Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohio
"We are not gathered to men or a man. No man for us can measure Christ. We are here tonight because this is a true love feast. And that means that the love of Christ is in our heart. We left our groups. We left our divisions. We are here on the common ground of Christ. What a grand thing it would be if all Christians just took that ground! The ground of so many Christians, the ground of some denominations, some organizations, some special teaching, or many different things, that is their ground. But the real ground of the Christian is Christ. If we all had a greater concern for the Lord Jesus than we had for religious things, what a different thing it would be in the world." --- TAS
How true. When I first came to the LC, this kind of talk filled the airwaves. It was attractive and it was true in our hearts. What killed it was the "extras" that began to grow larger. We began to judge all others, thinking only we were right. Instead of looking for Christ, our "common ground," we looked for all the things that made us different, made us unique, made us special, made us God's move today -- "not some piece of poor, pitiful, degraded Christianity."
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Dear brother Ohio,
Thank you for reminding us of the early days in the LC. May God have mercy on us for all the "extras" that we allowed to creep in after we had tasted such sweetness and such reality. The more we proclaimed our superiority to all others, the more we lost sight of the fact that by including these "extras" we were no longer assembling in the simplicity and freedom that our heavenly Father longs for - which is worship that is purely and simply in spirit and truth.
Whatever faults TAS may have had, right up to his death in 1971 he remained faithful to the vision that Christ, and Christ alone, is our "common ground". Even though he was very lonely and very misunderstood in the last decade of his life, TAS was not disobedient to the revelation that our dear Lord Jesus Christ is indeed Lord of
all those who are His,
in every place.
How I need to repent to the Lord! Dear Lord Jesus, most lovely One, surely Your riches are more than enough to satisfy us for eternity. Forgive me for trying to bring something other than You into our gatherings. Forgive me for my ignorance - I lost sight of my need to bridle my tongue. I lost sight of the fact that when I insult and ridicule my brothers and sisters in Christ, I insult the One who gave His life and shed His blood to save them. Dear Lord, how I repent to You. Do cause me to repent to the uttermost. O Lord, may my broken and contrite heart become acceptable to You once again. Create in me a clean heart, O Lord, and renew a right spirit in me. Dear Lord, have mercy on my wretched soul.
