Who Is In Charge of Your Church?

BLJ: Who is in charge of your church? Is it a board? A committee? A denomination? A pastor? It had better be the blessed Holy Ghost if you want a church that is alive and flourishing. When churches become so concerned with "order" that they make services so structured that there is no room for the Holy Spirit, the church has allowed man to become the driving force of the service. The service needs to be God centered. Yes, announcements, offerings, and greetings are part of a service, but they should be in the beginning or the end of the service as not to interfere with the moving of the Spirit. If we want the Holy Spirit to break into our meetings, we want a concentrated time of worship, prayer and preaching so God can deal with hearts.

What does it look like when the Holy Ghost is in charge? There will be Biblical messages that denounce sin and promote holiness. There will be saints testifying. There will be songs of worship that sing of the blood of Christ, the highway of holiness, and real heart felt worship. You shouldn't think you are at a rock concert or tavern.

ASSUMING ABERRANT AUTHORITY

All too many church members seem to forget that the Holy Ghost is the Executive of the Godhead, and the Administrator of this dispensation, and they take the church management into their own hands. Instead of working humbly with God, they soon operate on human judgment, and worse yet, carnally. When they do so, they are taking the same path that hopeless apostates of the past and present have taken. They failed to accept the challenge such as appears in these lines from an unknown poet-philosopher, who pled:

"Rouse up, brother! Rouse up sister!
Seek, O seek, this holy state;
None but holy ones can enter,
Through the pure celestial gate.
Can you bear the thought of losing
All the joys that are above?
No, my brother; no, my sister,
God will perfect you in love."

There is a balm this side of the moral and spiritual deadline, but there is no balm on the other side. There is a balm for all of the "Peters" who go out and weep bitterly (Matt. 26:75). They are truly sorry for the wrongs they have done. But there is no balm for the "Judases" who go too far in taking things into their own hands, betraying and crucifying God's anointed (Matt. 27:5). The rich man in Luke 16:19-31 had no pity for the poor, suffering man who lay at his gate full of sores, but later, in hell, he lift up his eyes in torment, but there was no balm for him.

The only way for us to produce more Peters and less Judases is to have "death-route" revivals which will plow deep enough with heart-searching to root out the carnal nature from the depraved hearts, until they will be like Peter, who was restored, and later received the baptism with the Holy Ghost, instead of ending as did Judas, who went to a suicide's grave and a devil's hell.

BLJ: We need real Holy Ghost revivals where salvation from sin and entire sanctification are preached. We need men and women of God to bring the thunder with the rain. This is an old expression that references ministers being loud, or entertaining, making the people feel good (lots of noise, i.e. thunder), but there is no anointing, i.e. the rain, on the message.

It seems that long-term Christians tend to be more vulnerable to the more subtle temptations and more susceptible to caving in to pressure than new converts. Many of them become so callused that they don't even feel sheepish or ashamed when they do wickedly. Jeremiah saw this happening in his day. He asked a question and then answered it: "Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? Nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush..." (Jer. 6:15; 8:12).

BLJ: We need the senior members of the church to stand and testify to what God has done for them over the years as an inspiration to the newer converts.