The Church Articles
Jesus Loves The Church
Dean Taylor
We all know 1Corinthians 13, it’s the love chapter. You have probably heard it at weddings in the ceremony, or seen it written in the wedding program. But the real context of 1Cor 13 is Paul writing to the church to deal with the issues that were brewing in the local body there.
One of the biggest confusion points in the body of Christ is the practice of separating Jesus and the church. By that I don’t mean the invisible worldwide Body of Christ, but the local expression of the Body, the church. If God’s love is flowing through us then we will love what Jesus loves. Ephesians 5 says that Jesus loves the church and gave his life for her. If Jesus loves the church, then guess what…we are to love the church and give ourselves for her also.
However, one of the main problems I see in the church today that we need to apply 1Cor 13 to is the issue of loving the expression of the local church. For some reason Christians have separated their love for Jesus and His Church, they think it is socially acceptable behaviour to criticize, condemn and sit in judgment over the church. Paul went on further and wrote 1Cor 14 where around 5 to 6 times he talks about what ever you do in the church make sure it is for the purpose of building up and strengthening the local church, not being one who tears it down.
Our attitudes, private conversations with other Christians, ways of thinking about the church all need to be overlaid with 1Cor 13 and 14 and Eph 5:25. How can we say we love Jesus if we tear down what He loves and died to establish. We are to love it when believers get together to worship and pray and help the poor and hear the word and on and on, because God loves it when they do.
Christians stop coming to church for all different reasons. One of the classics is that the church is full of hypocrites. Well Jesus died for and loves His church even with the hypocrites in it. So if we love Jesus we will not only love the church with the hypocrites but get planted in one and get involved. Being planted in the local body of Christ is the place God has called us to plant ourselves so we can grow into the strong resilient and stable trees of righteousness He wants us to be. The local church is where we get to practice 1Cor 13 love scriptures right in the mix of hypocrites and all the crazy people with their demons. That’s why Paul wrote the love chapter, because he knew that we all have plenty of different reasons why we should either leave the church or criticize and condemn it.
Anyone can say they love Jesus and the Body of Christ, because they are invisible. But what about the flesh and blood people in the local church right next to, and in front of you. The ones that you can feel, touch and listen to? This is where we learn to grow and mature as Christians. If we decide the church is not for us, our development is put on hold because we are no longer able to practice our love walk with fellow believers in a local body and so remain where we left off in our character development. It is only in the trenches of the local church, in that pressure cooker environment, serving with our gift arm in arm with all the different types of personalities and temperaments that we can come into the full stature of the son of God that we were destined to become and live out the 1Cor 13 love walk.
If you love Jesus, then love and embrace His church no matter what comes against you. Resist the temptation to keep swapping churches because you haven’t got your way or someone has offended you. A tree only becomes strong if it stays planted where God has planted it. As a great old prophet once said: when you’re starting to think you see problems in your church, “have as much sense as an old cow to just eat the hay and spit out the sticks” – but stay planted.
Author Profile
Dean Taylor
Dean grew up in Newcastle, NSW surfing the beautiful beaches and playing on many sporting teams throughout his young life and into adulthood. He was born in 1967 and raised in a Christian home, attending a Baptist Church where he accepted Jesus as his Saviour in 1978. Upon finishing a science degree at university Dean worked in the cardiology unit at the John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle before returning to do a diploma in teaching. It was around this time that he experienced the call of God on his life to ministry and while teaching at a Christian high school he had a transforming experience of the Holy Spirit which consequently altered the direction of his life.
Dean married his wife Wendy in 1993 and they moved to Brisbane in Jan. 1995 where he studied at the Baptist Theological College of Queensland. Graduating from there with a Diploma in Ministry, they were then led to Kenneth Hagin Ministries on the Gold Coast in 1997, where he completed studies before entering into itinerant ministry in 1999. During this season Dean was given a fulll time instructors position at Rhema Bible Training Centre which he filled until moving into a teaching/pastoral position at Destiny Church in 2003 which he continues in today.
Dean's home church is affilliated with Harvest International Ministries Australia one of the Apostolic Networks in a group known as the Revival Alliance. While continuing in his role at his home church, Dean has been directed by the leading of the Lord to also serve the wider Body of Christ. Operating in the ministry of prophetic teaching, his mandate and passion is to help pastors mature the Body of Christ so her individual members can come into their God-given destiny. His desire is to see God's children skillfully applying Jesus' Kingdom principles by bringing them practical, revelatory insight in a fresh, dynamic and understandable style. His heart is to see the Body of Christ being built up in strong faith and operating in greater demonstrations of the Kingdom.
Dean and Wendy live on the Gold Coast with their daughter Darcie.
Website: www.deantaylor.com.au | Article Archive: here | MP3 Messages: Shop
The Times, They Are A-changn'...
JoAnn McFatter
Bob Dylan said it well……and nobody really listened much to him, either. The times, they are a changin’. It’s simply a musical phrase that has been going around in my head for some time now so I thought I would look up the words of the song. Sometimes it’s a Bible verse that keeps coming to me over and over, but sometimes it’s just a line from a song, such as this. I know to pray about it and ask the Lord what He’s trying to say.
When I peer into it and consider the matter with God, He will expand on what He is drawing my attention to. The message in Dylan’s song is as applicable today as when he wrote it a generation ago, but the song itself (though interesting to revisit) is not what I am wanting to highlight here.
I believe it has to do with the “shift” that has been prophesied over and over by many a prophetic voice that is now upon us. Not that it really took a prophet to declare that as of late, but there were those who were prophesying the shaking in years past when we had no obvious reason to think in those terms. So here we sit with much to ponder in our own lives, even to the extent of re-evaluating the standard at which we have lived our lives up to this point.
The attachments we have had to this world’s economic system, mindsets, etc. have truly influenced us by way of what “makes sense” to the mind of man much more than we who have been born of the Spirit should have allowed.
” Jesus answered and said to him, ‘ Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘ You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.’ ” –John 3:5-8
He made the distinction between the flesh/mind of man and the Spirit/mind of Christ over and over in scripture. I researched vs. 8 a bit because it has always intrigued me. What I found was reference to the wind as something that we can hear and see the result of yet are not able to explain where it comes from or where it is going. It’s a mystery, as is the rebirth of man by the Spirit. We see the result – the new man – but we can’t really explain how it happens. Oh, that this were the testimony of our lives! Unfortunately, we have so mixed the mind of Christ with the things we have hung on to from the mind of man that it’s hard to even sort it out anymore.
Someone recently mentioned that we, as the church, have become a thermometer that reads the climate of the culture as opposed to a thermostat that SETS the climate of things. I even remember Bill Gothard giving a teaching 30 years ago showing how the pendulum of the church was shifting as the pendulum of our culture was shifting. Always staying a certain distance from the world’s pendulum but, none the less, moving along with it. I don’t believe this to only apply to morality, but to our way of thinking as well. We hold to the ways of the flesh as we hold to the mind of man.
I am not trying to throw criticism, but simply trying to suggest that we have GOT to get back to looking at the pattern laid out to us in the scriptures….to come up higher in our thinking. The times ARE truly changing as the Kingdom of God is being made manifest on the earth. We will be lost if we are trying to navigate by the mind of man through it all. Having lost the fullness of our miraculous rebirth as we are born of the Spirit as a new creation in Christ, we are stuck in the mentality of sins that we battle because we have not had a revelation of Christ crucified once and for all to take care of the very nature of sin. We need the renewed ability to have our eyes and ears opened with hearts of understanding to the mind of Christ as we put on the Lord Jesus Christ!
And do this, knowing the time that now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfull its lusts. -Romans 13: 11-14
My point is not even this. What I urge us to press into is the revelation of what happened when Christ gave His life freely on the Cross, shedding His Blood as the final act of sacrifice for sin! The whole lump and sum of it! The very nature of sin that would even allow us to be pulled into the sins that have beset us has been lost as we have so focused on individual sins that we have lost the revelation of the real beauty of the mystery. That Christ freed us from the very nature of sin itself – and, yes, it must be a revelation.
We have become so concerned with the sins that we have forgotten, or perhaps never even come into the illumination of the Blood of Christ washing over our sin nature so that we would not even be pulled back into the mentality of struggling with sins. What I think we have missed is the fact that the curse was broken and we no longer live under the curse that was given to Adam and Eve. It’s more miraculous than we ever believed what this Christ of ours has done on our behalf! As that revelation is granted us, we can then step into the place that we need to be walking at this time in history. All of scripture has led up to this point in time that we, as the manifest sons of God, are to be walking above all of the things that we struggle with. Let us look to the Light as we are in the Light and the Light is in us! Christ in us the hope of glory!
As we move into this position of revelation that He has granted us we will begin to walk in the mind of Christ to hear the voice of the Spirit. As the voice of the Lord comes to us to show us how to navigate through this hour that we have embarked upon we will have ears that hear because we are walking by and in His Spirit and not in the mind of man.
And those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. -Romans 5: 24-25
Instead, we seem to still be suckling on milk as babes rather than eating of the meat of the Word to build up our spirit man in wisdom and understanding, able to determine what the leading of the Holy Spirit is.
For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. -Hebrew 5: 12-14
The visitations, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the voice of authority, and much more that will be given in this hour by God will not be given to those of us who are still struggling with the milk. The veil between heaven and earth is truly at it’s breaking point. The invitation is there for whosoever will – He is not a respecter of persons as He has declared by His own mouth. BUT He loves us too much to release to us what we are not prepared to walk in. Many are called, few are chosen not out of punishment, but out of His mercy and love toward us to not give us more than we can handle.
I pray that this is not taken as a rebuke, but rather a call to come up higher. That is how I have heard it from the Lord and I hope that I have portrayed it as such, even in the frankness and reality of where we are at. We are called to sooooooo much more than we are living in. Perhaps that is because of the mindsets that we have allowed ourselves to adapt as we have compromised with the mind and ways of man. I have said this before but I cannot emphasize enough that it is a time to ask for a revelation of the Cross and the Blood of Jesus Christ so that we might truly come into the authority and discernment we have been called to walk in. Revelation that the curse is broken and we no longer are subject to it must be ours if we are to move in the signs and wonders that He has saved for the very last. He has saved you to be born in this hour intentionally because you have been chosen as one who has the potential to walk this out. Allow yourself to be realigned, or perhaps even for the first time aligned, with the mind of Christ and just who we are in Him as He dwells in us.
Author Profile
JoAnn McFatter
JoAnn McFatter is currently traveling nationally and internationally as a worship leader and/or speaker. Her ministry, Inside-Eternity, is partnering with WhiteDove Ministries, based in Foley, Alabama.
While facilitating the shift from the mind of man to the mind of Christ in word and song, she carries a twofold passion. First, to see the Bride abandoned body, soul and spirit to God and God alone. Second, to see revelation opened up as it pertains to spirit, science and art being woven together to bring Kingdom manifestation on the earth as it is in heaven.
Website: www.joannmcfatter.com | Email contact@joannmcfatter.com | Article Archive here |Books here
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