Breaking Free from Church System: A Biblical Perspective

The speaker discusses the problem of experienced pastors wanting to assist him in his ministry through the same church system they previously criticized.

Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus is used as an example of how Jesus challenged the leaders of the Jewish church to start over and see the kingdom of God in a new way.

The speaker argues that many people, including pastors, have a natural assumption that God wants to use their talents, hobbies, and possessions to build their own ministry or empire.

This assumption is challenged by the speaker, who argues that God has his own family, kingdom, and objectives, and that we should not try to enlist Jesus in building our own empire.

In the past few months since I started this channel, I've received a few inquiries from experienced ministers. One of them was an older man, nearing retirement. I've been deeply impressed by their willingness to start the communication off, by confessing that they feel they may have been deceived for many years. teaching a false gospel, never having really come to terms with the teachings of Jesus and the role those teachings play in defining what a true Christian is. It's greatly excited me each time to think of an experienced pastor actually switching sides and starting to work for Jesus. But there's been a disappointing pattern each time as well, from that point on. Let me tell you about it. Little by little, each one of them has in one way or another offered to assist me in what I'm doing and they offered to do it through the same ministry that they had just admitted led them nowhere in years gone by. Their natural assumption has been that they have discovered the truth now, all of it, or at least all of it that they need, and so what they need to do now is to go back to the church and tell the congregation what they know, albeit probably a bit more tactfully than what I would do. Yeah, I can understand that too. Religious leadership had been their career, And so they assume that religious leadership is what they have to offer to God. This is where I think error creeps in. There could be some truth in this, but I cannot help but think about the meeting Jesus had with a religious leader in his day. A religious leader in the one true church of the day. An organization clearly set up by God according to Scripture. So here was God's chance to get the truth preached inside the religious establishment. But what did Jesus do? This guy, Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, admitted that he had seen something in Jesus which his colleagues had either overlooked, or which they had consciously opposed. Nicodemus had not come to Jesus as a deserter from the Pharisees. No, but he did see himself as a peacemaker, hoping to enlist Jesus in what he and the other religious leaders were doing, for the good of everyone involved. After all, Nicodemus and his friends were the overall leaders of the recognized church of the day, and Jesus was struggling out there on the streets, with little or no official endorsement. Jesus had his crowds, but mostly they were fickle, and very few of them were educated, much less religious experts. Nicodemus felt that he could see something in Jesus that the other Pharisees were missing, something that could be helpful for the Jews as a nation, and probably for Jesus as well. So, what does Jesus say to Nicodemus, almost before he said hello? He says, don't be offended, Nicky. But unless you start all over again, like a baby, you're never going to be able to see the kingdom that I'm talking about. What? Start all over? Hey, did Jesus know who he was talking to? This guy was a leader of the Jews, a respected rabbi, a member of the Sanhedrin, no less. What's this about starting over? And what Nicky said in this secret, middle-of-the-night meeting with Jesus is very similar to what the pastors say to me. They say, I agree that something is wrong in the churches. You've seen it too. We need to fix it up, you and me together. I have some ideas. I have a paid position where I can preach it. I know influential people. We can work with them. They aren't all bad. We can fix it up. Uh-uh. That's your kingdom, Nicky, not God's. That what Jesus would say He say God plan is radically different and you part of the old school You a leader of Israel so all you can see is the kingdom of Israel You see Jesus had this thing that he called the kingdom of God It was a whole new ball game In the same way, all these various pastors can only see the institutional church or at least their little piece of the institutional church. They spend their whole life, well, their livelihood for many years. They believe that if they're tactful enough, more doors are going to open. The revival can begin inside the establishment, and they can be the catalyst. So what do I see? Well, I'm afraid I see another bit of hopeful idealism that is going to be chewed up and spit out by such a cruel institution that it would literally torture the Son of God to death if it would keep things going their way. I also see someone who's not prepared to come to Jesus as a baby and start all over again. In religious things, these various pastors are like a rich young ruler was in material things. How hardly, Jesus would say, shall they who are religious leaders let go of the religion long enough to be truly born again. They all think that they found an improvement on what Jesus and his motley crew did So they just want to take enough of the truth to be able to go back and sell it to their colleagues and to their congregations. One old guy wrote to me, Here's a link to my books. Read them. I've written a lot of them. But hey, aren't you the same pastor who just said a few days ago that you had missed the truth about Jesus all your life? Your books, bless your heart, will only be what you knew before. I introduced you to the Jesus of the Bible. There'll be little more than the blind leading the blind." Another one said, "'I'm going to do the same thing you're doing. I know some really good people in the church. I can enlist their support to start a charity. We can do great things for God, and we won't even need to sell our houses to do it." And I say, "'Start a charity? Is that what Jesus said? Why not just sell what you have and give that to the poor?' "'No, no, not everything,' this latest version of Nicodemus says. We need buildings and property. Trust me, I know how it's done. And I know the people who can make it work. But before I go too far with this, let me remind all of you that this problem that pastors have their obsession with themselves and with their own empire, it's not limited to pastors. All of us have talents, hobbies, careers, possessions, families, education, involvement in various groups. And so our natural assumption is that God is going to take all those bits and pieces and create a ministry tailored to where we live and what we have. We won't need to let go very much at all. Never mind that God can see the bigger picture, that he has his own family, his own kingdom, his own objectives that he wants to reach. What we each want is to enlist Jesus in building our empire, our ministry, our reputation. Please God, let my kingdom come, is what we pray. And in no time at all, we have convinced ourselves that it's really God who is telling us that he needs a chef in the local fast food restaurant or that he's been looking for years for someone like us to turn into a mega recording star. A very common misunderstanding is that if you forsake everything then God's going to lead you to someone on your block, in your local church in your family, or somewhere else very close by so that the two of you can sweep the rest of your neighborhood into the kingdom of heaven. Most of you have no idea just how difficult it really is to find anyone who is prepared to forsake everything for Jesus. At best I would say there less than one genuine follower of Christ in every 50 people on the earth today And in my experience it usually takes two or three times as many contacts to locate just one such person This assumption that we can turn all of our friends and relatives into genuine Christians is the kind of reasoning behind the so-called witnessing on the job mentality, isn't it? You work as a mechanic, servicing up to a dozen cars each day. You don't get to talk to all of the owners, and those who do talk are more interested in the repair and what it's going to cost. But still, you imagine that one day, God is going to use that job to get a genuine follower of Christ to drop into your lap in the middle of one of those conversations. That's why he put you there, isn't it? You're not there to make money. No, no, no. You're there to witness for God. You might even be able to sneak a few tracks, or a Bible, in with a reading material in the waiting room. And who knows how many hundreds of Christians will grow out of that kind of a ministry if you spend your whole life doing it. It's all egocentric delusions of grandeur, unfortunately. And it's a hangover from the old Broadway churchy gospel. But the whole neighborhood can claim to be Christian because they all said a little prayer or did some other cost-free ritual to get themselves saved and then get back to work making money. Is that really what God's looking for? Does he really need Christian mechanics, Christian newspaper reporters, Christian assembly line workers? Brothers and sisters, God is setting out to make a whole new world, a world that most of you have never seen. Trust me, what he needs at this point in history are people who will leave the old world behind and go everywhere showing what this new world of his is like. by the way we live, and by the way we love, and by the way we obey Jesus. Even if you had a position where you could say exactly what you wanted to say to millions of people every day, until you could show by your life that your faith is not in the money that comes with the paid job mentality, the message itself will be truncated, impotent, counterfeit. People would be given an ineffectual Jesus, unable to even feed them much less raise a lifeless, decomposed body back to life for eternity. Ask Billy Graham. Ask any of his colleagues. They all preach a watered-down, namby-pamby false gospel of their own creation. Not the teachings of Jesus. Well, they never would have been successful if they had. The message needed to be altered before they could become the successes that they are now. The bitter truth is that God doesn't need them, and he doesn't need their compromises. It could have been so much more useful to God if only they had let go and allowed themselves to be transformed by the real teachings of Jesus. Yet you want me to believe that you have found a way to get the apostate church to accept the truth through your connections, your smooth words, and your ability to impress. Others of you want me to believe that God needs you in that school, guiding all those students closer to the truth, or caring for all those patients in the hospital, in a job that many other nurses or doctors would snap up in a moment if you walked away from it. You want me to believe that God has put you where you are because he needs more potato farmers, or more call center salespeople, or more truck drivers. You tell me that he needs you to witness to the local Little League, where you coach, or to others at the PTA, or the local chess club. You're going to be the salt of the earth by staying right where you are and changing almost nothing. Your angelic smile will win the world for Christ if nothing else Sorry folks but what you really need is to be born again And that can only happen when you let go of your own little kingdoms all of them and start over afresh Break all the ties, drop all of your pretensions, and listen to Jesus like a little child. He's not interested in your presumed expertise, all the good works that you've already done, all your friends and connections. You can only be born again by coming to Jesus as a child, listening to him like there's no one else in the world to listen to, and then obeying him with all that you possess. Born again by Jesus, the Word of God. That's what you need, and without it, you're never going to even see the kingdom that Jesus wants you to be a part of. I can promise you that. Jesus alone has the words of eternal life. To whom else can we go? When you catch sight of that, then you may be on your way to being born again to actually seeing this invisible kingdom of heaven to being readied for the return of Jesus as a bride, awaiting the arrival of her incredible, awesome husband. That appears to be what Nicodemus missed out on. We only hear about him one more time in the Gospels, and that's when he makes a feeble attempt to stick up for Jesus, only to be silenced by his colleagues. Oh yeah, and then he helped bury Jesus after his colleagues had killed him. Now let me just clarify one little detail here before I finish. Some people are going to say, are you saying that you're the only one doing it the right way? How are you different from the pastors that you're criticizing? Well, truth is, folks, there's no easy answer. I've tried to teach on this channel that you can do it yourself, you don't need me. But, neither does God need you. And that's the point that I'm addressing in this video. Until each of us realizes that We will never be in the right frame of mind for God to introduce us to each other. You don't need me, and I don't need you. But we both need the teachings of Jesus. The cornerstone, not your books or my books, not your friends or my friends, just the teachings of Jesus. And this is where I do have a slight advantage. While these other guys have been building the institutional church and its many man-made doctrines over the years I've been promoting the teachings of Jesus and trying to put them into practice in my own life. My only real friends are people who have also submitted themselves to the teachings of Jesus. My only real family are people who have let themselves be broken on the teachings of Jesus. My only real projects are ones that involve others who are doing so in obedience to the teachings of Jesus. So yes, I will challenge the entire church world, all the thousands of denominations and I'll do it with a handful of people who are 100% sold out, red-hot followers of Jesus Christ. When you've seen such people, you know what I mean. You won't be impressed with the counterfeits again. I hope that others of you will have the privilege to someday meet for yourselves someone who has given up everything for Jesus, and who is living their lives 24-7 in obedience to his teachings. As Luke says in his Gospel account, such people went around with Jesus actually showing the world what the kingdom of heaven is like. That's exactly what the world needs to see today, and you can be a part of it. I'll leave it there, asking you once again to contact me if you are interested in following the teachings of Jesus so that we can experience together the earth-shaking revolution that comes from such simple but rare obedience. Peace be with you.

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