Honoring Incomplete Christians Who Went Before Us
Honoring Incomplete Christians Who Went Before Us
In our FB discussion groups dealing with restoring the Church to her original condition, there are obviously a number of you who highly critical of what you see within Christendom today. And you can count me among your ranks!
But where I am NOT like many of you is where you so easily dismiss, or even condemn, those who attempted reforms that were only partially successful in past centuries.
Luther and Calvin are your two biggest targets, and for good reason. But one of the reasons why “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child” (Proverbs 22:15) is because both physical and spiritual “children” have little awareness of their own failures when judging those of others (remember that old saying: “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones”?). I have thrown my share of such stones: I found it so easy to look down upon my step-father while I was a child (and for good reason). But in my forties, when I had learned what he had experienced under HIS parents during that “Great Depression” and when I had started to see some of my own failures as a father and husband, then my heart “strangely” grew softer toward him. Hmmm!
The church of the apostles did not turn into the arrogant, corrupt and cruel creature of the middle ages overnight. Mormons, JW’s and many Protestants present their interpretation of that historical evolution as if the Christians threw an “apostasy party” as soon as they heard of the apostle John’s death at the end of the first century. Once that party was over – POOF! Our came medieval Christianity!
Not so! Their downward spiral was a very complex process of relatively small changes in teachings, practices and attitudes that occurred in different locations over a period of centuries, and which then merged together. THAT is what accounts for that downward change.
And guess what? It is a very similar process that has being going on over centuries that has been REVERSING that downward evolution: if you don’t see it, it is because you do not understand how our God exercises His lordship over history.
That reversal seems to have started around the fourteenth century. Since that time, while reform-minded men have been doing THEIR “thing” to reverse that change back toward the original church – as best as they could figure it out, and to the degree that they were WILLING to figure it out – God has also been at work, doing HIS “thing” to accomplish the same goal. You need to look less at them and more at HIM!
And this is not a new experience for our God! If you want to know what I mean just read the entire Old Testament, because it is a history of the very same combination of men’s actions being mixed with those of God. For one example, in their distrust of God they demanded a king, and the cumulative actions of those kings that God gave them brought the very same disastrous results that His spokesman Samuel SAID would happen at the HUMAN level (1 Samuel 8:5, 10ff). And yet at HIS level, God used that very same Davidic bloodline to produce a very different result: the manifestation of His Anointed One! While HUMAN Israel was failing at every step of the way, even to the point of having its leaders become the opponents and murderers of their own Messiah, GOD was working among those very same people to become the fulfillment of what that Messiah claimed about them: “You [Samaritans] worship what you do not know; we [Jews] worship what we do know, because the salvation is from the Jews” (John 3:22).
So, to those of you who see nothing but disaster in Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and the Anglican Reforms – and probably much disappointment in the rut that the Anabaptist, Revivalist, and Holiness Movements have fallen into, and the anti-Biblical excesses into which the Pentecostal/Charismatic groups have fallen …
… to those of you who are nothing but disappointed and suspicious about current Christendom’s versions of Christianity I invite you to consider that YOUR GOD IS TOO SMALL!
(Just as mine used to be)
If YOU are in a Scripturally higher place than they are, you need to humble yourself to realize that YOU ARE STANDING UPON *THEIR* SHOULDERS! You are the fruit of what has gone BEFORE you, what many of them paid steep prices, even bloody prices to bring to our public “Christian consciousness.” Imperfect reformers such as those mentioned above were indeed guilty of making compromises that should not have been made – that is indeed true. But most of them also exhibited a degree of “bravery under fire” that most of you have never yet demonstrated. They built upon such Scriptures as they were aware of (or CHOSE to become aware of), and God will judge their hearts and words and decisions. But what makes you think that YOU would have been any better if YOU had been alive back then?
If you cannot admire humans whom you must also criticize you are merely demonstrating how much you need to “grow up.” And if you cannot see God working carefully and wonderfully within an historical process that is continually being contaminated by men, surely your God IS too small!
As I claim in my “Blueprint for a Revolution,” virtually every component of the Christianity of Christ’s Apostles has ALREADY been restored to Planet Earth, at least in a juvenile form!
Don’t let the failures of man diminish your awe of the Holy One of Israel, who knows perfectly well how to “write straight with crooked lines!” We can clearly see how He did it to get ready to reveal His Son at the first time He came. We SHOULD be able to see that He is doing it again in preparation for His PERMANENT return!
Amen?
Hallelujah!!
