People Don't Want More Meetings

12/30/2006

We don’t need more meetings—meetings are very tiresome. If you are a “pastor” you are at most of the meetings, but you wonder why other people aren’t there at times. Why are people missing? It’s because they have their own bubbles and they’re tired. They don’t want more meetings, they want more love. They want more relationships, not more meetings. They don’t want a house church meeting. They want you to love them and bring them into your home. They want you in their home and they want your gifts and love and resources to be merged with theirs. It’s like the cord of three strands that is not easily broken. When we all merge together, the cord of many, many strands is even more difficult to break. God wants us to be merged together and not have separate bubbles. It’s very burdensome and tiresome to add more programs, more meetings, and to break up in small groups and administrate things. It’s tiresome to manage all of that and have a curriculum for this and assign leaders for that. None of that is in the Bible! No wonder we’re so tired. We’re trying to do so many things that aren’t even in the Bible and we think that those are the ways to accomplish God’s purposes. When really, He just wants us to Rest in Him, love one another, and simplify and unify our lives into One.

What does it mean to simplify and unify? Unifying is not that we now believe the same thing—that’s not unifying. Unifying is that we’re bringing all the parts of our life together into One. That’s unifying, simplifying and that’s church. That’s the church you read about in the Bible. Even baby Christians can do it. They count none of their possessions as their own. They rise up, sit down and walk along the way together. That’s the church that Jesus is building, that the gates of hell cannot prevail against. He’s prevailing against the other one, the one that you “attend.” But satan will not prevail against the Family of God that is simplified and unified. I don’t have my job and then come back to you. You are part of my job. We talk and pray about it and you may even come and help me.

Where I live we have brothers with specialty areas such as computer knowledge or other technical skills. Another brother may be having difficulties with his computers at his job, and these brothers come and help him fix all of his problems, free of charge. The people in his workplace are glad, because they get free expertise and help. The brother’s career is better because his problems are solved and his reputation with his company is better. These brothers have served Jesus by serving this brother. All of our jobs become mixed in our homes, our market shopping, our housekeeping and our child rearing. We help each other with the gifts that we have—that’s Church. Who are my mothers, brothers and sisters? “Those seated in the circle around Him who do the will of God,” is what the Bible says. So we don’t need to break up into groups of a certain number of people. We just need to make sure that we’re being called alongside each other daily.

We’re invading each other’s homes with no law about it. No one needs to knock at my front door, because my biological children don’t knock at my front door. Why would my other mothers, brothers and sisters knock at my front door? If someone were to say, “Oh, I’ve come to visit you.” I’d say, “Come on in here and quit that!” Does my son say, “Dad, I’ve come to visit you”? Of course not! He runs up, grabs me and holds me. That’s what we all do—the whole church with hundreds of people. They all live that way. There’s nothing to attend and nothing by the calendar. There is no time clock saying when we start and when we end. Find just one time in the Bible when they started and stopped at certain times. You won’t find it even one time in the Gospels, the book of Acts or the letters, which cover 30 years of time. A brother named Luke, a gentile scientist, wrote the book of Acts. He started out by saying, “I’m going to write an orderly, thorough and scientific account of what the church was like.” Why did he not mention even one time in his account of 30 years of time, that they met on a certain day and that a certain person led a prayer, and a certain person gave a sermon, and they ended at a certain time so they could all go back to their own little bubbles? It’s not in there because their lives were merged and so should ours be. But it takes courage. It takes a lot of love, wisdom, and patience because none of us are very good at this yet. So we help each other like we would our own children.

You have just burst my bubbles!

•  People Don't Want More Meetings