Thank you Ohio.... Thank you.
I was writing a follow up to my first post here last night, and somehow it got dumped off the system before I was able to post it. Praise the Lord, there was some bitterness in it that needn't be spoken.
You are right, of course - the Lord did place me here to shepherd me and my family; and I love the saints in Christ dearly. They have become our family in every sense of the word. After being Saved, my wife completely lost her family; they rejected her utterly. Funny, they didn't mind her when she lived in sin, but now as a new creation in Christ the Enemy has really put a hate in their hearts for her. If it weren't for the Saints in our Local Church, we would likely never have made it.
And yet I struggle, as so many of you did.
Maybe my issue is, I have always seen 'problems' in the Church, and my response has ALWAYS been to leave, because "my relationship with the Lord was greater". When I've had a chance to stand for the Lord, I've sat down, and said nothing. This isn't humility, as I sometimes like to think, it's cowardice. It has no place. We are all to speak as we feel lead, and I need to give Him the headship to speak as He would.
Saints still in the Local Church,
Stop regarding man, whose life breath is in his nostrils. For of what value is he considered to be? Isaiah 2:22
Saints, Watchman Nee - whose work we regard and whose work we publish, said "Anything that comes from the hand of man is dead, it is finished and it cannot give life. Only the Word of God can give life."
As much as we can enjoy a life study, a message, it is no different from a sermon, is it? It is something that may be good, but it is not the Word of God.
Will you be like the Lutherans, who followed Luther - or the Christians, who followed Christ?
Saints, if you a consider a brother to be wise, and admire him, and want to grow to be like him, then you need to consider how you can honestly achieve that. The wisest men among us did not come to such wisdom by self-contemplation, studying their own thoughts and works. No, by their own testimony they grew up in Christ through the Word. When we speak of eating and drinking Christ, we do not mean that we fall upon His person as ghouls to consume Him - we mean that we drink the pure, guileless milk of the Word! We eat the meat of the Word! Christ is the Living Word! This is no mystery!
If a brother grows up in Christ, and gains some maturity by feasting at the Lord's Table, should we who wish to also gain not want to feast at that same Table with Him? We are called to, Christ wants to YOU to know Him so well as that too! Do not settle instead to lie beneath the chair of the brother who is feeding, and to eat only what he has already processed and digested. Saints, please - Christ is calling: Will you be an Overcomer? There is no such thing as an exclusive club of Overcomers... only a remnant will make it.
The Church in Philadelphia was warned, because they might lose the crown they had already gained. That is not an idle warning. The Church in Laodicea resembles Philadelphia in many ways...
If you haven't read Watchman Nee's "The Orthodoxy of the Church", published by LSM, then I encourage you to. See how Nee identified the characteristics of the final Church to appear before the Lord's return... the Church (which He still calls His Church) at the end of the age. Ask yourself, who is Nee describing here?
http://www.ministrybooks.org/books.c...2%2BI%20%20%0A
There are overcomers from each of the seven Churches, Saints; and there are also a lot of tares sown in with the wheat. We cannot judge who is who, because the Lord told us that we might tear out the wheat with the tares if we do not let them first mature; and only then will the tares be gathered and burned.
Only Jesus Christ is Lord!
In Christ,
Neither First nor Last