The Apostle Paul, when writing his first epistle to the Corinthian Church commands, "Let everything be done decently and in order" (I Cor. 14:40). This command has far less to do with things like children misbehaving and much more to do with the revelation that God has established everything with an Order and those things can only function in that Order! As the Word and Spirit are the life and soul of the Church, so Godly Order is the sinew in the Church which knits and joins the members together in the decency of perfected completion. Godly order is a bridle to mischief and a spur to the slow and negligent; it is the goodness of God instructing and admonishing us by correcting our obstinate wills and convicting us in our shameless disobedience.
It's high time for the Church to return to its proper posture of holy worship in the position of "anointed" Order. It's time that we challenge the North American Church to be rid of synthetic spirituality, dainty disciples, unconsecrated ideas, humanistic presentations, christian psycho-babble, entertainment-driven worship, and powerless preaching. All of this has done nothing but create surface believers who've acquired a taste for shallow, uncommitted, wholly comfortable Christianity and produce a Christian anomaly we call the Western Church. We can build the finest state-of-the-art facilities in the world, but if we neglect to build real disciples in our state-of-the-art facilities, we're doing nothing more than managing an entertainment center which caters religious services to a crowd of spiritual junkies. In many places I've visited, leaders were convinced they were doing "enough" by gathering a crowd while not doing anything of substance to build a disciple. I labored with them until they had a change of concepts and radical deliverance from their way of thinking.
Physical construction is far easier than inner-man building! And yet, when we look at unique construction of Solomon's Temple and all of its plethora of gold, silver, precious stones, carved cedars, woven tapestries, and stone foundation - all of it was "pre-pared," shaped and fashioned through tedious work before they were ever introduced into Solomon's glorious Temple. Everything was assembled and prepared in its exact order. The Bible says something intriguing about Solomon's Temple, it says, "Now all the work of Solomon was prepared unto the day of the foundation of the house of the Lord, and until it was finished. So the house of the Lord was perfected" (2 Chron. 8:16).
So, even after the craftsmen had placed the delicate gold furniture in the house, the house was not considered complete, or perfected, without the established order of what to do in the house. Our human efforts to build serve only to remind us that there is a greater house with spiritual bulwarks and unseen foundations that is our obsession, it's the Tabernacle of God made without hands!
So leader, be of good cheer and keep building your people, they are far more precious than the gold and glitz of Pharaoh City or Tiberius Theater!
Blessings,
Pastor Hutchins