'She couldn't stop laughing,' I was told about someone who listened to the four Abba House vision messages; and I didn't remember them being so funny. Apparently, she recognized situations she had seen in different churches. And God knows, there are often funny situations. He had put it on my heart to prepare these messages to present, in a way, our DNA, or to use another image, the Constitution, the Charter that He had put in place for the assembly, so that all could be imbued with it and abide by it.
Every business (in the sense of activity) has an underlying philosophy, a worldview that underlies everything it does. The same is true for churches. In reality, people often join churches for the wrong reasons—size, music, the trendy pastor (and I'm not talking about myself), location (I only have to cross the street, I can easily bring people to my house after the service), and not for doctrine, vision, and the leading of the Holy Spirit. And this is essential. Because being in a congregation, my choices, my service, my actions must correspond and serve the vision of the congregation, otherwise there is cognitive dissonance. I'm there, but I'm not.
Many of the frustrations people experience stem from ignorance or refusal to embrace the specific vision of the church they are in, the mandate God had in his heart when He brought it into existence. I have lost count of the number of people who have come to Abba House and instead of asking why we are there, what God has called us to be and do, have simply wanted to state their position and drag us along with their favorite doctrine, not to mention those who have launched into criticism of 'churches' that do not teach enough on this or that area that is their area of specialization or should I say their favorite area.
So I was entitled to requests for clarification and sometimes from the first visit as to my position on the end times, on the imminent return of Jesus, on 'prophecy', on the persecuted church, accusations of not preaching on the prophecies of the Old Testament announcing Jesus as the Messiah (it does not matter that the sermon of the day was about humility) and so on. My position, I am not more intelligent than my hero Paul, I repeat his words 'We preach Christ, and him crucified'. I have a mandate to bring men to reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ, to become passionate about God, lovers of Jesus, unconditional followers of the Gospel who live in a manner worthy of the Lord.
I believe that to achieve this, we still have a lot of work to do. This is what we are working on with all the strength that God gives us. We want to bring with us men and women who have understood and embraced this objective and also accepted the rules of life that we have given ourselves as a community and God's requirements for us. Because there is a requirement; a requirement of holiness, a requirement of purity, a requirement of love, not to ask for it, but to give it, a requirement to work on oneself, to remove the beam from one's own eye and not the speck from the eye of one's neighbor, (read the article the beam and the straw) requirement of constancy, fidelity, prayer.
From the beginning, God placed the 4 S's at our hearts to qualify those who will work alongside us (in English): STRONG (solid/strong), SPIRITUAL (spiritual), SACRIFICIAL (endowed with a sense of sacrifice), SUBMITTED (subject to authority) plus a fifth that God in his grace grants us, SMART (intelligent) because God gives us the knowledge and the know-how for everything that He puts in our hands. For these qualities to flourish in us, we must be imbued with God's desires for us and what he formulated as a purpose and rule of life for this body before the creation of the world.
Hence the presentation of The Vision of Abba House (click to listen) .
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