Yeshua Explored
August 8th 2022
Release
Why has God put us where we are?
(This series of articles was written a year after the first lockdown in March/April 2021)
Previous articles are still available on the Premier Christian radio website – https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Blogs2/Yeshua-Explored – (until they finally pull the plug!)
The two final elements of Hebraic church are personal to every believer in terms of them connecting to God and each other. Here are how I described them.
Remember, don’t analyse. The Bible shows us again and again that God wants us to consider time over space. Those first Christians were a people of a tradition that stretched back for centuries. They followed the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They are part of the nation forged by Moses in Sinai and led by David in the Land of Milk and Honey. They knew their history, they revered these men of old and especially those prophets, from Moses to Zechariah, who met with God at a given time, with messages for them all. There is no such thing as “holy spaces”, places where God can be found, but there are holy times, when God has visited our lives. This is our on-going testimony, God causes us to remember, to remember and believe, it does far more to sustain and build our faith than any number of clever arguments.
Function is to be preferred over form. The thing that turns Greek thinking right on its head is the concept of form and function. It arises from a view of things from the perspective of God, rather than the Greek concept of man being at the centre of everything. For God everything in Creation has a purpose.Everything in Creation (including you and me) should be identified by its purpose, or function, as well as its physical appearance, its form. In our culture, it is form that rules, we observe objects, we use them, we collect them, we are them. We’re comfortable with nouns. In God’s Kingdom, verbs are more important, even the Hebrew language, the language of most of the Bible, is a verb-orientated language, a language of action, of doing things.This really is thinking differently. When we meet a Christian friend we should be wondering what good works God has prepared in advance for them to do. What are their gifts according to the grace given to them? What is their function in God’s Kingdom? When we meet an unbeliever, we wonder what role God may have for us to introduce them into God’s Kingdom. It’s not so much who we are, but rather what we do, that is important to God.
Now consider your Church experience. We have inherited a system and an environment borne in the minds of pagan Greek philosophers and forged into something we call “Church” by those, such as Origen and Thomas Aquinas, who wished to create a synthesis between these systems and the Word of God. We may have inherited this as a fact of the processes of history, but we don’t have to accept it. Flockdown has disrupted our inherited system, has removed us from the brick and mortar and the structures that thrived in that environment and has issued us a challenge. This is where the blessing lies.
Our current Church model has been shown to be not the best way for every individual believer to have “God moments” and to find their function within the Body of Christ. It works for some, but not all and you could very well be part of a Church for your whole life without meeting God and finding out what on Earth He put you in this world for!
I’m sure, and it’s important that we can all see the ‘big picture’, that we are tiny cogs in a giant Divine wheel. We must do something, Flockdown has given us a new impetus to return to the original model.
Seize the moment!
This is an extract from the book, Flockdown Church: Back to the drawing board?, available for £5 at https://www.sppublishing.com/flockdown-church-278-p.asp
