covenant was undertaken at baptism and was thought to be the highest expression of religious voluntarism short of martyrdom. That means when you come in here and you say, I want to be a member in an Anabaptist brotherhood, he says, it's the highest expression of religious voluntarism. It's the highest expression that you can lay down and say, you know, I want to serve you, my brother.

I don't want to do my own way. I want to blend in. I don't want to have to always be my way.

Short of martyrdom itself. The biggest, highest expression of voluntarism is when those guys come in the door and say, who all are here are Christians and we stand up and we die for it. That's the largest expression of religious voluntarism.

But the next one down right after that is us blending as a brotherhood, us seeking the Lord together and being one mind. Franklin Lattell says, that's what I just read, Harold Bender says, it is a church of order in which the body determines the patterns of life for its members and therefore has authority over the individual's behavior. It controls admission of new members, requires evidence of repentance, the new birth and a holy life and maintains the purity of the church through discipline, using the ban or excommunication.

The Anabaptist sincerely sought to achieve a church not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that it should be holy and without blemish. He says a church of order. He says that the body determines the pattern and they required evidence of repentance and if it came to it, there would have to be excommunication.

This was a new concept. A brotherhood requiring this sort of righteousness. If you read some of the writings, some of the Protestant leaders thought they were out of their mind to think that they should be requiring this kind of holy life.

But this was important to the Anabaptists and we'll see why in a minute. So Robert Friedman in this book said the binding together of the brethren is essential for the disciple as its dedication to obedience to God. So I drew this on one of our sermons earlier but obedience to God.

Here's you, right, and here's God but in a horizontal way you and your brother. This is as essential as it is for this. If you can't get this to work out in your life, then you're tricking yourself to think that you can come here and somehow approach God.

And so for the Anabaptists, it's not that we don't have an individual relationship with God but it's that this here helps us be sanctified and helps us really test if we do have a relationship with God. And so they found this concept very interesting. I think Robert Friedman himself says, No man comes to God apart from his brother.

It's a concept of brotherhood. Now every time they would take of the Lord's meal, we all do that, we go and we have the juice and the bread, it would remind them of what happened with this concept. Listen to some of these writings.

This is from an early Anabaptist writer. He said this. The grains, okay, we're talking about the wheat, we're talking about bread, we have communion bread, right? We eat the bread.

What does that represent? He said the grains had to be brought together into one flour and one loaf. Not one of them could persevere until it was sorry, not one of them could preserve itself as it was or keep what it had. Each little grain, you think about it, you're a little grain and you think you're so great and all that, right? And I think I'm so great.

But if you wanted to keep your individuality, you couldn't be a piece of bread. You have to give up your individuality to be ground into flour, right? And so that's what he's saying. He's saying it could not preserve itself as it was or keep what it had.

Every grain has given itself and its whole strength into the bread. In the same way, the grapes must be pressed for the wine. Every grape gives all of its strength and all of its juice into the uniform wine.

In no way can a grape keep anything for itself. Only in this way does wine come into being. Grapes and grains which remain whole are only fit for the pigs and the muck heap.

If we can't learn to blend and to allow ourselves to be crushed and allow ourselves to blend, he says according to this early Anabaptist writer, it's only good for the pigs and the muck heap. They have nothing to do with bread and wine. They have kept back strength and body for themselves.

They lost everything and remain lost. They had a strong view of this idea of grains giving up their individuality and turning into bread and grapes being pressed. Here's another one.

Hans Nadler 1529 he said this. He's actually in a trial and they're asking about what are these Anabaptists like and what were you doing and he said this. He was explaining what a Lord's Supper looked like to the Anabaptists.

He said then we celebrated the Lord's Supper at Augsburg the Lord's wine and bread. With the bread the unity among brethren is civilized. When we take that bread we not only remember Jesus but we remember the unity that we have as brothers.

Where there are many small kernels of grain to be combined into one loaf there is need first to make them into one flour. So this is very common. In fact I have two other writers and I'm not even going to try to read them but Menno Simons and another one wrote the same kind of thing which can only be achieved through suffering.

Did you hear that? The only way you can be achieved to be made into one bread is through suffering. You ever thought it's a little bit of a suffering thought when your brother or sister calls and say hey can you come over and help me tonight? And you're like I have my own plans. Ever think that? Or they ask you for a little money or they ask you for a little help.

Whatever it is. You know the Anabaptists didn't just believe in an outward suffering, the cross. They believed in an inward suffering among the brothers and they thought it had to happen to become a true Christian.

An inward suffering when we give up of ourselves, when we give up of our things, when we give up of our strength to one another and show true brotherly love. He goes on, likewise the wine many small grapes come together to make the one wine that happens by means of the press understood here as suffering. Hence whoever wants to be in brotherly union has to drink from the cup of the Lord for this cup symbolizes suffering.

Everybody stand up. Just going to stretch a little bit. Everybody put your arms up.

Okay good. Everybody good. Okay now you can sit back down.

Feel better? I know these quotes can get long and laborious but it's important. Alright so it's not just the outside world that we're suffering but we're suffering by giving to one another. Now you might think to yourself this is an ideal, this is a dream like what's the reality of this really happening? And you know the Anabaptists if you study their history, there's a lot of failures.

But the question I had this morning is, is this ideal still biblical? Is it still right? Should we still strive for it? It's not working very well. The other ideal, the Protestant ideal, the Lutheran ideal, the Calvin ideal. We just read of what's happening today.

So they did not believe in what's called sinless perfection. Now that's the idea that everyone of us should be able to start living a sinless life. Do you think that's possible? Anyone here? There are groups that do.

My wife and I were part of one. They did not believe in that. In fact their opponents would say they did.

I even read in the martyr's mirror they would ask them do you believe you can't sin anymore? Oh no they would say. No we can still sin. We can still fall into sin.

They didn't believe in sinless perfection. They were realists. They knew that somebody's going to fall into sin.

The second generation is going to come along and they're not all going to just embrace this thing and be like oh yes we're all just first generation. We all love the Lord. We're ready to die.

They were realists. They knew that that wasn't necessarily going to happen. And so they believed in what was called the rule of Christ.

Anybody want to take a guess? What's the rule of Christ? What do you think the rule of Christ would be? What's that? Okay. Anyone else? What would the rule of Christ be? What's that? Okay. I didn't know what it meant either as I was reading.

To them the rule of Christ was Matthew 18. What's Matthew 18? Anybody? Correcting a brother. This was very very important to the Anabaptists.

The Matthew 18 concept. Where we go to our brother when we see something in his life that is not pleasing. That is sin.

That is falling away. And we admonish him. And if he doesn't hear us we bring another brother.

And if they don't hear us then we bring the church. Hubmeyer, early Anabaptist, he said this. Where there is no brotherly admonition, no church is to be found.

That's pretty strong. Where there is no... Listen to Menno Simons. He said this.

Exclude, according to the word of God, all adulterers and fornicators, drunkards, slanderers, swearers, those who lead shameful and inordinate lives, the proud, greedy, idolaters, disobedient to God, whoremongers, and the like, that you may become the holy Christian church, which is without spot or blemish, which is as a city built upon a rock. But if you remain as you are, then I say publicly, better to die than to enter into your doctrine, sacraments, life, and church. Now maybe you were raised Mennonite and you struggle with the concept of church discipline.

You struggle with excommunication concepts. This was a new thing for the church, for the Anabaptists. This was something they felt they wanted, a voluntary church, but the only way they could keep it, a true church, where it didn't become what the Protestants had, where it was just full of sinners, was to have the rule of Christ.

This was an important concept to them. And one of the reasons why I think it's important for us to discuss so we understand why Anabaptists do this. Franklin Littell said, by baptism the believer came under the discipline of a biblical people.

The Anabaptists understood that when you were baptized, you were entering into, not your own life, but a discipline of a biblical people, which he says, a discipline which he himself helped to make and enforce. So this is different about the Anabaptists. It wasn't the structural you know, the Pope's up here and he tells and all the way down.

It was supposed to be a brotherhood where you help to make the discipline, you help to enforce the discipline. It's not just the Pope or the preachers or the priests. Conrad Grebel, early Swiss brethren, he said this.

He was writing a letter actually to Thomas Munzer, which later, yeah, that guy fell away. But he was telling him, the supper, talking about the Lord's Supper, is to be an exhibition of unity. It's supposed to show that we are unified.

And he says, it shall not be observed, except in conformity with Christ's rule in Matthew 18. This was way early on. They're already saying, don't even have this.

This was in 1524, before the Sleightheim, before, you know, right at the beginning. And they were already saying, before you have the Lord's Supper, the fraternal brotherly meal, you need to apply the rule of Christ. You need to make sure your church is a holy church.

And then he says, for then it would not be the Lord's Supper, for without Matthew 18 everyone runs after the outward. And that which is inward, namely love, one lets go, and brethren and false brethren go to the supper together and eat. And then at the end of the letter, he said this to Thomas Munzer.

He said, press forward with the word. Create a Christian church with the help of Christ and His rule as we find it instituted in Matthew 18 and practiced in the epistles. Apply it with earnestness and common prayer and fasting, in line with faith and love and without the law and compulsion.

This was very important. The Anabaptists wanted the rule of Christ to be done not as a punitive thing. Punitive is you do something wrong and we're going to punish you for it.

But punitive is but they wanted it to be something that was done out of love, to bring your brother back, to save your brother from going to hell in the end. And it's hard for the Anabaptists to keep that in mind. It's easy for us to turn it into a punitive thing instead of for the good of my brother.

For the good of Christ's church. Now what lest you think, well this was just some Anabaptists. They studied 15 confessions.

15. From the year 1527 all the way up to the year 1792. Almost 1800.

15 confessions. You know not all of them agreed. But did you know every one of those 15 confessions had something about the ban, excommunication or shunning in all 15 confessions? We saw the Slightheim Confession several times ago.

This was important to them. The ban, the concept of a disciplined church. So as I'll say, a voluntary submitted disciplined brotherhood.

Robert Freedman said it is helpful to call the Anabaptist brotherhood a church of order. I found this interesting, this quote. This was from Bender.

He said in some ways the Anabaptists remind him of a medieval monastic order. Now think about the monastic orders. You think of monks and you think of nuns, right? You think of people who have taken up and said we're going to divorce ourselves from the world.

We're going to devote ourselves to prayer and fasting. We're not going to get married. You know they wouldn't go to war.

They would be a holy people set apart. And Harold Bender said the Anabaptists were creating a similar fashion of monastic order. An order that said we don't want to just be like the everyday Christians that we read about.

We want to be Christians that are true disciples of Christ. In that book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, this is a modern book by a modern author. When he got to the port about what do we do about this, all these terrible statistics, I ordered the book and I'm still waiting for it to come but I read another report that said his number one thing was we need to return back to church discipline.

In fact, there was an old Baptist record from the 1800s and it said it had a guy's name and a year and then it said what was his sin and it said intoxication and then it said what was his response and it said repentance and then it said what was the church's response and it said forgiven. And then a couple years later same thing and a couple years later same thing. But I'll tell you my wife and I were raised in a Baptist church and we never saw that.

We never saw any form of church discipline and this book is saying we've got to get back to that. The modern day Protestants are actually saying we need to have church discipline in our churches because of what's happening. And so in this Arnold Snyder's book he said the Anabaptists had four major marks.

Number one, the first major mark was baptism. The second major mark that they, he would say these were what almost all Anabaptists believed in. In fact, his wording is there were four marks of the visible community of saints that were accepted by all Anabaptists regardless of origin.

Baptism, which we've talked about. The ban, which we've talked about today. The Lord's Supper, which we've talked about today also and how they looked at that.

And lastly, mutual aid. Sharing of possessions. And I don't have a lot of time to get into mutual aid but I will say this.

A visitor from Strasbourg, he was a Protestant. He went to an Anabaptist meeting and he was listening to a baptism service of a Anabaptist and he said this is what they said. As the person was being baptized, they asked the person this.

Whether they, if necessary required, would devote all their possessions to the service of the brotherhood and would not fail any member that is needed if they were able to render aid. So they had a high view that if necessity came, render all of their possessions to the brotherhood. So how does this relate to us today in closing? I guess my burden was that this is an Anabaptist church.

You may say to yourself, well I'm not Anabaptist. And that's between you and God. I'm not saying that all people that are true Christians have to be Anabaptists.

But my heart was to understand a little bit the Anabaptist mentality. Why they did what they did. Franklin Littell said that the Anabaptists were trying to create and go back to the early church.

They were trying to go back to the primitive church and do as they saw in scripture. Did they make mistakes? I'm sure some of you would say you can think of mistakes today that they've made, right? You can go back in your history and think of mistakes you've seen. Of course, I'm sure they have made mistakes.

Did they make mistakes in history? Absolutely did they make mistakes. It's not a pretty history all the time. But my question is, was their ideal right? Did they have the right ideal of a brotherhood church? Did they have the right ideal of a brotherhood that focused on blending, loving each other, being a light, expressing the kingdom of God through the church? And I never drew the last thing here.

Almost forgot. So the Anabaptists, according to the way Robert Friedman drew it, is he drew it like this with interlocking circles and I hope I didn't erase any of you. But and then a brotherhood coming to God together.

Now that breaks down a little bit. I understand we do have an individual like I said here with God. But once again, if you can hear me out that no man comes to God apart from his brother.

We have to learn this suffering. We have to learn how to be sanctified through our brother. And so the Anabaptist model was brethren interlocked together seeking God together as a brotherhood.

Very different than this model and very different than this model. And in some ways I would say it's a balance between, in a way, it's a balance between these models. Number two, how much have we been influenced by Catholic and Protestant thought? I would hope that maybe some of us would go home challenged today thinking you know, I do think of the church a little bit like this.

You know, just kind of a a club or a place for me, a resource group for me to come to strengthen my walk with God. Or maybe some of you think, well I do kind of think like this. As long as I show up and do my sacrament of listening to the sermon then I'm considered a Christian.

That's not the church. It's not about sacraments. It's not about necessarily right theology.

It's about true genuine discipleship, walking with Christ. So that's what I had this morning and I'm hoping that it'll help explain some of the reasons why we do and think the way we think here and maybe challenge us to love each other more, to give of our time. You know, when a brother called me the other day and I'd just been studying all this stuff and he said, hey, could you do this for me? And my heart just jumped because it was like, this is brotherhood.

It was exciting. And I think because I've been thinking about all of this. So I want to encourage us do we to love each other more, to see that the kingdom of God is concretely expressed in the brotherhood, in the visible brotherhood and how we love each other, how we give up to each other.

And yeah, I'm hoping that'll challenge us. God bless each one of you.