WORKS FOR ME X

THE ORIGINAL REFORMATION

Life isn’t about me and what I do.  It’s all about God and what He did and continues to do.  I am His handiwork, His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that I should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)  I can’t make more of myself or lees of myself.  I am what I am.  I am His creation to do with as He pleases.  “This is the work of God that you believe in him whom he has sent.  Those who believe in him are joined together and GROW into a holy temple, a dwelling place for God.”  This is not a static building but a living organism made up of those who believe.

I think a lot about the Church, not the man made institutional church but Christ’s Church the he is still building.  That Church begins with the confession that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.  This confession is the Rock, the foundation of His Church that the gates of hell will not prevail against.  Christ’s Church consists of people who have entered into a covenant relationship with God through grace and faith in the work of forgiveness and reconciliation that Jesus completed on the cross in the shedding of his blood.  In this Church there are no barriers, boundaries, or buildings.  This Church is a communion of saints from the beginning of time throughout the end of time and beyond that into eternity.

There is no church without the Gospel.  There is no Gospel without Jesus and the cross.  There is no Gospel without the resurrection.  A gathering of people can be a Social Society, a community, a cult, a denomination…but it cannot be the Church without the Gospel of Jesus Christ, his work on the cross and his resurrection.  As people hear, believe, and receive the Gospel and receive it as a gift of God, He Himself begins to add to their numbers.  He grows His Church.  There is nothing man made about this work and only God is to receive the honor and praise through worship. 

The Bible reveals the truth that human beings are slow to learn and quick to forget.  Church history reveals the same truth.  A century hadn’t past and already the Church of Christ that began soon after his resurrection and ascension had already gone off track enough that God Himself gave Jesus  a revelation of things to come and the issues that needed to be reformed in the Church.  Jesus made this known to John through his angel.  This was the Original Reformation and unfortunately would be followed by several more as the years moved on.

This Original Reformation reveals a consistent pattern of actions of God’s people since the beginning of time.  God’s people abandon God, in their pride build their own cisterns, the cisterns break and people fail and turn to their idols, who fail to fix them.  God sends a revival, people repent, and begin anew, only to fall back into the same pattern.  In my pride I ask why this continually happens with God’s people.  In my humility I ask why this continually happens with me.  In His great wisdom God answers me.

“God made man upright, but they sought out many schemes” (Ecclesiastes 7:29).  Another translation is even more convicting.  “God made man simple; man’s complex problems are of his own devising.”

I believe that time is running out and I wonder how many more warnings and words of reformation God will graciously give.  I want to stop, look, and listen and get it right.  I want to go back to the Original Reformation that Jesus undertook, recorded by John, his beloved disciple.  Those issues are the roots of all the issues that came after them.  If those can be dealt with and corrected the pattern can be broken.  It works for me.