[Jay]

Originally Posted by ACuriousFellow

And just where did I say that "church" and "human spirit" are the same thing? Can you quote me exactly?

I provided scriptures to show that in the New Testament, you have instances where the one place of worship is said to be the Spirit. A parallel to the temple.

And I provided scriptures to show that in the New Testament, you have instances where our bodies are explicitly called the temple of God, which is where worship and sacrifice take place.

And I provided scriptures to show that in the New Testament, you have instances where the saints, both individually and as a whole, are themselves the temple of God and his dwelling place.

The churches are assemblies, or gatherings, of God's holy people, the saints. The universal church is the entirety of God's holy people, the saints. As such, a church, an assembly, speaks of saints collectively. Therefore, the church, this gathering of God's holy people, is God's temple.

I also noted the particular lack of scriptural references to cities and their boundaries as being parallel to God's temple.

I challenge you again, therefore, to quote me properly and show where I said that the church and our human spirit are the same thing.

Your entire point here is that we don't need a physical place to worship. Which isn't biblical. Sure technically we can praise God anywhere we are. We can do that right now wherever we are sitting, and we should. We are always encouraged to exercise our spirit in our personal lives. However this personal pursuit isn't the full picture of God's goal for his corporate people according to the Bible. We can certainly take verses out of context to support your theory. But we'd have to do so at disregarding God's obvious moves to implement the congregation life. Again, it's not hard to prove that God wants a particular place of meeting. Deuteronomy 12:11 and the local churches in Acts and the Epistles. We also have verses such as Hebrews 10:25 which say directly to not forsake the assembly. So there's no way I could disagree with Nee and Lee with regards to the local church concept and I certainly agree with them on the degradation and division of the denominations. Which are also talked about in the book of Revelation with the types of the 7 churches. The Babylonian degradation is also talked about in Deuteronomy and we see constant pictures of God's called out ones falling back to this worldly religious system and commiting spiritual fornication. Which God hates