Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
I found another church. The church is called the "ekklesia". It is where anyone believes into the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and we gather together....whenever a believer is next to me, there is the opportunity for the ekklesia, the assembly.
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Here is a quote from YPO that is worth reviewing:
"Eventually, I got clear that the Lord had pushed me out the front door of the Local Church but I never got the word from Him about what was supposed to happen next. I think very many of us can appreciate this awkward position. And the answer is, of course, don’t do anything. Meet with every believer you can in any context that you can and let the Lord worry about the rest of it. Don’t join anything or start anything. You are already in everything that you need to be in. Anything else is a distraction.
Consequently, the main lesson I gained from my brief time among the saints in the Local Church was just how easy it is for religion to distract us from the reality of Christ. Or, as I’m fond of saying these days, how easy it is for a notion about “universal church” to destroy the ability to have the actual assembly. It’s both ironic and sad but even those places that readily picked up the practice of “The New Way” actually practiced it in an old way from the start because there was no other way for them to do it. To put it bluntly, the definition and practice of “The God-ordained Way” could never actually BE the God-ordained way but it could only become another denomination. Just assemble freely and assemble small and let the Lord as the Head worry about the building of His Body."
I loved that line, "Meet with every believer you can in every context you can and let the Lord worry about the rest of it", i.e. the building of the Body of Christ.
That's kind of what I meant when I said, "Don't get all religious" with the believers around you. Just receive them, however poor, pathetic, and "thin" their Christ might appear. Because when the veil is lifted you might find that yours is worse still, and you'll be glad for giving them a cup of cold water.
There was a song in "Smokey and the Bandit", which I used to sing when on the road in my salad days: "Wee got a looong way to go, and a short time to get there...."
The local church is not an organization; it is an event, and it occurs whenever two or more are gathered...