Are you on the right train? Where are you going? Of course this partially depends on what your goals are. I hope that at least the goals of the Lord Jesus Christ would also be yours. But this article is written in the hope that somehow you would see that to find the path that is on the same page as the very goals of the Lord Jesus Christ is very hard to come by in this dark age and darkest of generations. There are so many motives of the heart that God has to sift through. If you heard the sound wave as you clicked onto this page the lady says "Tickets please ... tickets please." No matter what train you may have gotten yourself onto either intentionally, unintentionally or wrongly with the best of intentions - it cost you something to get your ticket. But are you on the train that is going to the God's goal, the New Jerusalem? Is your destination the same as His? Another good question is do you know the way? Does the engineer at least? Is your engineer (Engineer??) the pastor or the Great Shepherd? Do you have the right ENGINE aboard your train with enough horsepower and fuel to make the journey? Well, that's what this writing is about.

I was going to write this while I was still in Japan years ago and didn't have time as I was preparing to go on leave. In Japan I originally thought this all up. Actually though these ideas are not something directly revealed to me or something I just thought up on my own but in this case are the partially the result of reading Gene Edwards "Overlooked Christianity." Previous to this I had gotten hold of a book put together by Steve Atkerson and others entitled: "Towards a House Church Theology" written by many concerning what the "House church movement" is saying these days and in actuality I have to fault that movement. In other words, even though I did not lie in anything I said in Addendum 3 (concerning some things that were in that book that I really do back up there is still something gravely wrong and I mean gravely wrong with it. It is not really "me."

The house church movement has a theology for the basis of their approach to the Christian faith and most of it is based on verses sown together from different passages to prove a point. So if this were the case then why would I write something complimentary about the book? Well because I still agree with what was said in many of the issues brought out by the book and since I do believe it and it is controversial with some beliefs I thought I better see what the reactions of people will be towards it.

Now let me take a minute to say that you absolutely MUST stop and realize that if you don't pay some real serious attention to outward practical issues and destroy the pagan traditions of men as far as so-called "church practice" is concerned than you will wind up with a leaking wineskin that will NOT HOLD the new wine of the Holy Spirit no matter how much God pours out IT WILL LEAK!!!!! Please take a minute to read my parable before you go any further: A man had many children who all lived in a new condominium he'd just bought. In that residence he had a new light blue carpet. his kids (who were quite small at the time) loved chocolate milk which he had there on the 2nd floor in his refrigerator. However they were so wild they had paper cups with holes in them... but they cried out to their Dad to give them the chocolate milk. Well they cried and cried till finally he got angry and went to the refrigerator and got it and threw it at them!!! Now, its not that he didn't want them to have it but he didn't want the carpet to be stained brown either!

Sure if you pray pray pray the Lord will open his night chambers and give you what you ask. But would it not be better to have a new wine skin to contain it? On the other hand you could have all the practices and trappings right and STILL not have what or rather the Who that Jesus shed His precious blood for and if you really love the Lord ALL the way not just your way but want to satisfy the desire of HIS heart and you really mean to have every thing in accordance as HE wants it to be then give HIM WHAT HE WANTS!!! He wants his Body, Building and Bride, not anything else!!!!!!! Now here's my proposition of what the real New Testament heart throb really is and please don't settle for anything else. Outward proper practices are important to contain the wine but here is the wine and I have seen some groups that had some of their outward ways wrong but still had this main reality and other groups seemed to have all the practices right but no inner life heartbeat!! In a big sense of the word all the other stuff is stuff that if you could know it and try to do it you still would not have the "real thing" and it would just be something that is like putting plastic apples on a real tree and trying to have a so-called "New Testament church" but it is not the reality that Jesus Himself left in this world. So what is the real thing? God. God is the REAL thing that was left behind by Christ and God wants that quality restored and it has to be up to His standard or the world is not going to take notice. As Leonard Ravenhill once said: "As the church goes so goes the world." No wonder the world is in such a mess! Now is the church going to change and become what she once was in the 1st century? No. But there will be some who come back to the original way and that is good because what God needs is a channel that is just like what He had in the beginning and a loving bride that will fulfill the desire He has in His heart.

So what is the real beginning that was known and spread by the original apostles? Well I don't think it was birthed on verses sown together. Now you may think that I will turn to the book of Acts and tell the story as it really happened and try to tell you like it is: , but it is beyond me. It is not in my grasp. I can only use my weak words. The beginning of the Christian life and the church is not starting at the book of Acts because before Acts is the life of Christ and before the Acts of the apostles there were the acts of the first Apostle: Jesus Christ, and where did His story and His training start? In Bethlehem? Not really. Now.... you may be able to see into my heart and find out something about the real me. Why am I the way I am? Why? Because the first Christian Worker and Founder of the church which is His Body was trained and raised up different than today's workers and preachers are raised up and so were the 12. So where is the real beginnings of these things if it was not in the book of Acts? The book of Acts was just a continuance of the story so it must have begun in the four gospels. Nope. It all started in Eternity past before anything was even made. Go back as many octillion years or centuries as our puny brains can imagine when the concept of "nothing" or "something" did not exist because there was only God and there was no room for "nothing" because He was theALLand in Eternity future He will be the ALL in all. It took an eternity past of fellowship with the Father and 30 more years of fellowship and training as a man before He was ready to begin His ministry! That's alot of time spent in the presence of God! So where was Christian life first lived? In the Godhead in eternal ages. The Father loved the Son absolutely totally ravishly ecstatically adoringly and just poured out with all His might (which is endless) all His care, love, joy and adoration with an endless infinite respect upon the Son. In turn (if such a concept even exists in that timeless realm)the Son returned that same love, worship and lavishingly ardent adoration upon His Father with which His Father had poured on Him. Of course the Son told the Father, "I love You soooo(forever and ever with more "o's"!!!)much I want someone else to see how wonderful You are!" And the Father told the same thing to the Son and so it was planned and decided that They (or HE) would create.

There was something else (actually there is more that has happened in eternity past than in all the universe and its centuries combined!!!)that happened: the Son, Who was not the first Christian, received His life from the Father(Who was the first Christian) and He learned to live the Christian life and was trained by His Father to live that life by living by the life of His Father not by a bunch of rules. When He became man He DID NOT CHANGE the way He lived the Christian life. He even admitted in John 5:30: "Without MY Father I can do nothing." Later on He told His disciples: "Without Me you can do nothing" in other words He did not live the Christian life by His perfect human life as perfect as it was but He lived it by the life, by the divine life of the 1st Christian: God the Father and it was a life with a different genetic structure. O.K. so wasn't Christ also divine? Yes, but He still could not live it on His own. In fact He said: "I do what I see the Father doing." Now that's a close relationship with God!! Of course, I have barely scratched the surface of the things that took place in eternity past, (!!!) ... events far more marvelous than anything we know or understand as far as events in this time and space existence we have!!!

Where was ecclesia or assembly-life first seen? In eternity past in the fellowship that flowed between the Father and the Son. So where was the first place assembly-life was ever seen (even though it probably wasn't much noticed)on this planet: a carpenter shop! Jesus' compatriots and fellow young men probably decided at 21 to sit under a rabbi and learn the scrolls so they could become a Pharisee, scribe or maybe a priest but Jesus decided to fellowship with His Father in a carpenter shop! Add 30 years of fellowship onto eternity! There the Father trained His Son! Personally! Except here it was in the context and limits of earthly humanity! THIS HAD NEVER BEEN SEEN ON PLANET EARTH!! NEVER HAD A MAN LIVED BY THE VERY LIFE OF GOD!!!!! Where was church-life seen next? Jesus and 12 men sitting around on a living room floor or hillside! Those 12 men "hung out" with the Son of the Eternal for 3 and a half years! That equals 20,000 hours in the direct presence of God!! Accept no cheap substitutes for producing apostles! Accept no cheap substitutes for producing ecclesia life other than THOSE kind of apostles or men with THOSE qualifications and those qualifications alone!!! What did they notice the most? His miracles? No! I'm sure they impressed them and they certainly were so amazed at them they wrote much concerning them but that was not the biggest impression. Those outward miracles were merely one kind of outward expression of the inward BIGGEST impression His life constantly impressed like a seal upon the hearts of those men. The biggest impression was His loving spotless life. Here I must say that I am not just copying Gene Edwards to say these things but if you'll click here: (A Vision) later on you can read on how I did have a vision of Christ in his earthly life and not only the disciples but I was impressed mainly by His loving life. Was that all? No. There was something about Him. He was certainly the happiest man and the most perfect they had ever seen but there was more. It was total self emptying love. In fact it seemed He WAS love: love incarnate. Love that could touch and change people so deep within. It was a pouring sort of love! Healing was just a helpless result of such love. It seemed unavoidable in the presence of such love. But there was more! Much more! ALL of this proceeded from His fellowship with an indwelling Father! It seemed the Blessed Vessel He was could hardly contain and pour such an Abundant Ocean that swelled from within!!! And they saw it from day to day! They watched Him like a hawk. Or they tried! There was so much to see!! Far better than television! They watched for mistakes but there were none! What an impression He made on these men even without one flaw even under such close scrutiny! But the Lord would have it no other way. They in this way "learned Christ" This is not the same thing as sitting in a Sunday school or hearing a sermon (what an addiction THAT has become!). They saw His actions, heard His words: even the tone of His voice, saw the way He moved, His smiles at them, His inapproachable and to them, unattainable joy, his inapproachable astounding wisdom, His tears, His sighs, even the way He turned His eyes and they could read what was in them. Do you think they were in love with Him? Yes, some more than others. But some actually hated Him: ... for no reason sometimes.

Day by day they observed how He lived, how He reacted, how He spoke in all situations and how He ministered. They observed Him in every situation and from all angles. Of course they were awed by all of this because they could not copy such a life as He had. This could not be done until after the resurrection when men could be born again. The difference was alot of things clicked and made perfect sense and came home to them as never before and they found that they were able to be like Him cause He lived within. The difference between them and us is that even though we got the same life through the new birth we have not seen what it is like to live by the life of God such as they saw it so we are not motivated to pay the price. We don't know what the lived out divine life is like and we don't know how to live in it and by the way our aim these days is not to live by God's life so that He will be seen and glorified in us; our goal instead is to do a work for God. When some people who wanted to do the miracles He did asked Jesus "What shall we do that we may work the works of God?" Jesus answered: "This is the work of God that you may believe on Him whom He has sent." It was not our works for God that counts with God that no flesh should glory but His works in us and that work is that He may work the faith of Christ in us. Our problem is: we really don't know GOD!

With all this background and all this time spent in the presence of God its no wonder that on the day of Pentecost apostleship was born. So what's next? The ecclesia-life of 13 became 120 and what did they do? They prayed constantly; they were in constant fellowship with the Father and the Son and asking for the baptism, which is the promise of the Father. Then 3000 got saved and God knew they could handle those many and knew that very quickly they could handle even more. Now where did these 12 get the ability to handle so many converts and bring them up right? From the greatest Shepherd of course. All 120 received the Spirit of course but the works of power and preaching and witnessing and ministry is only spoken of in Acts as being done by the 12 for the first 8 chapters. After the 3000 got saved there were 3118 sitting at the apostles' feet watching them just as 12 had sat at Jesus feet. It took about 6 years before Stephen was raised (in the same way the 12 were raised) and started doing great works of power. Disciples at that time just did not go seeking and doing works of power before they were ready for it. They concentrated on Life. What kind? They wanted to be conformed to the image of the Firstborn Son of God such as Romans 8 says we can be!

Most of their meetings were in all the houses where they were at during most of the times of their life and what were they doing? Seeking God, breaking bread with praises and prayers and fellowship with one another and they were involved with the apostles teaching (by the way the NT states that there should be only the apostles teaching which is now the N.T. and no other.) and the apostles fellowship. And just what did they talk about? Well what would you want to hear if you had been with the 12? A dissertation on Psalms? Or a talk on morality? I'm sure they touched briefly on such matters but mostly they spoke about their time spent with Christ and how He had such a close life with the Father and how all believers are supposed to walk in this age even as He walked. There is not a second way to live the Christian life. What did the 12 do when they were with Christ? Serve God? Nope, the only service they did was for 2 weeks when He sent them out. They sat and watched Him and soaked Him up until Pentecost. Now what did the believers do in Jerusalem the first 6 years? The same thing. They sat at the apostles feet. Only after years and years did a few more apostles or sent-ones get really qualified and raised up and one of them was Barnabas who had been with them from Pentecost but he did not get that status or anointing till Saul of Tarsus got it with him. Now you see 12 trained others to be sent-ones or church-planters however you call it but not till they had been ministering themselves and walking in fellowship with God for years. How did apostles develop after this? The SAME EXACT way as the Father had trained the Son and the Son had trained the 12. Now how did Paul get trained? He spent 3 years (this may be even better than being with the earthly Christ) in the desert receiving revelation from the glorified Christ and sometimes caught up with Him. Then he spent 3 years alone in the struggle of daily life as a Christian in Tarsus learning to live by the Son of God Who had been revealed within him. Then he spent 4 years sitting at the feet of Barnabas (who had sat at the feet of the 12) who raised up the assembly in Antioch, which was as gentile as you can get. The funny thing is it took 10 years (probably it took longer because Jesus was not on earth to raise up Paul but what happened and how was it? It is necessary that a man sit in and be in church life before he could possibly be an apostle or it will never happen and it has to be the type that such qualified apostle's produced or it cannot produce apostles. Until you really feel hopeless and say how can such a thing ever happen on this earth again? you are blind and don't have even a clue of what I am talking about and can't see what it really is that I really mean!!!!!!!!

So how about Paul? In Acts ch. 20 we see him training 9 men (8 are mentioned) while they watch him raise up the church in Ephesus where he stayed the longest. This was only after years and years of being an apostle and after the men (who he picked from churches he had raised up by the way and whose names and the churches they came from are listed in Acts 20:4 and on)had themselves sat in church life for years getting to know Christ and growing into His image. Now what was the center and meaning of all this? THE ETERNAL FELLOWSHIP THAT FLOWS BETWEEN THE FATHER AND THE SON AND THE FLOWING BETWEEN THEM IS THE SPIRIT!! John proves that this was the center of apostolic ministry in I John 1:1-4. He said that our fellowship is with the Father and His Son Jesus Christ and this is one of the few epistles which in the beginning does not mention the Spirit because everybody knew that fellowship is the Spirit and His grace in us shared between believers and this is what builds us up. So he says that which our hands handled, we have seen, and heard we declare unto you that YOU may also enter into the same thing. THIS and THIS alone is the Christian life! Nothing else! CHRISTIAN LIFE IS BEING BETWEEN THE FATHER AND SON AS THE FLOWING OF THEIR COMMUNION FLOWS BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN THEM!!!!!!!! It is that simple. It is that profound. Unless you are living and walking by the Spirit Who is the Communicator and Conveyer of all that the Father has given the Son then it is not the Christian life it is just ethics or Confucius or something of man and something wood, hay and stubble. There must be God's eternal life involved and Christ in you the hope of glory or God has no pleasure in it. NOTHING ELSE COUNTS! Even Paul said this fellowship is of the Holy Spirit in II Cor. the last verse: "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen." We can actually experience the fellowship which has taken place will take place and takes place in eternal realms between the Father and the Son! Now how can you have this kind of thing while being in a Protestant tradition sitting silent in a pew? It has to be communicated between brethren! We live far below our privileges in Christ. I'm actually sick of preachers telling young converts you must now serve God and do something for Him. The passion that makes the church live is "that I might know Him" as Paul said in Phil. 3. Out of that and that alone flows all and I mean ALL that is needed for life and service and it hits the mark because it does not fall short of the glory of God. So the fellowship of the Father and Son is the secret and all there is to the Christian life and it IS the church-life (it also IS the oneness: Jesus prayed: that they be one EVEN AS the Father is one with the Son!) also. Yes, its just that simple and that's what I believe but the ecclesia (church is a pagan word that actually connotes a hierarchical system) could only be then and now started in 2 ways and this is the logical result of such a high standard. Only by apostles who had been in this fellowship for years and sat in this high standard or #2 by groups of believers going to another city and starting or rather transplanting the same spiritual reality they had to that city. This is the ONLY 2 ways it happened in the N.T. AND SHOULD BE THE only TWO WAYS IT SHOULD EVER happen now!!!! In both cases the ones who extended had spent years soaking up Christ and growing up into the Head by the ministering of joints and bands and the supply of life throughout the functioning of many members surrounding them and thus grew in the life of God in the normal situation of assembly-life that would to God every believer should be able to experience. But instead of being fellow branches on the Vine with the life sap flowing in fellowship from many members around them (and this is glorious) they are isolated and there is not that kind of relationship of the Body with all members functioning and sharing their inward fellowship to edify one another. I just quoted Eph. 4 by the way. So anyway I hope you can see a little something from my poor words of why I think the way I think.