not of the world

By ray brown

"They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world" (John 17:16). God has always had a people distinctly different from the peoples of the world""not better but different. The entire Bible is a cohesive, comprehensive canon of sanctification, culminating in the gospel of Jesus Christ and him crucified. What we commonly call the "high priestly" prayer of Jesus Christ is his prayer for all who believe in him. "Sanctify (or set apart) them through thy Truth: thy Word is Truth" (John 17:17). A Christian is one who lives by every Word that proceeds out of the mouth of God and not according to the standards of this world system. True Christianity is Christ consciousness. Only an awareness of the cross of Jesus Christ in the harrowing truth of its raw austerity can keep me loyal and accountable to God's gift of amazing grace in his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. His cross is my cross, and it is your cross. Only the preaching of the cross of Jesus Christ can keep the miracle of redemption alive. Our identity with the death, burial, and resurrection of the LORD Jesus Christ is what makes us different. We are the continuity of the love of God in Christ extended to the worst of humanity; truly, a love not of the world. A Christian is one who lives to perpetuate this love of God in the earth. Conversely, what this book calls mainstream Christianity in America fundamentally lives for themselves. Someone must say so. Someone must tell contemporary, worldly conciliatory, and carnally compromised Christianity that God is a Holy Spirit whom the LORD Jesus Christ emphatically said the world cannot receive (see John 14:17). In this age of all-permissive grace, a Christian is identified by their living according to the truth of God's comprehensive Word and by a marked separation from this world system. "If any man loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him" (see 1 John 2:15). Indeed, and as this book without apology declares, the love of the Father is Christ.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781098001131

Book preview

Book 1

If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.

—John 15:19

I have given them thy Word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

—John 17:14

There was a time when I was a spiritual mentor to veterans living in a long-term recovery facility. The place was intended to be zero tolerance in its command of absolute abstinence from all mood-altering substances; and of course, this is colloquial recovery vernacular for absolutely no drugs or alcohol. However, this particular program was off the rails, as it were. They say a catch-22 dilemma, which seems to be an especially virulent and self-perpetuating enigma of many government programs, is a circumstance of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions; or so says Webster. But such was the case of the program I reference. Under the auspices of a new director, random drug and alcohol testing was initiated. I also happen to know that at times it was targeted, and not random at all, but quite deliberately precise due to favoritism and skewed administration goals.

This specific program’s federal funding was based on its census. The dilemma in this case was that so many veterans were presenting positive for these drug tests and subsequently made to leave the program that it became impossible to replace them in a timely enough manner to meet the minimal census demands which would allow this rehab to be self-sustaining. It seemed everyone was getting high for lack of a more delicate way to put it.

To make a long story short, the testing was first falsified and then discontinued. The situation was epidemic. This was so disconcerting to those of us who knew on a very personal level that total abstinence is an addict’s only avenue of success until in the sovereignty of God and by the Holy Spirit of God they are led into a saving faith of the LORD Jesus Christ.

Over the years, I have had opportunities to observe many of these veteran programs and a few private ones, sometimes from the inside looking out. Often I have said that military service is the only job I know that you can hold for just three or four years and still be reaping employee benefits thirty or forty years later. We take good care of our veterans as a nation, and from a certain perspective, this is something to be proud of.

There are many dedicated professionals who staff these programs, and they do make a profound difference. For our purposes here, I reference the veterans and specifically the ones who were abusing both the program and mood-altering substances while living there. From personal experience I know, also, that there are veterans in these programs who are sincere about recovery, even sincere about living for God, but through a lack of knowledge about the dynamics of addiction and recovery and through a lack of knowledge of God’s Word, they are no match for the subtleties and deceptions of Satan. I know because I was one of them. Perhaps as this epistle progresses, I will have an opportunity to expound on my personal testimony and will gladly do so, but let it suffice for now that I attended seven drug and alcohol programs, four of them veteran programs. Yeah, Mama said most of her kids were quick learners, but I wasn’t one of them.

There was a time when my rationale and disposition toward life in general and about recovery and rehab specifically was just like many of the veterans I later mentored, and that being so, I will try to write in the first-person narrative where pertinent so as to own my attitudes and behavior. Any discipline which can help me sustain a sense of responsibility and accountability for my conduct and sentiment thereof is beneficial. Your personal testimony cannot be taken from you. I have grown into the revelation that what makes me a witness to the resurrection and the life that is in Jesus Christ my LORD is that I was there, and I am he, I am that dead man whom he raised to newness of life.

In one particular circumstance, upon entering one of these rehabs, I had no intention of stopping my drug and alcohol abuse. It was wintertime, and I was in the mountains of West Virginia. I had spent a couple of miserable nights in the woods hunkered down around a campfire I was too impaired and too sick to maintain. There is a term for addicts and alcoholics for whom the disease has advanced to this state; I had become a snowbird. I do have to give myself some credit here; I was quite credible at faking it when necessity dictated. I knew how to go through the motions with minimal complaint, I would barely ripple the water, as it were; you know, fly beneath the radar.

The following narrative is to my shame, but I will tell it anyway. The LORD Jesus Christ took my shame, but it is good for my soul that I can still remember the exceeding sinfulness of sin; and today, when I plead the blood over my life, I know the power and efficacy I am bringing to bear upon my circumstances.

This country counts it a duty and an honor to feed and clothe and provide health care for its veterans. But there are veterans, of whom I was once one and of what percentage I would be afraid to estimate, that take advantage of the system. Some, and again, I am guilty of having done so, refer to Uncle Sam as Uncle Sugar. I know, I know, it’s terrible, but such was the despicable attitude of we veterans in this particular rehab I was a resident of, as well as the one at which I would later be a spiritual mentor. Yes, we were on the gravy train, as it were, and we were interested in one thing only: more gravy.

Years later, this is the type veteran and person in general to whom I ended up trying to mentor; yeah, people that were, in essence, just like me. Someone said, what goes around comes around. Now I cannot speak for other persons in such a state, but I can speak for myself. Though I would not admit it at the time, even though I may not have comprehended the full extent and complexities of addiction or why I thought and behaved the way I did, I was essentially motivated by one primary purpose, and that was how to procure the next drug or drink: more gravy.

Through seasons of disappointment and disillusion, if we are steadfast, our eyes fixed on Jesus, instead of despairing at the nature and depravity of man or the machinations of the devil, we will find that the LORD has had us in school all the while, making us his witness. I had been set aflame by the grace and love that had saved my soul; sanctified and set ablaze by the truth which had made me free. I was at the end of myself with no outlet for my ardor, desperate to do something to please the One who had done everything for me.

I began to pray and fast; I was relentless. I arose early, early in the morning. I prayed the Word of God, I cried aloud and spared not; nigh unto trespass in zeal. I said, LORD God, you have spared my life from destruction and saved my soul from hell. Truly, as David, you have brought me up also out of a horrible pit. As Jeremiah, I am the man that has seen affliction by the rod of your wrath, I am a brand plucked out of the burning and your trophy of greater grace. You have given me the desires of my heart, but what are the desires of your heart? How might I bring joy to your heart, how might I marvel you and stop you in your tracks, as it were, and turn you about, as did the centurion’s faith whose servant was ill? LORD, I search myself for need and find nothing against myself, my cup runneth over. What then are the desires of your heart?

In this vein, I continued for about ten days, fasting intermittently, continuing instant in prayer. LORD, what is the desire of your heart? When I had exhausted myself and stood silently weeping before my home altar and could barely whisper one last time, LORD, what is the desire of your heart? Then I heard that unmistakable, still, small voice say, The worst of humanity.

Saints of God, this blew me away. In an instant, I realized my love had a bottom, a bottom that it should not have. Immediately, I realized how shallow my love was, how superficial and insufficient my Christianity, how cursory and uncultivated the witness of God’s love in me, how perfunctory and ineffectual the outreach. For days, I was stupefied and greatly dismayed. In defense of myself, I suppose, I insisted that I loved the LORD with all my heart, mind, soul, and strength and my neighbor as myself. Instantaneously, the LORD silenced me with two short, soft words: Do you? These two small words bore the weight of my witness.

In silence and in seclusion, I searched myself, appalled at the artificial, synthetic nature of my service to God and to others, embarrassed at the conditional elements and exclusive nature of my love. I will be nice to you if you are nice to me is not the love of God in Christ. Stark the revelation that I could barely love what was probably considered the best of humanity and that there remained entire tracts and subgroups or minorities, which I had not even considered ministering to.

After the initial shock of the raw truth about my religion, I got down to work because we know that faith without works is dead; and in my own critical case, I began with works of repentance. I confessed the standards I kept, the records of wrongs against me, those real and those imagined. I confessed the stringent conditions I had placed upon meriting my love. I prayed for strength and for the courage to take an objective, dispassionate, intrepid look at the bottom I had placed upon my love and a brave new look at the sick and afflicted and lost multitudes that for years I had deemed unworthy of my love and consideration and myself inadequate to positively impact their lives. I also noticed that I was not the only one looking for a cleaner caliber of sinner to which I could minister, as it were, and that corporate Christianity’s love was much like mine, it only reached so far into the depths of the depravity of man. In prayers and fastings, I repented from my perfunctory standard operating procedures and pitiable, man-made, self-promoting modus operandi. I evoked the Holy Spirit to show me the truth of how the ninety and nine loved and honored one another at the exclusion of the one and then all of us in a corporate, silent collusion to present as if we were whole. The Holy Spirit is love and peace and joy and so many beautiful things, and the LORD Jesus could have called him by any of all these and many more combined, but he chose to call him the Spirit of truth. Well, and the truth was, among the righteous congregation, you know, the religious right, that if we candidly admitted one of us was missing, this would obligate someone to go after him. Yes, you know the one I am talking about, the disheveled one, the nappy, one-eared, odd-looking one impossible to love.

God has special children. God has special children he sometimes sends among us to see what the rest of us are made of.

Continuing to pray and worship in spirit and in truth, abiding in the light of life which is the LORD Jesus Christ, refusing to turn away from the layers of my pseudo-Christian love exposed revelation upon startling revelation, I entered into a depth and knowledge of the love of God in Christ Jesus for the world I did not know existed. I was made to come face-to-face with the limitations and impossibilities I had ignorantly and/or impudently placed upon the Holy One. If I wanted to serve God, I was going to have to repent of the judgments and conclusions I had made and the constraints I had placed upon his omnipotence. I had to repent of the transference of my own prejudices and inadequacies upon the character of God. I had God in a religious box, and he suspiciously looked a lot like me: foursquare with the corners precise and no more room to navigate. I had God where I was comfortable with him.

In short order, it seemed, my very prayers were being transformed, my will conformed to God’s, the desires of my heart merged into his desires. Extemporaneously, I began to pray, O, LORD, I don’t want to minister to those that already have and are always demanding more, but I want to minster to those that have nothing and are hoping for just a little bit. It was as if Christ was being released in me to pray, the outreach of the love of God was progressively becoming a reality. The Holy Spirit showed me the desires of the LORD Jesus’ heart, greater depths of his compassion, a bottomless love.

It was about two weeks later, and I was entering Harvest Worship Church of God in Lexington, Kentucky, for the Wednesday evening service. A man stopped me outside and asked me when the church would be distributing clothing. They had a ministry called the King’s Closet. I said, I’m not sure, but let’s go inside and check the schedule on the bulletin board. King’s Closet was currently closed, but we noted the times on the schedule, and I then introduced myself to this gentleman and told him that I would be honored if he would be my guest for the evening service. I immediately apprised him of the fact that I was in the habit of sitting on the front row but that he was welcome to sit anywhere he was comfortable. His name was Paul. He surprised me by sitting right beside me on the front row. Most folk don’t care for that, even Christian folk, but it would empower us and transform us into viable witnesses for the LORD Jesus Christ if we tried it for just a little while.

Paul was quiet, I think the term reticent fits him well. He was obviously well educated and was a perfect gentleman throughout the entire evening. He stood when I stood for worship, and I noticed him singing and tentatively raising his hands. As the service was closing, I asked him if he was a Christian, and he said yes. I then asked him if I could anoint him with oil and pray for him in the name of the LORD Jesus, and he graciously allowed me to do so. As we were getting ready to leave, Paul asked me for a ride home; it seems as if it was raining that evening.

Anyway, Paul only lived about six or seven blocks from the church, and as I dropped him off in front of what looked like an ordinary apartment building, I invited him to join us again for worship on Sunday. He said that he would, and when I asked if he wanted me to pick him up, he said that he would walk.

Paul quickly became a regular. He would walk to church, and I would often give him a ride home. Paul was and is one of the LORD’s special ones, I’m convinced. By now, Paul would be about fifty-five years old, and though I did not know it at the time, he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was about twenty years of age and had suffered from its periodic symptoms and etiology for all those years. When I met him that Wednesday evening, his symptoms were in remission, and he was probably on the correct regimen of medication, as well as being compliant taking it.

Paul’s attendance at church became more regular than most of our regulars, if you know what I mean. One day, out of the blue, as they say, he asked me if I would get him a wall calendar for his room. I picked one up at Dollar Tree and brought it to the next service, but Paul wasn’t there. After he missed about three consecutive services, I went looking for him. It turns out that Paul lived in the building behind the one I was dropping him off at when I would bring him home from church and that there were actually three buildings, comprising a complex called Messner House, a privately owned facility that rented to the mentally ill. They inexplicably have a zoning designation as a boardinghouse. You can google them. I will try to limit my comments about them because I want to get into my text, which I believe is going to essentially be on sanctification; yes, of the world/not of the world.

Messner House represents the lowest level of subsistence I have seen for any one group of persons. They house over fifty profoundly to moderately mentally ill men, as well as the developmentally disabled, with or without diagnosis. They accept anyone with minimal functioning, medicate them, feed them as cheaply as you can possibly feed any group of people, and charge them such exorbitant rents that it leaves them very little of their social security disability checks for clothes or shoes or any other incidentals beyond simply subsisting. The buildings are divided into rooms with multiple occupants and no furniture. Each man has a small locker that may hold about two changes of clothing and basic toiletries, but most of the locks are broken. The smell in these buildings is horrendous. These men are treated like animals and nonentities. We, as a society, allow it to exist out of sight, out of mind, as they say. It is quite literally a contemporary leper colony. These men need professional medical care, but because of governing laws and regulations that I do not fully understand, this place not only exists but is run as a profitable business. You do not want to know what I think of the owners.

Atrocities are committed quite frequently here, unreported robberies, physical and sexual assaults, sundry criminal acts that would be tolerated nowhere else; but because society has adjudicated these men unworthy of our care and attention, they are allowed to prey upon one another and, in turn, to be preyed upon by the staff and management as well. Notably, in the late 1980s, seven men were killed by fire-and-smoke inhalation at this very same facility. I could write a book, as they say.

The day I took the calendar by there, Paul was not home, but another mentally ill man showed me his room, and I slid the calendar under his door. I saw several of what were apparently mentally ill men, disheveled, soiled, wandering aimlessly about the facility, and I began to invite them to church. Two others came with me the same day I was looking for Paul and could not find him. These guys began to come to Sunday school and church services also. My van would seat seven persons, and within a few weeks, I was making two trips. Sadly, this did not make me too popular with the healthy members of my church; you know, the righteous right, the sanctified and selectively forgetful, meaning that when the LORD Jesus found them, they were not doing any better than these men but they had selectively forgotten it. For about two years, me and a van full of these men visited diverse churches throughout Lexington, Kentucky, with similar results. The LORD was teaching me about the bottom which my love had and the bottom which the church was volitionally ignorant of. We selectively forget that there are entire tracts of humanity, whom if they are going to experience the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, they are going to have to witness it in us. We love them who are most able to love us in return. We love one another with air-kisses and smarm and then write a check for the untouchables. Day-old bread can touch the belly, used clothes can keep the body warm, but it takes the love of Jesus to touch and change the heart. Frankly, most Christians are looking for a cleaner genre of beggar upon whom to lavish our perfunctory, superficial grace, if we serve at all. Someone has to say it.

Eventually, I taught a Bible study in the cafeteria at Messner House that lasted forty weeks. It started with six men attending the first week and continued to grow until the attendance was about thirty-five of the fifty or so men who lived there. These men were hungry for God, hungry for love. There are those, many of them very religious persons, who maintain these men cannot comprehend and apprehend the Word of God, but it is the Spirit of this Living Word that casts devils out and displaces darkness. As we live the life conducive and amenable to the Spirit of the Holy One abiding in the temple of our spirit man or spirit woman, we go up in the name and office of the Word of God, and it is the person of the LORD Jesus Christ that goes before us. God does what my faith allows. And he sent his Word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions (Ps. 107:20).

It occurs to me that Jesus gravitates to where the need is the greatest, to where the crisis compels him. If he was in Lexington, Kentucky, some Sunday in the flesh, as it were, would he be schmoozing with the righteous right and the ninety and nine celebrating one another, or might he be down at the leper colony laying hands on the one that needed him most? Indeed, if he were in his Father’s house on the Sabbath, would he be slapping the deacons on the back, or might he not turn a few tables over, as it were? Thank God that grace was fascinated with my need, absorbed by my brokenness and abject poverty, enthralled, engrossed with my penury. Truth was mesmerized and enticed by my captivity, earnest, incited, provoked to set me free. This then is the hope of my salvation, and it is the revelation of my helplessness and sin.

Truly, them who have no need of the physician need not expect a visit from him either. We forget that it is God’s favor that makes us righteous and act as if God favors us because we are righteous. And from here, we go on to try to earn favor, but the reality is, when I am weak, then am I strong. Behold, it is the LORD’s strength, it is the LORD’s grace, and his thoughts are not our thoughts. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:8–9).

This weakness is my salvation, the acute awareness of my absolute powerlessness and inability to do anything to save myself, the painstaking, excruciating, progressive revelation of my total depravity, face-to-face with the exceeding sinfulness of my sin. This is law and sufficiency of grace throughout the seasons of my growth in the knowledge of God; it matters not the infirmity that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

The Spirit of the LORD kept taking me back to the LORD’s conversation with Nicodemus in the third chapter of John and then with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well in the very next chapter. But just before the LORD’s conversation with her, the Holy Spirit drew my attention to just the first three words of John 4:3, He left Judaea. He left organized religion, he left Judaism, as it were, and then went directly to see a lady whose life was in crisis. It was in the context of his conversation with this lady whom had had five husbands and was currently living in sin with another man that he also had his discourse with his disciples about coming to do the will of his Father and to finish his work.

Moreover, he talked to Nicodemus in dark sayings and things hard to be understood, perhaps leaving him with more questions than answers such as, how can these things be? However, he told this Samaritan lady quite plainly, when she referenced the Messiah which was to come, he told her, I that speak unto thee am he (see John 4:26).

Now I had heard messages preached on this lady before, most of which emphasized her sin and failures. The Holy Spirit showed me her broken heart and disillusionment. This had evoked the compassion of the LORD Jesus Christ and drew him unto her in the first place. He was quite deliberate about it. That is where the LORD Jesus Christ found me, and I would be willing to bet where he found you also—white unto harvest, right in the middle of some crisis in your life. When my life was like a train off the tracks, Jesus came looking for me and found me subsisting in marginal society. The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit (Ps. 34:18). This is grace. We Christians, on the other hand, and especially the more religious of us, the more righteous we become, the less grace we have to offer the next fellow. This is truth.

Seasons change, and it is the LORD who adds to his church of believers such as should be saved. It is mine, and it is yours to take the limits off. I wish there were time here to say more, or more accurately, I wish I were permitted and moved of the LORD to say more of the thirteen desperate souls who within an eleven-month period confessed the LORD Jesus Christ as their LORD and Savior and were also baptized. About the time the Bible study at Messner House was passing into another season for various reasons, I was soon to be married and would move to Henderson in western Kentucky. When I realized I would be moving to Henderson after I was married, I began to feel an urgency in my spirit to do some type service work when I arrived here. I continue to write every day, but I also need some hands-on ministry, as it were. Besides the Bible study at Messner House, I was also called upon and honored to speak at a facility called Nathaniel Mission in Lexington, which ministered to the homeless and the needy in the community. I commented to my fiancé that it was a shame Henderson did not have a homeless shelter or I would go by there and offer my services to cook or to clean or to do whatever was needed, and she informed that Henderson did have such a place, a men’s shelter called Harbor House.

To make a long story short, when the director learned that I liked to preach and teach God’s Word, he said he already had a cook and the guys that lived there performed the cleaning chores, but what he really needed was someone to preach this coming Sunday. Anyway, that was sixteen months ago, and I still preach every other Sunday to a small group of men there. This isn’t about me. This is indicative of how quickly God opens doors that the least of these, his brethren, can receive his Word.

This brings me to the title of this volume, and the nature of the message the Spirit of God moves through me to convey. It is the definitive gospel of grace and truth by which Jesus Christ came that I cannot have one without the other; that, indeed, God is good and abounding in grace but that this grace came at the expense of the truth about sin; that my sin and your sin crucified the Son of God. Moreover, the same grace that saves me from sin is able to keep me from sin. This is truth.

But first, a little more about the nature of the men to whom I have been sent to minister the gospel so far. As I continue to preach and lay hands upon these men in prayer and call upon the name of the LORD Jesus Christ, I also continue to write to the LORD’s church as a friend of the bridegroom. What I call an awareness platform is being awakened in my own soul, and in my spirit man, I know that I know that I am being prepared to stir the consciousness of the LORD Jesus’ betrothed to the fact that for all our differences and all our righteousness, we have more in common with these men than we care to admit; that many of our lives are in crisis also.

First, it does not matter if my condition has been diagnosed, the LORD knows the state of my heart and soul. Nicodemus, for all his religion, and he was a master, was just as lost as the Samaritan lady at Jacob’s well, although I am convinced he was saved later. One glaring difference, though, is that Nicodemus no doubt considered himself superior in every way to the Samaritan woman. The men to whom the LORD has chosen I minister to are not amateurs or fledglings but full-grown sinners. Thus, my own appointed place I suspect, for I too was a battle-scarred, duly accredited professional miscreant and malefactor, a seasoned sinner.

We know the LORD Jesus came to seek and to save that which was lost (re. Luke 19:10), but it seems to me, the more righteous we become, the more we posture and parade and pontificate as though we had found him instead. We swagger and sashay upon the perimeter, as it were, presuming upon the LORD’s grace and mercy, insinuating credit. We present so greedily desperate to prove ourselves well, you know, saved and sanctified, and oh, so saved, that we incrementally and unwittingly remove ourselves from the Great Physician’s ministrations. We cease to be the ones he is looking for and embark upon the broad way and wide gate of self-realization. Everyone wants to be a bigger Christian.

Now this may be old news to some, but to me, it was a refreshing revelation when the Holy Spirit kept reinforcing to me the correlation between the lives of humanity in crisis as being quite literally, as well as prophetically, the fields white unto harvest the LORD was expounding upon at Jacob’s well. That dear Samaritan lady, left to her own devices, would most likely have continued to move from marriage to marriage unfulfilled or, worse, continued to live in sin. She no more needed another husband than an alcoholic needs another drink or a drug addict needs another hit. Drugs and alcohol, multiple marriages, and the like are the earthly waters which will never satisfy; indeed, instead, they perpetuate a progressive cycle of crisis of which the wages thereof are death. It is still called sin.

The Holy Ghost effortlessly transitioned me from the fourth chapter of John to the fourth chapter of the gospel according to Luke and continued to reinforce the revelation and reality of the love of God the Father sending his only begotten Son to redeem humanity from the pathos and crisis of sin. After being led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil for forty days and having soundly defeating him by the Word of God, Jesus Christ returned in that same power of the Spirit into Galilee and went into the synagogue to read as was his custom. He opened the book to the prophet Isaiah, and the following scripture was fulfilled; an synopsis of the varied categories of crisis in which humanity finds themselves and from which Jesus Christ came specifically to deliver and to save us from. You might say that the lives and souls of the following type persons are as fields white unto harvest. The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, because he hath anointed me to PREACH the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to PREACH deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised. To PREACH the acceptable year of the LORD (Luke 4:18–19) (emphasis added).

Ironically, we think the more righteous we become, the closer we are to God, and in a certain aspect, of course, we are. Yet all the while, it is our abject poverty and total helplessness that makes us so attractive to love as only God knows love. Our infirmities are the catalyst of his coming. This is my righteousness, and it is Christ. My weakness and my humility in the knowledge and understanding of it and what a tentative hold as concerns my humanity I have on this salvation that as a man, I am so equivocal and undecided in all my ways that my perpetual consciousness of what thin ice I tread upon thus becomes my strength.

God did not send his only begotten Son into this world to come get me and me in particular and take me straight to heaven because of what a great saint I was. Jesus came because I was a sinner. Jesus Christ was and is the Anointed One of God sent to preach the gospel to me because I am poor—poor in spirit. I don’t have a nickel with which to save myself. Conversely, in generalities, we, as the church, like to preen and present just how spiritually prosperous we are. And we wonder why we pray and pray, and we don’t get any more God, as it were. Here is a radical thought: if the Son of man came to seek and to save that which is lost, then why don’t I just present as the one he is looking for? Instead of going to great lengths to hide my weakness and fear and unbelief, why don’t I just step into the light with it. Here I am, LORD, I’m the sinner you are searching for. I want to be the one, the one found of you.

But watch us some Sunday, the elitist assembly of God’s saints celebrating the individual and corporate righteousness of ourselves; not one sick among us, as it were, not one poor, not one brokenhearted, not one captive to just a little sin, not one blind, not one bruised. We don’t pray much, we don’t go to the altar much, we don’t linger much, we don’t fast much. Indeed, why would we seek outside our own self-sufficiency? I mean, after all, we are already saved. We have found God! Never mind he wasn’t the one that was lost. Church, this is what contributes to our complacency and to our adjudication by the Holy One, and the estimation of him who is the Baptizer with fire and the Holy Ghost that we are lukewarm. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked (Rev. 3:17).

Many of us are so far removed from where he found us, advanced so far beyond whom he came to save, so conscious of our own success that we are unconscious of his presence. Believer, the abundant life is found in my absolute alliance and categorical reliance upon the LORD Jesus Christ. O, that I might know him! This is where God is found, in thirst and in hunger, and at the door of my broken heart. Deep calleth unto deep (re. Ps. 42:7), and when my life is lost in his, it is found to be an ocean.

The Word of God sought me out and found me in the abyss of all my broken dreams and bitterness beyond all human help. When I heard that this Jesus is the friend of sinners, that Word ignited hope among the dry and desiccated wood, hay, and stubble of my efforts to survive the self-loathing and the self-destructive shame of the accumulated sin laid upon my soul. Thank God, I was the one he was looking for; the one the righteous congregation had relegated irredeemable, that sinner the Sisters of Sanctity said could not be saved. The ninety and nine thought to have the one lost sequestered in the foursquare socioeconomic and ethnically segregated box of their denominational determinations. And all other denominations were going to hell by the way.

We create God in our own image, and he escapes our corporeal expectations and suppositions every time; our limitations, our prayers spun and skewed in our own favor, our self-serving Christianity. We don’t want him; we want ourselves. What have you done for me lately. We evoke his presence once a week for ourselves, hoping against hope that our forty-five minutes on one day will somehow balance or compensate the iniquity of the other six. We go to church to get God to sign off on our shady business. We live in the shadows and wonder that we cannot find him when we want him or rather when we want him to do something for us. Our lives are in crisis also, essentially because we have no love for the truth that exposes our duplicity. If once I would pause in my frenetic search for self-realization and acknowledge that I am out of control trying to save my life for myself, the gift of godly sorrow that leads to repentance would be laid at my feet. Where there is no repentance of sin, there is no remission of sin, this is an astute gospel truth, and the grace I think I have with God in an impenitent state is in vain. Where the blood of Jesus is applied, God has fully intended that I cease the offensive behavior. Neither do I condemn you; Go, and sin no more (see John 8:11).

It is fields white unto harvest which the LORD of the harvest concerns himself with; dried branches can be gathered up in their appointed time and cast into the fire. Jesus Christ is LORD and Savior, not the servant of my self-righteousness. He was about his Father’s business there at Jacob’s well that appointed day and intended to use a lady who had already had five husbands and was even now living in sin with another man as his witness to bring revival to the city, Sychar. The LORD was so intent upon putting the sickle in, as it were, that when his disciples urged him to eat, he responded with, I have meat to eat that ye know not of (re. John 4:32–34), and as they wondered among themselves if someone had brought him something to eat, stuck like Nicodemus on the earthly, the Master replied, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work (see John 4:32–34).

Through one disillusioned and ostracized sinner woman, the LORD ignites awe and wonder, excitement, a hunger and a thirst for life, renewed hope to an entire city. Henceforth, they would be drinking that living water which is the gift of God. Jesus had just recently left Judaea or, as I like to think, the constraints and self-sufficiency of Judaism and regulated religion. Was Nicodemus too stuck on himself to receive this revelation, too righteous for grace, that the LORD Jesus was sent to the Samaritan lady at Jacob’s well? Indeed, the Master said that this is what he was sent to do and intended to finish.

I began to identify with this lady at the well and my specific calling in Christ, the astounding implication of an explicit appointment, the very allure of my lost condition to the LORD, the enchantment of my crisis. The Word of God came alive, and the Spirit of the HOLY breathed upon me, and I heard the Savior say, He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted (re. Luke 4:18).

He found me right where I was. O, how that my wretched condition and abject helplessness moved the heart of a Holy God that he would send his only begotten Son and for me. In my crisis was found the comprehensive cause of his coming; for I was also poor, captive, blind, and bruised. Astounding the revelation, that the ninety and nine righteous-right and contemporary Pharisees think it is all about them, and the Savior does love them imprisoned by forms of faith and the rigors of religious crisis, but his passion is for the one. Jesus Christ is the Good Shepherd, and as long as the earth endures, ninety and nine will never be one hundred.

That contemporary leper the corporate church relegates irredeemable has an irresistible attraction to mercy and unconditional love. The grace and truth by which Jesus Christ came delights to break down barriers and transcend elitist religious presumption. It is men which have established boundaries and religious parameters and relegated everyone not proselytized and programmed to the same compulsory regimen as themselves as lost. We still get it wrong. We look for Jesus and cannot find him. Perchance if we took a closer look, we would see him down the street, eating with publicans and sinners, sitting with the addicted and the homeless and the mentally ill. Perforce, you will find him in a faith which works by love and in its outreach hear the Master say, For I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (re. Matt. 9:13).

In a specific seasonal realization of my calling—that is, as I took up my cross daily and denied myself, I followed hard after him. Working with a pastor at Nathaniel Mission, who would later perform the ceremony when I got married and host my wedding reception there at the mission, one day, I had commented that it was my greatest joy to lay hands on some sinner, some alcoholic or outcast crying out for the LORD as moved upon by the Spirit of his Living Word, seeking deliverance and healing and salvation. It resonates with me and often moves me to tears as the presence of the Holy One descends upon a sinner’s cry of contrition, and in the similitude of my own soul’s affinity in that sinner, I realize, you cannot get any closer to God. In the agony of the LORD’s grace, out of crisis, they come by the terrible revelation of the truth of a very personal sin, and it is a beautiful thing to behold the LORD of the harvest put the sickle in. What an honor to travel in the wake of a champion.

My, my, I digress. I had commented to this pastor that I loved ministering to sinners but that I despised wiping the noses of saints which have been afforded every opportunity to amend their ways and have not repented or risen above a lukewarm form of faith. You know, spiritual malingerers, either complacent or compromised or covetous, in a covert illicit love affair with the world, cheating on Jesus, crying, maybe sick and afflicted, living in willful sin, and wanting you to pray for them; especially grievous, the ones who neither pray for themselves and certainly do not pray for anyone else or bother to read their Bibles. Alas, give me a sinner to talk to about the LORD every time.

In the same vein, I would attend worship services at various churches to which I was invited and loved to visit God’s people everywhere. But when I experienced listlessness and indifference, apathetic, disjointed doctrinal rhetoric and religious regimen and no relationship, gluttony for grace and abhorrence for truth, no godliness, no holiness, no degree of separation from the world, all, from people maintaining they were Christian, it had a tendency to infuriate and sadden me. I would go home and weep and weep. I stood before my home altar and asked the LORD, How much of this indignation is mine, and how much is yours? because we certainly cannot use mine. If you can receive it (I did), the LORD, with that small still voice, yet notwithstanding, emphatically said, But we have the mind of Christ (re. 1 Cor. 2:16).

This pastor friend of mine commiserated with my revelation, his eyes on fire knowingly, and shared with me that a pastor friend of his, with whom he had attended seminary had resigned. My friend said that when he, in turn, asked his friend why, he commented, Because I can’t stand the smell of sheep anymore.

Alas, who is to confront the daughter of Zion with her whoredoms? Who is to tell the daughter of Jerusalem that if she doesn’t get out of the world’s bed and forsake her fornications that she is going to hell? It will take the boldness of Stephen, a man full of faith, and of the Holy Ghost, to withstand being called a zealot and a fanatic, legalistic, and mentally ill, judgmental and holier than thou. This will be the reward of the friend of the bridegroom; in our enlightened, tolerant era, hopefully only metaphorical stones, and not real ones (yet).

It is the Spirit of truth, this Living Word of truth, which reveals the thoughts of God. Christ Jesus is the Word and voice and expression of the mind of God, lacking nothing. For it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell (Col. 1:19). And we can have his mind by living and abiding in the Word of God, by keeping his commandments and abiding in his love. By living a life of sanctification and service, perfecting holiness in the fear of God, we can be full of faith and full of the Holy Ghost to have the mind of Christ. As you can receive it, without excuse or explanation for myself, I unequivocally assert that we can have the mind of Christ concerning the spiritual condition of the church, his bride. Of course, this is correlative to our being a faithful friend of the bridegroom, with a singular eye unto service, intent upon the advance and prosperity of kingdom business. And unto you that hear shall more be given (re. Mark 4:24).

We, and I include myself, have a tendency as the ninety and nine righteous to strut around the synagogue much like bulls instead of sheep, vying to be the biggest Christian in the herd, as it were. We vacillate between arrogance and a sense of spiritual superiority when the weather is in our favor or bitterness and despondency if we think the sun is shining a little better and brighter on the next fellow. We so easily lose sight of our commission; we think it is exclusively about us. We celebrate one another, we posture for pats on the back. Jesus wants to know how we can call ourselves Christians and call self-serving, self-celebratory, self-worship, having church. How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only? (John 5:44).

The LORD Jesus is our example in pleasing the Father and advancing his kingdom. He said, Follow me. This is what disciples do. To call myself a Christian, to truly be one, encompasses the comprehensive Christ. We are covetous of a day of Pentecost experience, but how many of us have embraced a Garden of Gethsemane experience? You know, not my will, but thine be done. We turn out in unprecedented numbers on Easter Sunday because that empty tomb resonates with our wanting to be born again, but when we circumvent Calvary and the preaching of the cross which commands our death to sin, it exposes our hypocrisy. We want to be born again but at somebody else’s expense. Startling the revelation in that agony of its grace and truth, that the gift of new life will cost me the death of the old one, and that the cross of Jesus Christ is my cross also.

As Christ Jesus was motivated by bringing glory to his Father in all he said and did, even so, the Holy Ghost teaches and guides us into all truth to help us glorify the LORD Jesus Christ in all we say and do. That the Father may be glorified in the Son (see John 14:13)—that is, in our particular case as his disciples, that the Father be glorified by Christ in us.

If we would please God, this brings us full circle to fields white unto harvest in the continuity of the outreach of God’s love in Christ Jesus and through his disciples for a world still lost. Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples (John 15:8).

To glorify the Father and to honor the Son, I make myself available to be sent into the Father’s fields. Although there are many among the righteous assembly whose souls are still in crisis, perforce some unaware and some unwilling to admit it, the self-sustaining, self-righteous congregation is not of the white unto harvest fields to which the Savior refers at Jacob’s well. The Master himself said the ninety and nine have no need of repentance; and I would add, no desire. Sadly, many have need, but they have no conscious need or desire for repentance. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Thus, I conclude that it is still the poor to whom the Spirit of the LORD would have the gospel preached, the brokenhearted he would have to be healed, the captives to whom he would still preach deliverance, and recovering of sight to the blind and to set at liberty them that are bruised. This is still the acceptable year of the LORD, and it commands to be preached (see Luke 4:18). Thus, I deduce for a disciple to faithfully follow in the footsteps of the Master is to enter these same fields by faith seeking the same fruit that the Father may continue to be glorified in the Son: Jesus Christ, as revealed to be in you and in me. It is Christ in you and in me that continues to gravitate toward the souls of those whose lives are in crisis. He is still here to seek and to save that which is lost.

I speak from experience when I say there was a time I was so righteous that I did not need much help at all. I was pretty much self-sufficient in my religious rituals and exercises. But from the mountain of spiritual success and arrogance, I no longer could hear the voice of the LORD for the noise and clanging symbol of my own. For I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (re. Matt. 9:13).

Yes, there was a time I had heard the LORD’s call, and I had answered and was saved. All that is good and well and as it should be. But like the Galatians and in actuality like the propensity of most Christians, it seems, I had started with grace and in short order sustained myself with self-righteousness. It seems the more righteous I became, the less grace I needed for myself, and certainly, the less I had to offer the next poor fellow.

The LORD would of a necessity bring storm after storm into my life to break up everything I trusted in, i.e. the ship that I had built and entrusted to my own navigational expertise, all my religious posturing and egotistical spirituality. It was on the rocks of repentance I would hear his call again. Repeating this same experience more times than I care to admit, I resolved to remain a sinner saved by grace and let other contemporary Pharisees and wise men concern themselves with righteousness. There is nothing I can add to the righteousness of Christ and nothing that I can do that matters without it. I have found that if I remain brokenhearted, the LORD pours in and out all the time, exceeding grace and joy unspeakable. It is here that I give and receive, having learned that what I give away, I am allowed to keep.

It seems that it is the soul in crisis which is most often afforded grace to hear the voice of God. To the soul that acknowledges its need, the gift of godly sorrow is freely given and an ear to hear also. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live (John 5:25). When I accede that God is faithful and true and righteous altogether, when I accept his adjudication is equitable and just concerning my sin, when I acknowledge that I am, indeed, dead in trespasses and sin, it is then that grace and truth in the person of the LORD Jesus Christ is at the door.

It is dead men who get saved and raised to newness of life. Where all hope of human help is lost, there I am found of God. It is when my life is in crisis that I most need an unequivocal, undiluted, indisputable Word of God. This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5).

Men and women whose souls are in a strait, suspended by a thread between heaven and hell, as it were, need and deserve an unambiguous Word. God is love, and God is light. These are absolutes. God is a Spirit, and his first name is Holy.

And thus, we come to the title of this volume, not of the world, and of course, its subtext of the world. Church of God, the days are short, let us redeem the time. The line of delineation is just this concise: God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. Child of God, our choice is just that distinct: of the world or not of the world.

Lukewarm will never do. We know this, but it still does not incite us to turn it up, to fan the flame, to burn for the LORD Jesus. We remain at room temperature, and I am afraid the reason is unbelief. We think of a Holy God too casually. We really do not believe a God who is love will spew (or vomit) us out of his mouth. We think of ourselves too highly. I am not so sure we believe in hell. And I suspect those of us who really believe in heaven are nominal and minimal and stream-lined Christians with one foot in the world clutching our stuff, watching the clock, as it were, waiting for the last minute to rush in to get it right. I conclude we do not really believe he is going to come as a thief in the night either, if we really believed our robes would be white.

That there are no shady places in God is a radical gospel.