Improper Assembly of the Body of Christ

By Bishop J. G. Riles Sr.

Improper Assembly of the Body of Christ is a book written to challenge how the church today looks at, extracts, ingests, and dissects scripture, especially with our recipe used to congregate and formulate the assembling of the true church.
This book is a strong reminder of the biblical protocol. As Jehovah stressed to Moses, “See that thou do all things according to the pattern shown thee in the Mount.”
In this book, Bishop Riles seeks to reestablish biblical principles and truths. It is written to increase unity in the body of Christ and tear down and remove walls, barriers, and partisans never supposed to have been in the first place.
It is to ensure that the blood of God’s truth circulates to the least extreme and remotest parts of the body of Christ.
Pauper or king, Sunday stroller or Holy Roller, we must all strive to be the church of the faith, where everybody is welcome to take a seat.
Some might be tempted to think that it is impossible to have unity—we are just too different! We come from different backgrounds and have different styles of praise and worship, we express ourselves differently, and we enjoy distinctively different things.
You may ask, “Bishop, how in the world do you propose that we can be unified?” To achieve corporate unanimity, we must come to the understanding that unity is not “sameness or uniformity.”
The Christian’s unity is a unity in diversity. Like Baskin-Robbins, we exhibit thirty-eight flavors and varieties. We can be different but not divided. We must learn not to compete or to compare but to celebrate our incompatibilities.
God did not create the earth in just browns and earth tones.
God views the world through a kaleidoscope. It is a beautiful bouquet. The church must be an array of multiplicity—multicolored and multicultural. The church is the “rainbow coalition.”
God is calling his family in for suppertime. At suppertime, my mother’s rule was that she would never call us to eat at the table separately or individually. Instead, we all had to eat together at the same table at the same time or not eat at all.
The church needs to be an accurate sample of unity and a proper example of what it truly means to unite and be a unit. If you dip a glass into the Pacific Ocean in California and you return to Texas with that glass of water, you cannot say you have the entire Pacific Ocean in a glass. But perhaps you have an accurate sample or a proper example of the Pacific Ocean in that glass.
A cake, a pie, or even cornbread has many ingredients essential to the texture and flavor of the cornbread, pie, and cake. You cannot bake a pie or a cake with a cornbread recipe or with cornbread ingredients or bake cornbread with a pie or cake recipe or ingredients.
In a cake recipe, all the ingredients are different, all the ingredients aren’t sweet or agreeable, but all ingredients are necessary for the success of delicious cake. Any ingredient alone is not a cake. Sugar alone does not constitute a pie or a cake.
Flour, vanilla, eggs, or butter alone, independent of one another, does not make a pie or a cake or cornbread.
It is not until you homogenize them and blend them—mix, mingle, marry, merge, scramble, and place them together in a hot oven—that they come together to make cake, pie, or cornbread.
In this last hour, God is removing the walls, barriers, and partisans never supposed to have been there in the first place.
God is scrambling up his church. He will keep on scrambling until you cannot tell where the yoke or the yellow begins and the white ends. He is going to scramble until we do not choose ministries based solely on race, culture, or ethnicity but based upon whether there is a move in that ministry.
Like the black-and-white keys on a piano, the church belongs to all of us. It is time for us to go back to the Bible. God has given us his word to live by, and there is just no other way to please him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664125940

Bishop J. G. Riles Sr.

Greater Love Temple Ministries has been generously blessed by God to have for its pastor one of the world’s most prolific, divinely gifted preachers and teachers of our era, Bishop J. G. Riles Sr. Bishop Riles was converted in Austin, Texas, in 1971 at fifteen. He was renowned in his earlier years for being a praise and worship leader and a musician and choir director. Bishop Riles began his national evangelistic ministry at nineteen years old and was a very successful crusader for six years. After visiting the campus of West Texas State University (WTSU) in Canyon, Texas (via an invite as a member of The Tim Curry Singers), Bishop Riles later returned in 1982 to the campus of WTSU to begin his Texas Panhandle ministry with the formation of a gospel choir known as the West Texas Gospel Singers. This gospel choir soon turned into campus Bible studies and weekly church services at the J. A. Hill Chapel, which soon overflowed its banks and exceeded its borders. As a result, the Greater Love Temple Ministries was established. Bishop Riles was blessed in 1989 to unite with First Lady Evangelist, Dr. Georgia Riles. For many years, as a team, they have traveled the country and abroad, conducting conferences, marriage seminars, revivals, and crusades. They have been blessed with five children (three boys and two girls), two godchildren, and eight grandchildren. Now, almost thirty-eight years later, the world is continuing to be blessed by this best-kept hidden secret: this anointed man of God. Bishop Riles has been deemed a “preacher’s preacher” and fondly referred to as the the Preaching Machine. He is a gifted writer and is well-known as a skillful, talented guitarist. Several years ago, Bishop Riles recorded an instrumental gospel CD yet to be released. His accomplishments have been many and his efforts fruitful. On behalf of the Greater Love Temple’s Ministries, it is our pleasure to present to some and introduce to others the dynamic ministry of our Moses, Bishop J. G. Riles Sr.

Book preview

Improper Assembly of

The Body of Christ

Bishop J. G. Riles, Sr.

Copyright © 2020 by Jackie Riles.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

Rev. date: 08/21/2020

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Contents

The Transition

A Forward Look Governed by a Backward Glance

God Will Not Have Half a Child

Provision by Miracle and Not by the Industry of Man’s Hands

Power in a Look!

The Unified Body: God’s Human Family on Earth

He Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

Unthankfulness in the Presence of God Is Theft

Holiness Is Now a Requirement

We Gather but We Are Not Together

The Day That Israel Told the Big Lie

Remembering the Old Testimony Services

Caution Before Penalty

London’s Bridge Was Not Falling Down

God Has a Plan

Bad Habits Are Hard to Break

It Is Teamwork That Makes the Dream Work

Learning a Lesson While Working on My car with My Dad

Creating New Families

Destiny within Destiny

Your Victory Is in Your Praise

A Tale of Two Visions

Strategy Is Everything

What Is an Unlawful Assembly?

Prompted from Thought to Action

Values over Methods

Beauty Is Only Skin Deep

Ye Are the Seasoning of the Earth

It Takes This to Make Us Good

It Is Not What You Are Going Through but Where You Are Going To

The Resiliency of Salt

Our Methods of Assembling the Body Can Be Good but Not Right

Two Parallel Roads, One Wide Enough to Make a U-Turn

Lessons from a Fool

Being Broken in the Right Way

Author Description

I would like to thank the members of Greater Love Temple Ministries for all their encouragement and support.

Special thanks to my lifelong companion, Dr. Georgia McGruder Riles. Without your influence, love, patience, writing, and editorial skills, this book would never have been possible.

Peculiar esteem also to my son, Jackie Riles Jr.

(my rock and jack of all trades), for your great creative input in every phase of getting this project published.

Thank you to my other two wise and older sons, Michael and Chris. Thank you to my oldest daughter Jaqueline for all the phone conversations that we have had.

Lastly, to my gifted and talented trio: my youngest daughter, Courtney, and my two precious grandchildren, Kaidence and Zoe. Love you, guys, always.

Isaiah 65:8 says, Thus saith the LORD, As the new wine [the juice, the glory of the grape is its juice] is found the cluster [every single grape] and one saith, Destroy it not; for a blessing is in it: so will I do for my servants’ sakes, that I may not destroy them all. Another translation reads this way: As the new wine is found in a bunch of grapes, and one says, do not destroy it, for there’s some good in it, so I will act because of my servants and not destroy all.

Another translation reads: When juice is discovered in a cluster of grapes, someone says, do not destroy it, for it contains juice, it is beneficial, or has benefits. In the bunch of unripe grapes, at present of no value, the new wine is contained. The blessing is in the cluster!

The Transition

We are no good to God in this present condition we are in right now. The church must not be married to a method. For things to change, we must change. Things do not change—we change. Abigail Adams said we have too many high-sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them. Talk is cheap. Your actions speak louder than your words. We must be willing to change our ways, our mindsets, and our dispositions. We must be compliant and submissive enough to renovate and remodel our methods and our recipes. It is difficult to lead and to implement change effectively.

Most people will resist change if they see no immediate rewards. Change is not something that you do as a corrective measure when things are bad or wrong. Change is something that we do in life to make things better. God’s church is a church of change. It is a transitional church. A progressive church. A church in advancement of its destiny. It has always been a church in transition and a church in transit. It began with the days of [not enough] in Egyptian captivity under Pharaoh, a hard-cruel taskmaster who, as a punitive measure, made the church in captivity work increasingly more laborious, in commanding them to gather up their own straw to make Egyptian bricks.

Until the days of Moses, whom God raised up to usher and escort them out of Egyptian bondage, inventively crowding them from just a passionate desire to a more intimate knowledge of Jehovah God himself. God used Moses as a conduit to introduce them to more advanced forms of worship and service while they journeyed into the wilderness of [just enough]. It was during this time period when they were stuck between the blessing of their deliverance out of the bondage of Egypt and the blessing of the promised land of Canaan that God began to reveal himself to them. It was in the wilderness, which is a type of the test, that Israel was being provided and cared for not by the industry of their own hands but by the proviso and miracles of God. It was not until forty years later that they would finally come to rest in the Promised Land, the land flowing with silk and money or milk and honey (more than enough) where their methods, ways, means, and techniques and recipes, their structure of relating to God, would again remodel, renovate, and refashion. It was out with the old and in with the new.

Mark 2:22 says, And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred; but new wine must be put into new bottles if we are going to maximize and take advantage of all times. We must discern what is for now and what is next, in order to enter what is new.

This is not your father’s Chevrolet. I believe in conservatism but not just maintenance of the status quo. You cannot put this new wine in an old flask or in an old resistant mindset, where we are like cement, all mixed up and permanently set. We must not be rigid and brittle like old wineskins that lack the ability to expand and remain flexible and pliable. We, the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, must not be like cabbage, all balled up and hard. God’s church must not be hesitant or reluctant to step out on faith and take a new enterprise or to go on a new adventure. New wine and new vision must be deposited in new vessels.

Some people in the church today are so narrow-minded that they can look through a keyhole with both eyes. My brothers and my sisters, the fact of the matter is that we cannot catch fish in a bathtub. For us to catch fish, we must go to the lake because that is where the fish are. And then we must be willing to change the bait to fish with whatever the appetite of the fish is. The church must be aware of the times and fish with what the fish are biting.

A Forward Look Governed

by a Backward Glance

Most of the old stores and brand names that failed to check the pulse of the times of society that they were living in (for the signs of life and not the signs of death) did not survive. They died in that generation. The old Woolworths and T G & Y’s. They failed to change with the times and remain relevant. The old mom-and-pop and five-and-dime stores much like the first generation of the children of Israel that God delivered out of Egyptian captivity. The present victory was laced with future seeds of defeat. They were out of Egypt, but Egypt was not out of them. They had left out of Egypt, but the attitude and the slave mentality of Egypt was still resident in them. The children of Israel were out of Egypt; but the garlic, leeks, and onions on their breath and the Egyptian sand in their pockets and in their shoes betrayed them.

God could not take them into Canaan while Egypt was still in them; so he led them in a circle, cycling in the wilderness for forty years, waiting for a landing spot. God sentenced them to 365 days’ punitive punishment. One year per day. Forty years for forty days, that they stayed perched at Kadesh Barnea, hesitant and reluctant in disobedience and unbelief in obeying God in entering the land of promise. The Bible said that God led them into the wilderness to test them and to prove and approve them. Forty is the number of probations, the number of trial and testing.

A person does not change by seeing what is in other people. We change by seeing what is in us.

Tragically, it would take forty years for them to see or for God to show them what was in them. The Little Egypt children voted against God in siding with the evil report brought by eight of the ten spies sent out to spy out the land. They had rebelled and resisted and failed to embrace the commandments of God and walk in his ways. They angered God and forfeited their destiny. God swore by his wrath that they would not be permitted to enter his promises.

Great men are not made great men because of their future. They are made great men because of their past. We cannot look forward, but we can look back.

In Numbers 14:27 And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, 27, How long shall I bear with this evil congregation, which murmur against me? I have heard the murmurings of the children of Israel, which they murmur against me. 28, Say unto them, As truly as I live, saith the LORD, as ye have spoken in mine ears, so will I do to you: 29, Your carcass shall fall in this wilderness; and all that were numbered of you, according to your whole number, from twenty years old and upward, which have murmured against.

If God is as holy as he says that he is, then he must hate sin. Remember that in the story of Jonah. Sin made a fish get sick to his stomach and throw up. God would not tolerate any admixture of those who obeyed and those who did not obey, so he decided that only those twenty-five years old and upward would be permitted to filter through his strainer. Those twenty plus would not survive. They would become a tragedy and a statistic of the test. Only those born in the desert and who would have no remembrance, no recollection, no point of reference or point of identification, no connectivity or attachment to Egypt. Only the survivors divorced from the old-Egypt mentality and with a new faith would be permitted to cross over into Canaan.

God showed mercy even to the offspring of these rebellious habitual backsliders. God had given them the promise, but now he would give their children the assignment. Their little ones, now under twenty years old, which you have made God a predator of in your unbelief, that you said would be victims, them saith God, will I use, bless and bring in. In verse 31, they had charged God falsely in, charging God with a design to destroy their children. God was not the kind of God that would destroy the innocent with the guilty. The world will never be left without a witness. God will always have a people.

God Will Not Have Half a Child

Here is the story of King Solomon’s great wisdom and wise judgement in the dispute between two mothers who came to Solomon requesting that he settle their dispute as to who between them was the mother of the living baby.

They both had birthed babies; however, during the night, one baby had died. One mother who had taken the dead baby was accusing the other mother of stealing her living baby and substituting the dead one. The woman who had stolen the living baby was claiming that the living baby was hers. Because they could not decide on the matter, they asked that Solomon, who was renowned for his wisdom, to decide who was the real mother of the living child.

Solomon’s reaction, in response to their request, was by asking for a sword. King Solomon then proceeded as if to cut the living baby in two. Solomon could then give half a child to each mother. The real mother, frantic that her child would be killed, to save her child