Miss Matched, Etcetera

(Kenneth Copeland's plane and home)

Miss Matched, Etcetera

            Your writer was a member of an investment group who held regular meetings at a certain restaurant. Because of a wedding, the meeting place was changed and one of our members invited us to meet in the board room of a large-prestigious local bank.

            Back then, still a little eyesight, enthralled by portraits hanging around the room. Old white men, long dead, whose family names reigned across the city such as the founder of a large cotton mill, huge lumber corporation, large retail clothing chain, all well dressed, well groomed, smirking with the arrogance of gentility. Not one person from a poor family, even a shepherd, earthy people whose gentleness and sweat had made them rich.

            When you look at the baby pictures, any of us, the power brokers-opinion molders of the board room, the baby pictures of the most subservient of us, even the shepherd, it is hard to distinguish the adult from the baby. Most babies look very much a like, cute-lovable-adaptable. Changes of every type take place during maturity. We are not stuck where we start. It is hard to predict the outcome just from genes and, there is a great need for the gentleness-integrity-humbleness of the shepherd.

            God must have loved the poor because there are so many. It was two shepherds, the lowest in the economic and reputation ladder that God announced the birth of his son.  It was shepherds-herdsmen who dominated early scriptures...Abraham, Jacob, David, etc. God referred to his chosen-called-elect as sheep.  "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:" (John 10:27).  Christ referred to himself as the good shepherd. "I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep" (John 10:11).

            The greatest event in human history is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, it changed everything. Belief in the resurrection of Christ changes lives. AND, no matter how important or how much money, if you do not believe this, you are lost. "And if Christ be not raised, your faith [is] vain; ye are yet in your sins" (1 Cor 15:17).

            To the believer, the church member, the work of Christ is the obsession of life. The Apostle Paul was not mentioned in the gospels. Paul's conversion, this brilliant Pharacie Jew, inspired by God, left most books of the New Testament to us. Paul was stoned in Effaces, in chains at Maletis, beaten, jailed, gave us the passion of the church.

            When you have buildings, you have what buildings can do. When you have organization, you have what organizing can do. BUT when you have passion-prayer, you have what God can do. Paul's final message to us: "I have fought a good fight, I have finished [my] course, I have kept the faith" (2 Timothy 4:7).

            If the Christian actually believed what it means to dramatically put your life in the hands of God, IF understood what it means to have love for the savior, then justice and integrity of living.

            You would not recognize the baby picture of the early church, 120 then Pentecost and 3,000 added, then his followers crossing the world, baptizing believers...today millions if not billions of Christians. Is this writer the only person questioning the voracity of church growth? Early Christians were persecuted, sought togetherness in a sanctuary. Today's church sanctuary not distinguishable from a political or civic club, open to the general public, spectators-visitors-unbelievers singing together with the committed, "Oh how I love Jesus"-putting into the offering plate money.

            Jehovah's witness halls do not have spectators, Mormon temples-stakes do not have visitors, early black church Christians found solace in their togetherness. Catholic priests-Baptist preachers say, "Don't offend those in the pews."  It was the mixed multitude (Egyptians not Jews) that caused most of Moses' problems when leading the children of Israel from Egyptian bondage...miraculous deliverance of God.

            The big "tent" evangelistic crusades of Oral Roberts, Oliver Green, attracted spectators, and many were saved just as some are saved at evangelistic Sunday night services. I knew one dentist and his wife who went to Oliver Green's tent as spectators, left the tent as born again-devout believers.  The baptistery is the least used area of most evangelical churches.

            We have forgotten the poverty-brutality of the early church, even the poverty of the early church in America. One "eye-ing" the jet planes of Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland, and other televangelists. Their opulent lifestyles..the laughing, clapping of Joel Ostein's performance like the mafia infiltrators from Chicago and NY who now occupy our nation's capital, would lead the casual observer to think that Christianity like patriotism is EASY, available to BUYERS. I tell people not to waste their time discussing Jesus' resurrection with an unbeliever. It is like discussing with pet lovers God putting animal skins on naked Adam and Eve. The truth is still the truth whether anyone believes it or not.