The Church Speaks of Discovering and Unleashing Hidden Powers
W. Carl Ketcherside
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A short time ago I drove into a filling station which was featuring a sale on automobile batteries. A huge advertising banner was flapping in the breeze. On it were the words "Power-packed for perfect performance!" The thought occurred to me that the angels could have unfurled the same banner when the church of God was introduced to humanity. The primitive ekklesia was a spirit-saturated, power-possessing, might-manipulating, energy-exercising organism, before which no enemy could stand.
You are familiar with the expression, "The Greeks had a word for it!" Their versatile language had more than one word for power, but whatever the legitimate form of power described, the church possessed it. There was dunamis--the power of dynamite and dynamo. There was energeia--operative power--the power of functioning energy. There was exousia- -delegated power--the power of authority and activity. There was ischus--endowed power--the power to produce and propel.
What has happened to this magnificent spiritual body which would prompt someone to write the parody which I received in the mail several months ago, and which read,
Like a mighty tortoise
Moves the church of God;
Brothers, we are sitting
Where our fathers trod.
We are not united,
All divided we,
Torn and rent asunder,
Lacking charity!
I am to address myself tonight to the subject
of discovering and unleashing hidden powers. Let us be sure that
we understand the nature and scope of this investigation.
Discovery is not creation. Columbus discovered America; Balboa
discovered the Pacific Ocean; De Soto discovered the Mississippi
River. Neither of these men created what he discovered. We create
that which has not previously had existence; we discover that
which has been here all of the time. The power to turn the wheels
of factories and light a multitude of cities was always in
Niagara Falls, but it was useless until man discovered it and
harnessed it. I do not believe that a single atom has been
created since God rested on the seventh day but the power of
nuclear fission lay hidden in the buried heart of uranium until
prospectors brought it to light and scientists
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The church is not the source of power. Its purpose is not to create power but to channel it, not to crystallize it but to utilize it. The Psalmist declared, "God hath spoken once; twice have I heard this; that power belongeth unto God" (Psalm 62:11). The apostle said, "For there is no power but of God" (Romans 13:1). When David blessed the Lord before all of the congregation, he did so with the words, "Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty" (1 Chron. 29:11). In the Hallelujah Chorus as recorded by John in Revelation 19:6, the voice of the great multitude chanted, "Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth."
"Omnipotent" is from the Latin. It is the equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon "Almighty." This word occurs fifty-six times in the Bible and every time it is applied to God. There cannot be two "Almighties." We must be careful that we do not think of omnipotence as merely a superlative degree of power possessed by God. When used of God it is not merely the sum of all power, but the all power of Someone. It is not the aggregate of potency but the attribute of a personality. Whatever power the church discovers or uncovers, it will be from God and belong to God.
When the church speaks of unleashing power it is evident that it has restrained, restricted and retarded the free movement of God's Spirit. That which has been suppressed must be expressed, that which has been stifled must be shared, that which has been held back must be held forth, that which has been sounded in must be sounded out. In too many instances the church is like Lazarus when he was raised from the dead, "bound hand and foot with grave clothes" (John 11:44). He was alive but powerless. He was all dressed up with no way to go. He was bound up, bound down, and bound around, until Jesus said, "Loose him, and let him go!"
The musty smell of the sepulcher exudes like the aroma of death from our winding-sheet of prejudice, indifference, traditionalism, and the party spirit. But the message of God concerning his people when they are powerless is always one of liberation. Whether Lazarus arrayed in ghostly garments, or Israel cringing under the lash of Egyptian taskmasters, the divine admonition is, "Let my people go." Whatever God wants done in any generation, he supplies the ability to do. The power to perform the divine purpose is present and available to the people of God. It is time that we free our feet from the fetters and face the future with full assurance that we need not fail. I want to suggest three areas of neglected power which would enable us like our Lord to go forth "conquering and to conquer.
The Bible teaches that every child of God is a priest and there is but one high priest, the Son of God. Every person on earth who has been called from darkness into light, every one who has laid hold of the mercy of God, is in the priesthood of God. "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a dedicated nation, and a people claimed by God for his own, to proclaim the triumphs of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. You are now the people of God, who once were not his people; outside his mercy once, you have now re-
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Let us go one step further. God's laity is his clergy. The word "clergy" is from "kleros" which means "heritage." This is the word used in 1 Peter 5:3 where the elders, or bishops, are instructed not to lord it over God's heritage. The heritage is equated with the flock of God. The word of God knows nothing of a clergyman or layman. These expressions are a part of the "speech of Ashdod" and demonstrate how effective was our sojourn in Babylon and how close to its environs some of us still remain. The Protestant world soon forgot the implication of a universal priesthood of believers and there is every evidence that many of us are treading on the same dangerous ground. The spirit of professionalized service rendered purely for the fee involved, rears its head throughout the land, and betokens the fact that it still lives to quench the Spirit and to throttle the gifts of the many. Indeed, when we speak of "gifts" today we have reference to that bestowed upon the church by the people, rather than that bestowed upon the people by the Father to be used in edifying one another.
We need to examine our vocabulary carefully. It is not enough to speak where the Bible speaks but we must also speak as the Bible speaks. When we do we will come to realize that ministry is not something done to the church, but that which is done by the church--the whole church! Every Christian is a minister. One enters "the ministry" by coming into Christ. That which makes one a child of God makes him a minister of God. We do not go away to study to become ministers, although those who have become ministers may go away to study. You can no more make a man a minister of God by handing him a diploma than you can make him a priest of God by giving him a certificate. Men can make clergymen, and if they are made, men will have to do it, but only God can make us ministers of God, and he makes all of us his ministers because he is no respecter of persons.
Because we have lost sight of this concept of the church we have forsaken the ideal of the Master for our lives. He said, "The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister." But the sons of God now come, not to minister, but to be ministered unto. The result is that the saints are no longer participants in the arena but spectators in the grandstand. The pulpit has become the sacred precinct of a professional dramatist and resembles the stage for a polished performance rather than a speaker's stand for sharing life and experience of others of like precious faith.
Thus the congregation is spoon-fed for years and never learns to feed itself. The fact is that we are delivering babies who never intend to grow, enrolling students who never intend to graduate, enlisting soldiers who never intend to fight, and registering racers who never intend to run. Our motto has become, "There he is Lord, send him!" The Ship of Zion is no longer manned by a volunteer crew working for sheer love of the Captain, but is steered by a pilot and an assistant pilot, while the remainder are paying passengers who are going along for the ride and complaining as they go. Many congregations are made up of half-converted individuals who think that when Jesus said we were to be childlike, he meant "childish" and they have to be petted and pampered to even keep them coming, much less to minister to others.
The tragedy of this is recognized when we remember that, in a world bursting at the seams with a population explosion, the preachers of the gospel who should be taking the message to the lost, are tied up and tied down, by having to salvage those who profess to be saved. Men spend years in preparing themselves to reach the masses with the Message and then are forced to become glorified "flunkies" at the beck and call of every petulant member with some pettyfogging and pusillanimous problem. By the time the erstwhile gospel proclaimer considers complaints, referees ridiculous ruckuses,
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It is astounding how much dead timber and dead weight there is in the average congregation. Dead timber produces no fruit and dead weight must he dragged along. Somewhere along the way we have missed the very essence of the Christian concept and the result is that we have the greatest accumulation of unused talent and the richest deposit of untouched ability of any group of people on earth. If we are going to be honest in our plea for restoration it is time that we begin to revolutionize our thinking so that every soldier will don the armor and every child of God will be active in ministering.
The primitive church did not send out missionaries. It was missionary! One reason the missionary society problem did not trouble them was because there was no one who could attend a meeting to discuss ways and means of taking the Good News to the lost. They were all out doing it. The entire church was scattered abroad and all those who were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the word.
Our greatest source of power is not in the pulpit but in the lives of those in the pews. We must meet the challenge of making every man of God a man of might. We must use our meetinghouses, not for parading profound pulpiteers, but for training soldiers in spiritual combat. We have moved the battlefield into the mess-hall and our brethren spend their time fighting each other. Let us discover and utilize the tremendous power in the priesthood of all believers, a power that is all too often siphoned off down the drain of disuse and discouragement.
"A people of his own." This is the designation of those who pledge allegiance to God's Son. Again the apostle declares, "For we are the temple of the living God, as God said, 'I will live in them and among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people" (2 Corinthians 6:16). The conclusion is, "Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, and make holiness perfect in the fear of God" (2 Cor. 7:1). Sanctification and holiness are translations of the same word. To be holy is to be sanctified.
It is to be regretted that the word "saint" has fallen into disuse among us. It was used no less than sixty-two times in the new covenant scriptures to describe the believers in Christ, and every time but one it is in the plural. Being a child of God is not an exclusive relationship. God has no "only" children in Christ. There is no place for a "lone wolf" attitude in the flock of God. The world thinks of a saint as someone canonized after death by other men. But if you are not a saint before you die, what someone else does after you die will not make you one. We
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Nothing is more startling than to contrast the lives of the primitive saints with those of our modern brethren who claim to be children of the same Father. Theirs was a constant career of adventure in the Spirit. They lived recklessly and fought relentlessly on the frontiers of faith. They refused to be scared out, starved out, or stamped out. What could the world do with a man like Paul? They threw him in jail and a little after midnight he converted the jailer and his whole family. They sent him bound to the prison in Rome and he started a congregation in Caesar's household. When they threatened to cut his head off he declared that he had a desire to depart and be with Christ, when they agreed to let him live he declared he would die preaching the Word. What weapons are effective against people who regard death as the gate to glory, and who cannot be bribed into substitution, beaten into submission or battered into subjection.
Why were the early Christians different? I think it was because all of them were conscious that they had died and been raised again. Only new men can live new lives! I would not minimize the importance of baptism. No one can any more strongly affirm its essentiality than I do. But I wonder sometimes if our emphasis upon this subject, which is our reaction to the de-emphasis of the religious world about us, may not have conveyed a wrong impression to those whom we have led to Christ. Baptism can transfer us but cannot transform us. It can change our state but not our nature. Our spirits are made new by the Holy Spirit. "He saved us, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but in virtue of his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration, and renewal in the Holy Spirit, which he poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior" (Titus 3:5,6).
Our source of personal power is the indwelling Spirit. Paul prays to the Father that "he may grant you to he strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man" (Eph. 3:16). Our problem is the age-old one of those who begin in the Spirit but seek to be made perfect by the flesh. The way of "perfection by flesh" is the way of legalism with its deadening conformity and paralysis of conscience. It seeks to be good by pressures from without, instead of by the divine presence that is within. "If you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live"(Rom. 8:13).
No man can be made truly good by law, not even divine law, for there are some things law cannot do because of the weakness of the flesh. Law can keep one from doing things that are evil because of fear of penalty or reprisal. But merely abstaining from evil is not all that is involved in the good life, for goodness is not negative, but positive. One can be full of legal precepts who is not full of the Spirit. Some mighty wicked men believe some mighty good things.
The fact is that we are either under the reign of sin or the rule of the Spirit. We must either live for self or the Savior. The one who is under the dominion of sin is powerless; the one who is filled with the Spirit is filled with power. It is vital to our spiritual existence that we reaffirm the truth with reference to the indwelling Spirit, so that our lives may be purged, purified and purposeful. We can develop the divine nature only with divine help. The world has no potent weapon against the consecrated life. Men can debate theories of holiness but there is no argument against the life of holiness. When all of the believers are wholly committed unto Christ so he can convey his holiness unto us through the Spirit, we will become "more than conquerors." We need to be purged from sin, purified from sham, and pledged to the Savior. Then we will be sheep led by a Shepherd and not cattle driven before a storm.
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It is the tragedy of our own history that, having begun so auspiciously, we have "fallen out by the way" and instead of becoming a catalyst to bring together divergent elements, we constitute one of the most divided movements in the contemporary American picture. We have contributed to the number of factions and fragments in the past; it remains to be seen whether we can contribute anything vital to the unity of the future. I do not hold with those who would abandon the ideal of restoration, but I am not so much concerned for "restoring the restoration movement," as I am in recapturing that spirit which gave it incentive and impetus.
The movement was an outgrowth of the implementation of those methods and means which were considered to be best adapted to the needs of that generation in forwarding the purpose of God. The fact that it was regarded as a "movement" and not as the church, proves that it was not to become stodgy, staid or static. We should not be shackled by blind devotion to outmoded expressions or experiments, nor should we be stampeded by wide-eyed amazement into adoption of anything in our generation which will make the ideal of God unattainable. Our problem is intensified because we have inherited not only the feeling for fellowship which animated our fathers, but also the subsequent feuds which decimated their successors.
Our Lord prayed for the unity of all who believe in him. With the shadow of the cross falling over his pathway, he first prayed for his chosen envoys, and then said, "Neither pray I for these alone, but for all those who shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one, as thou Father art in me, and I in thee, that they all may be one in us, that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." This is the foundation of all Christian unity. It is the point at which we must place our Jacob's staff for any survey of the promised land of peace.
Observe that it is a universal unity. It involves all those who accept the testimony of the apostles. These were the divinely chosen and qualified witnesses. Those who reject their word do not truly believe in Jesus at all. He declared, "He that rejecteth you, rejecteth me." In every test of the validity of faith, the assaying scales must be the apostolic word. In a great time of spiritual crisis when the foundations of faith were being assailed by antichrists, the apostle John wrote, "We are of God. Whoever knows God listens to us, and he who is not of God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error" (1 John 4:6).
Our unity must be personal. We are to be one as Jesus and the Father are one. Fellowship is a relationship between persons. It is not necessarily related to things, as the very word "fellow" proves. Fellowship is the sharing with others of a common life. It is not the sharing of the same opinions, ideas or interpretations. These things may present problems in the fellowship, and they may cause tensions among those who are in the fellowship, but they do not create fellowship, and by the same token, they need not destroy it. We are in the fellowship with each other because we are in Christ Jesus. It is not that we are all in the same place but in the same person that makes us one.
Our unity must be visible. If it is not exhibited practically the world cannot visualize it and it will have no impact for good. Jesus conditions the acceptance of himself by the world on the oneness of those in the world who have accepted him. The world will be won to believe in Christ when those in the world who believe in Christ are one. Those of us who are within the framework of the restoration movement have a dual task to perform. Now that we have allowed our-
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The divided world of our day will never accept the testimony of one Lord from a divided church. Actually, however, we have a greater unity than we have realized, because unity is the gift of God through the Spirit. Our task is not so much to create unity as to recognize it. We are not instructed to attain unto unity of the Spirit but to maintain it. One attains to that which he has not previously had; he maintains that which he has previously held. A lack of recognition of this has produced tragic consequences on missionary fields where those who lived at peace with each other in paganism have been set to fighting against each other under Christianity.
The greatest challenge of this age is the one presented by our dissension and disunity. This is our worst foe because it is a hydra-headed monster we have created and nurtured and which will devour us and all we hold dear if we continue to defend its right of existence. If it be true that the world will be led to believe in Jesus by an exhibition of our unity, we seek in vain to conquer the universe for Christ by merely pumping finance into partisan programs abroad. What is to be gained in the long run by sending men to call the heathen out of darkness who cannot even call upon each other to lead in prayer to the Father?
We are divided because we have thought in terms of division. We are today just where our thinking has brought us. We shall be tomorrow exactly where our thinking takes us. If we desire unity we must think in terms of unity. We must proclaim unity instead of division. We must distinguish between the word of life and the strife of words. It is for this reason that I have resolved never again to encourage factionalism or division among the saints of God. I have dedicated my life to trying in my very feeble and meager way to restore peace among the adherents of all the dissident factions. I regard every sincere baptized believer in our Lord Jesus Christ as a child of God. Wherever my father has a child I have a brother. I am convinced that he has many children and I have many brethren who have never even heard of the restoration movement. That movement is not the church and should never be confused with it. There is only one church now, there never was but one, and there will never be another. The church is a divine creation and a divine organism. It is not a human organization. A man might as well try to create another God as to create another church. The church is the body of my blessed Lord and is composed of all the saved of all the earth.
The church of God was on earth before Thomas Campbell read his "Declaration and Address" and before Alexander Campbell was born. Jesus has never been a head without a body, a king without a subject, or a shepherd without sheep, since the Pentecostal birthday of the church. Whether we would recognize and welcome some of the sheep if they came back among us now makes little difference, seeing that "The Lord knoweth them that are his." I am determined to receive all whom God receives, and on the same basis that he received me. He did not receive me because of my perfection in knowledge but in spite of my imperfections. I am no longer so much concerned that others believe all the things I think I know, as I am that they know Him in whom I have believed.
One can be wrong about many things if he is right about Jesus and still be saved; he can be right about everything else but if he is wrong about Jesus he will still be lost. I am determined to make nothing a test of fellowship which God has not made a condition of salvation. Those who are good enough to be in fellowship with him are not too bad for me to be in fellowship with them.
Think of the power we have dissipated in the perpetuation of feuds and fusses. Thousands of reams of paper have been consumed in vitriolic attack upon other members of the family; millions of dollars have been expended to promote partisan
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I am thankful that we can observe indications of a growing maturity among us. We are no longer as eager to deal with problems upon an emotional level and are seeking to combat them on a rational level. There is every reason to believe that, in spite of remaining areas of bitter factionalism in some localities, we stand upon the threshold of the brightest day in more than a century, for the heirs of the restoration movement. We are substituting association for assault, dialogue for debate, confession for challenges, and heart-cleansing for brain-washing. We can approach each other with open hands instead of with clenched fists. The chip on the shoulder has given way to the tear on the cheek and the tug at the heart.
We have many problems yet to be solved but we are coming to see that we can labor together toward their solution. Our differences may seem multitudinous but we know that differences are not occasions for division, but rather, for discussion. Our doctrinal disagreements can never be resolved by fighting as aliens, but only by loving as brethren. It is not necessary to be in the fellowship that those of us who are in Christ adjust all of our differences; it is only necessary that we adjust all of our differences in Christ.
To that end I pledge you my continued help in alleviating any of the distressing conditions which have arisen in the past. You are my brethren and I love you dearly. Call upon me when I can serve Him by serving you, to the end that when life is over we may all be able to share that eternal togetherness where there will he no more separation, and heartaches will be forever forgotten. "And now, brethren, I commend you unto God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up, and to give you an inheritance among them that are sanctified."