Why are there SO many different Jesuses within Christendom?

He wrote: “Have you ever thought of writing a 30-minute exhortation that would be helpful to these folks?”

My response: It would be helpful from MY perspective, but I am very reluctant to barge into people’s and congregation’s set opinions when my perspective would be so radically different from theirs; that is one part of my motivation in putting my Blueprint for a Revolution into written form. I find it easier and more productive to communicate with people who are new in their surrender to Jesus and His holy Word, BEFORE the newly poured “concrete” has hardened into the form that their churches find adequate and acceptable to God (like you, for example).

As my years and experiences have accumulated, more and more I find myself focusing on two issues: (1) the need to be committed to what JESUS (and His early churches) included in what was meant by becoming a “disciple” (and thus, “saved”); and (2) the existential NECESSITY of entering into that Pentecostal promise, as described in Acts 2, 8, 10 & 19. A person whose sincere surrender to Jesus and His Word is relatively recent is SO much easier to convince of the need for those two realities, rather than people who have bonded with and lived with the adulterated ecclesiastical substitutions for those two essential decisions and experiences. Let me explain:

(1) The great majority of traditions and churches on planet Earth today introduce you to a Jesus who is really quite a different person than the Jesus of the New Testament and the original churches. The nature of a decision to “accept Christ” is qualitatively different, depending upon what that “Jesus” commanded, demanded, and promised you. The real Jesus both demanded and promised MUCH more than we are led to expect in our experience of Christianity. That difference is somewhat like the difference between “choosing to be a writer” and choosing to join the Peace Corps. Both are real choices, and both can change your life over time. But the latter decision, the Peace Corps, produces a qualitatively different form and depth of “consecration.” And it produces over time a different depth of character and idealism. The desire to become a writer is typically mingled and contaminated by a dream of possible fame and fortune, which is quite different from moving to Africa and helping dig wells in some little village in the “boondocks.” Of course, not ALL people who have “accepted Christ” and accepted life in an Anglican, Methodist, Catholic … church are like those who just want to become a writer, but if they intend to become consecrated to the real Jesus, they will have to spend too much time working AGAINST the context of their religious “system,” instead of simply being able to surrender to it (as those Marines can do in their boot camp that I often mention). The divine mission of the Church that JESUS created is to provide the teaching, the disciplining, the correcting, the inspiration, and the experiences that will turn you into an APOSTOLIC Christian. The “Jesus” of Christendom’s churches no longer makes the same demands, nor does that “Jesus” offer and effect the same promised supernatural experiences that we see in the New Testament Jesus and earliest churches (as I know from my own real but superficial decision & experience of 1960). The result of not being as deeply rattled by and deeply surrendered to the Biblical Jesus is a “conversion” that allows Satan LOTS of “wiggle room,” as I personally discovered. Just look at one example: a Jesus who demands that you must make a decision to refuse to exercise violence upon ANY human being before you can be “baptized into Christ” personally rattles you MUCH more deeply than when you are permitted to accept a relationship with a “Jesus” who did not even require to to think about that demand. So, your decision, though it may be a real, non-phony, decision (as was mine) is nowhere near as deep experientially as when you have to include that particular decision of non-violence in your “acceptance.” That shallower level of decision can also produce real, even significant, results in your personality and character (as it did in mine). It may sober you up, make you more idealistic, and cause you to change careers. But it is not the same depth of decision, experientially, that was being experienced by those in Acts 2, who were “cut to the heart.” THEY were rattled and cut as deep as the heart goes; while my decision – though it certainly pierced through my skin, did not bring me into the same place that it had brought them through Peter’s Spirit-anointed ministry. And my experience was far from being unique. As a result, while Satan was dealt a “set back” in my initial “conversion,” he was able to recover quite sufficiently to use a different approach and seduce me back into his fold, until our Father patiently and skillfully drew me back and even turned that horrible descent into darkness into a blessing, deepening me, and preparing me to experientially enter into His wonderful Pentecostal Promise.

(2) And regarding that “Pentecostal Promise:” Both through Biblical study and personal experience I have come to understand that those events about experientially receiving the Holy Spirit described in Acts 2,8,10 & 19 were never understood to be as exceptional as Christendom’s versions of Christianity have made them out to be. I grew up having only Acts 2 presented in sermons, and quite naturally assuming that such an experience was what turned a TYPICAL “Christian” into an apostle or some other form of HEROIC Christian. And perhaps because I did not ever see any such “heroic Christian” in my church circles, I was also led eventually to assume that anyone who was sincere about being a “Christian” already had all of that “Holy Spirit stuff” taken care of, and all you had to do now was “grow” gradually, like a household plant that is watered daily will grow. Later, when I became a sacramentally-oriented Christian, I was taught that it was the sacrament of Episcopal confirmation which actually conferred the Holy Spirit, through the imposition of the hands of those in the “apostolic succession.” Evangelicals, on the other hand, insisted that you always “received” the Holy Spirit as soon as you “accepted” Christ (whatever “accepting” Him meant to them SPECIFICALLY).

But it turns out that the inspired apostolic writings clearly show that the experience of that promised Pentecostal event had nothing “automatic” about it (at least if you read them with the same common-sense logic that you use everywhere else when reading serious writings).

And the Scriptures also show that that Pentecostal experience was not how you become a “super” Christian. Rather, they show that that promised experience was an essential step in BECOMING a Christian, as Jesus and His apostles understood “Christian.” You have to keep in mind as you read the New Testament, that all of those being addressed in the Epistles were PENTECOSTALLY experienced Christians; apart from some “wolves in sheep’s clothing” and people who still needed to become “un-hardened” further by God, the only kind of “Christian” that existed then was a Pentecostal one. When our experience is within the context of what Christianity has become, that seems like a scandalously shocking thing to say, but it is actually a version of that classical elephant in the Christian living room (again, obvious to those who use that normal common sense in reading His Word). What do you think is implied by Peter in Acts 2:

“38 Then Peter said to them, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call.”

The implications of that one statement alone make what would be scandalous among today’s church members into something quite obviously true, no? That Pentecostal event was the apostolic NORM, one of the necessary steps in becoming the kind of “Christian” that Jesus and His Spirit-inspired apostles made possible. Very few forms of “Christian” or “church” today understand, accept or disciple you into what was the necessary “norm” for them.

The lack of that apostolic teaching, ministering, and experiencing regarding becoming a baptized “disciple” and an apostolic “Christian” describes the profound difference between the real “Gospel,” the real “Church,” and the real “Christian,” versus what passes for the “Church” and “Christian” that is currently available. Fortunately, God knows how to minister to His individual elect despite what He has to work with (or AGAINST!) among those who currently use the name “Church” and “Christian.”

But He should not HAVE to do that, should He!

Should not those currently bearing the name “Church” and “Christian” be converted to what is the BIBLICAL “norm,” spend time on our knees in cut-to-the-heart repentance and make those specific decisions that will genuinely cause us to KNOW and even FEEL “born again” as He meant it in John 3:3? Jesus invented that term “born again” because it described both the objective AND subjective experience of what HE brought to the earth. That conversion – or REconversion – would make us valid candidates for our own experiential Pentecostal “filling,” as had happened to the entire audience of the New Testament. We “Christians” have gotten so used to using that and other Scriptural “experiential” terms that the great majority of us have ASSUMED the reality rather than experienced it. We ASSUME that we have “accepted” Christ, even though the Jesus to whom we surrendered is not the same revolutionary as the one described within the New Testament. We ASSUME we have received the Holy Spirit, even though we would not be able to give an affirmative answer to the same question that Paul asked of the Ephesians: “DID you received the Holy Spirit when you believed” (Acts 19:2).