Evening Fellowship

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The LORD hath graciously extended unto me a great and undeserved privilege this very evening: to exhort the assembled brethren in a short message, the burden of which was the exaltation of the blessed simplicity of Christ’s divine person! I was invited to journey thirty-one long kilometres—one way—to an informal yet sweet gathering at the home of dear brother Warren, a place blessed by the presence of his beloved wife Angel and a few close friends of the Puritan Project Philippines. My spirit was deeply honored to have met and shared communion with these precious souls tonight. In the simplicity of Christ and the sweetness of fellowship, one finds the true reward of labor!

In this season when the Almighty doth seem, for a time, to withdraw the sweet comfort of His manifest presence, I am constrained to look only to His immutable faithfulness, and never to the shifting sands of my own limited understanding. My soul stands unmoved upon Christ’s finished redemptive work, regardless of the world’s censorious idiocy and contradiction. God was profoundly mindful to send the comfort I so desperately needed in the pure, sweet fellowship of fellow-lovers of the LORD—a union void of burdensome obligations, but united solely by Christ’s eternal truth and a shared burden for souls, and not by the dead letter of man's rules. I now begin to perceive a much clearer and more painful picture of what is professed as "Christianity" in this present age: a mere humanism hiding behind a brittle façade of piety! What ought to be the shining gems and jewels of Christ’s regenerative work is now deliberately overshadowed by a cold, dry intellectualism, deceiving the complacent, and seeking, if it were possible, to confuse the very elect. But let us be assured! God hath reserved unto Himself a faithful remnant—souls who have not bowed the knee to the Baal of empty religion, now masquerading vicariously as sound theology. 

What then is the inevitable question? Should we therefore refrain altogether from the noble pursuit of Theology? God forbid! Nay, for true Theology, the very knowledge of God, is a precious gift bestowed from God Himself, that we might rightly know Him and love Him! Yet, we are commanded to refrain from placing this knowledge upon a pedestal, whereby we begin to worship the mere idea of Christ, and not the living, gracious person of Christ! In pursuing the cold, rigid idea of Him, true love, profound compassion, and tender mercy are left outside the walls of the heart. The modern professing Church hath now utterly ceased striving to be the Good Samaritan, and instead, she deliberately passes by upon the other side, recoiling in disgust at every sincere soul who fears God but dares to dissent from her own precise doctrines. This posture of judgmental piety sadly mirrors the very heart of stone that governed the religious institution which, only a few centuries past, murdered thousands upon thousands of our own brothers and sisters in the faith! Let us be warned: The love of the truth must never supplant the truth of love!

"I desire theology and sacrifice."
"By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you hold many conferences about me."
A dear soul once remarked sarcastically against someone who was patronizing intellectual theology, "Yes, God said, You shall love the LORD your God with all your mind, all your mind, and all your mind."

A voice from my childhood days echo in my thoughts as I write this, "Go home and worship me in any cloth, for I was never tailor-made. Who told you I was? Who gave you the right to think it? Shame on you for converting me into a bullet, and shooting me into men's hearts."

The LORD knows to preserve those who are His. Whose minds are full of Christ, not mere intellect. May He raise up praying broken laborers with burdens, a new and different breed separate from the now superficial laborers with self-promotional yearnings.

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