THE BLUEPRINT

Having been birthed in the rich soil of a healthy, biblical church environment, until it turned into a heavy-shepherding Christian cult, I have been blessed to experience what I believe the Church was meant to be, starting with Pentecost. I have also been able to minister in this biblical pattern in my own ministry, especially in our tent church in South Africa, where we saw many conversions and healing miracles. Now, retired, I have observed a multitude of other church structures over the years and have not seen that pattern duplicated, and I find myself in the words of Crosby, Still, and Nash, trying to “get back to the Garden.”

This is what I believe. The End Times, remnant church, what’s left of its tattered self, will never be popular with the world, or even with the rest of the church world. For those holding out hope that the Church is going to rise up, defeat Evil, and transform the world, making it ready for Christ to return, isn’t it getting tiring by now having to keep pumping something up that won’t hold air? Statistics say that church attendance in America has been rapidly declining, not increasing, but then that may be a good thing, seeing as how most of the churches themselves are only offering religion. This is a far cry from what Jesus meant for His Church when he said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” So far, the gates of hell have done a pretty good job of crippling, perverting, diluting, and relegating much of the church world to impotence and irrelevancy.

     What did God intend for His Church? In John 17, Jesus pleaded with His Father concerning His greatest desire for His Bride: that they would be unified as one in purpose and spirit. Four times in this chapter He said things like, “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be like us.”  Paul added in Ephesians that we should be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” And to the Philippians he said that we should be “standing together in one spirit, with one mind, striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.”

     This is not about the present-day ecumenical movement of the World Council of Churches, taking the likes of Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Catholicism, and combining them with all the other false religions of the world, until they’re all unified around nothing more than their own subjective “truths.” Or like the recent interfaith movement taking up the “Pride’ mantel, virtually signaling their allegiance to the soon upcoming system of the Beast. This is the religion of Babel, of Babylon, and eventually, the one-world religion of the antichrist.

     So, what’s happened to get us off course? The Early Church in persecution was doing fine, never better. Not that I’m advocating for more of the same. Then, after getting “legalized” and accepted by the State, it became compromised and religionized until it was murdered by the cult of Romanism, whereby the Church went into a one-thousand-year period called the “Dark Ages.” It reemerged with Martin Luther, who broke away from Romanism, and over time, the original “gifts of the Spirit” began seeping back in, along with conversions and the power of Pentecost, and they began looking more like the original Church of Acts.  

     The Evil one couldn’t let this stand. Since his primary target has always been God’s people, be they Jew or Gentile, he succeeded in getting the revitalized Church to divide into denominations, and even the non-denominational became their own separate denominations. Most allowed themselves to be lobotomized, severing their connection to the power of Pentecost, and now “having a form of godliness but denying its power,” they have been divorced from their biblical roots until they fit the Lord’s warning, “can a bad tree produce good fruit?”

     So, what should the Church be unified around? It’s not like we weren’t given a blueprint to follow. It’s not as if the Book of Acts had somehow been deleted from the Bible, although most of Christendom has done just that, relegating its power and miracles to a distant past. God made it easy for us; Luke even gives us an eyewitness account of the early Church: “And they continued steadfastly in the apostle’s doctrine…” (Acts 2:42). Luke didn’t say, “Just make it up as you go along.” He didn’t say, “If you don’t like a particular doctrine, if it makes you feel uncomfortable, just write it off as something of the past.” He didn’t say, “If your denomination doesn’t believe that way, then just ignore the Scriptures and go along with their doctrines. It’s like the Church has thrown out the blueprints and invented their own version of Christianity, doing “that which seemed right in their own eyes.”

     Again, what should the Church be unified around? The pattern left for us is not some deep mystery buried deep within the book of Leviticus or the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s found in plain sight in the Book of Acts, where the Church was born on the Day of Pentecost, the original imprint. They believed the baptism of the Holy Spirit to be a separate experience from the Spirit of God that comes to dwell in every believer’s heart upon salvation. In Acts 19, Paul asked the Ephesian believers, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”

These Ephesians were already believers, they possessed the indwelling Spirit of God. Paul wanted to know if they had also received the baptism of the Holy Spirit “since they believed,” for if these two experiences were one in the same, then why would Paul be asking this question? And continuing in Acts 19, we see a biblical pattern, the Ephesians were saved, baptized in water, and baptized in the Holy Spirit. Then, they went out and preached everywhere, made disciples, and planted churches throughout their known world. All the present-day Church had to do was follow this simple pattern and they would still have the same power today.

     God calls the gifts of the Spirit the “gifts of the Spirit” because they are a gift, like salvation, not merely a doctrine. What should you do with a gift, especially one so valuable and came at such a cost? That’s easy, one should be grateful, and to show one’s gratefulness, they should put it to good use. God offers a free gift to empower believers and His Church, so why have most of them said, “No thank you, we believe you’re outdated, that you don’t exist, we can get along just fine without you, that you make us uncomfortable so we’ll invent a doctrine to deny you? Doesn’t that seem like a rude response to a free gift?

     This First Church also believed in the imminent return of Jesus in what’s known as the Rapture, harpazo in Greek, or raptus in Latin, which means “seized” or “carried away.” It’s where we get our English word “Rapture.” For those who say the word Rapture is not found in the Bible, it is if you read the Latin version. The Kione Greek translation is even more descriptive, harpagsometha, which directly translated says, “we shall be caught up, taken away,” with the idea of it being a sudden event.   

     If the Church could be unified around even these two events, the Holy Spirit baptism and the imminent return of Christ in the Rapture, the rest would fall into place and we could all regroup around the blueprint given to us in the Word. It’s as simple as just believing what the First Church believed and then practicing it.

     Jesus said in Matthew 12 that “every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand.” And Paul said one of the most serious sins the Church can commit is to bring division among believers. Jesus spoke about the power of Christian unity when He said that if even just two of you agree in prayer about something, it will be done for them.

     If the Tower of Babel was destroyed by God because of their power in unity to do Evil, how much more if we had genuine, biblical unity today, where we could once again be the Church that “turned the world upside down.”