May 2020 – Bonita Bible Mission

OUR PRAYERLESS CHURCHES (Pt.3)

Since the Reformation, until the mid 19th C the weekly intercessory gathering of the saints was an essential meeting for the whole congregation. From time immemorial this was the secret of survival for the New Testament church at Jerusalem and Antioch when it was still a persecuted and vilified minority.

Today, with very few exceptions, free prayer participation of spoken intercession is a forgotten public meeting. It was once a staple part of the church programme. It has been abandoned as too archaic and old-fashioned in the modern 21st-century hustle, and bustle addicted to restless compulsive busyness.

The unions secured the right of the worker to 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, and 8 hours leisure. Today’s frenzy of movement, predicted by the ancient prophets, seems to allow time for busy social media, electronic interactive screen communication and entertainment for leisure, leaving little or no time for private devotion to God in the Scriptures and prayer. Much is often determined by their master, the smartphone allowing them any quietude. Heaven forbid that they dare silence or switch it off! Such action would be anathema to their so-called friends sending the latest interactive hearsay rumours.

Truthfully, on average the godfearing and the upright professors of moral rectitude and religion could not possibly stop still in prolonged silence without image, icon or decibel to preoccupy their minds. Why? Because they do not want to be discomforted facing their own naked soul unmasked of its pretence, and spurious profession of walking with the Intercessor: the Saviour.

Prayer, the clergy says, in this ‘modern-day’, can be automated and privatised by circulating lists of their people’s needs to the faithful for their petitions, in private prayer via prayer-chains. Whether by Bible Study hand-outs, email, smartphone, or social media, they are in reality, obfuscating as clergy and elders as they silently proclaim: “Why pray, when the church can SAY it some other way? Viz: said prayers, read prayers, and dead prayers?

When the human spirit prevails in an assembly the spirit of prayer is unwelcome. Preachers and leaders bypass it altogether and relegate public assembly prayer to individual home activity. When this happens hot coals cool; luke-warm embers become cold; broken reeds become more bowed; saints forget how to pray and when they try they are lost for words the vapour of smoking flax ascends. They with the household of faith need the old-time fire of free spontaneous vocal saints’ praying in the midst of the assembly. Without it they are separated from the Spirit’s dynamic of fire that God has deigned to ignite only when saints pour out their hearts aloud to Him. In a day of false-fire, it must be understood that prayer is in the language of the people, not the indulgence in eccentricity via popular hypnotic entrancing gibberish. The latter can be made unwelcome by precluding outsider participation.

The modern church focuses only on public praise in worship of song and overlooks the other. No one denies that God has chosen the ‘foolishness of preaching’ to save, keep, and revive, but only free public prayer generates the fire of the spirit of prayer in the heart of the newborn lamb. Down through the ages until the mid-19thC. our godly forefathers took this as incontrovertible. This was so in the New Testament church at Jerusalem and later at Antioch.

“And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness.” (Acts 4:31)

“Gird yourselves, and you priests lament,: you ministers of the altar howl: come, lie all night in sackcloth, you ministers of my God…Sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land into the house of the Lord your God, and cry unto the Lord.” (Joel 2:13-14)

Credits: King James Version-(Public Domain);
Article: John David

OUR PRAYERLESS CHURCHES (Pt.3)

UNDERSTANDING THE VIRGIN MARY’S HERITAGE

UNDERSTANDING MARY & JOSEPH’S HERITAGE BY ANCESTRY.
MATTHEW 1 (see also Luke 3: 23-38)
Contrary to Rome’s tradition, the genealogy of Mary is given in Matthew 1:1-17. Although it is an ascending lineage from Abraham’s wife Sarah, only three of the Virgin Mary’s matriarchs are familiar to the student and a number are only implied: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachael, and Bathsheba. Thus at first reading, it would seem to be a patriarchal list, because it was written in a strongly patriarchal culture. The three familiar ancestors listed are Tamar, Rachab, and Ruth, as Mary’s matriarchal antecedents. Heli was the father of Mary, but Jacob the father of Joseph with many illustrious patriarchs well known the Bible student.

Luke the physician, the writer of the gospel, and the Acts of the Apostles, gave a patriarchal descending list of forbears of Joseph. He was the Lord’s stepfather because Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Joseph’s wife, Mary. While she was not sinless, as Rome claims, she had not been impregnated with man’s inherent accursed seed (via Adam’s fall) that Joseph would have given her.

Though Joseph’s genealogy is remarkable, (Luke 3:23-38) his ancestry the best of the patriarchs, princes, and kings; God’s curse was nonetheless present in his seed that generated Jesus’ brothers. Only the Holy Spirit of the Heavenly Father could plant a sinless seed within Mary’s womb that would be “holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners”.

The reader must realize that both parents possessed the heritage within the tribe of Judah. Indeed, Jesus is called the Lion of Judah.

The promise made to King David and Solomon, (reiterated time again by the prophets) was that the coming Saviour and High Priest of elect believers, would come from the tribe of Judah to lead another priesthood in his new kingdom of heaven. He would be a descendant of David whose forefathers were shown to be from Judah, the son of Jacob (Israel), and grandson of Abraham ‘the father of all believers’. Remember that Abram met Melchizedek and blessed him with the grace of faith, among other gifts. (Genesis 14) A few verses later in Genesis 15 Abram is at last able to believe the impossible promises he had previously disbelieved and therewith was justified by faith and became the ‘father of all believers’.

Both Matthew’s and Luke’s list of lineal ancestry, are meant to confirm Jesus’ maternal and neo-paternal heritage as the Son of David, the Son of Man, and the Son of God. Yet paradoxically, Jesus Christ our Lord (whose name, before his incarnation, was The Word of God) had no beginning and has no end, just like Melchizedek. Thus the Lord Jesus is the Christ, forever the High Priest, after the order of Melchizedek.
References:
Genesis 14:18-20; Psalm 110:4; Hebrews 7; 1 John 5:7; Revelation 19:13;

Detailed Study: Compare of Hebrews 7 in the following verses:
Hebrews 7:1-3; 7:12-15; 7:17; 7:21; & 7: 21-24.

Scriptures read and referenced are from the King James Version (Public Domain) which was the fifth and last reprint of the first English New Testament (Tyndale 1526). The Reformers published the first New Testaments from the Koine Greek (in Erasmus’New Testament 1516) and translated into European languages. The Greek manuscripts of the NT from Constantinople had only arrived in Europe some fifty years earlier after Islam laid siege to Constantinople.

Article by John David.

UNDERSTANDING THE VIRGIN MARY’S HERITAGE

UNDERSTANDING DIFFICULT PASSAGES OF THE BIBLE.
Romans 7:5-14. The essence of vss: 5-14 by John David using the King James Version (Public Domain).
But when we were in the motions of sin it did work in our members, but now we are delivered from them wherein we were held that we should serve in newness of spirit.
But sin had wrought in me all manner of lust. In the oldness of the letter of the Law I knew sin by its commands which condemned me.
Before I knew the Law I was unaware of sin within me. But when I learned of the Law’s commands I was condemned to death. Its commandments wrought in me self condemnation and guilt. It was deadly to my spirit, crippling me.
The good commandments unto life I found to be deadening, though they are holy, just and good. Was the Law killing me? God forbid! It exposed my sin consciously making me captive of my carnal state.

PRAYERLESSNESS OF OUR CHURCHES. (1)
by John David
Without the spirit of prayer present in a congregation converts will be made by men, but not by God. They will be taught doctrine, creed, and biblical history, confessions of faith, and biblical verse memorization, but lack the inner Teacher in the absence of the spirit of prayer.

Charles Finney of the Second Great Awakening and George Whitefield of the First Great Awakening were totally dependent upon the spirit of prayer. Finney would only preach in a church where it was manifest in at least one or two saints. The whole secret of his ministry was the spirit of prayer. He personally knew the secret of prayer described in Romans 8 and 2 Corinthians 10. He knew what it was to ‘stand in the gap’, to plead, reason, and remonstrate with his heavenly Father.

This was none other than the secret of Moses, Daniel, and Elijah. Albeit, for an assembly of the saints, warm coals can only retain their fire when with other warm coals which then may become hot if they pray audibly to their Father together. This is the secret of the statement: “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”. Otherwise, the church is constantly on the defensive against a wily foe who can outwit it.

When saints pray audibly and unashamedly in Christ’s name the smoking flax will flare into flame again and the bruised and broken reeds will begin to revive. To underestimate the spoken prayers of the saints is folly indeed. The invisible cycle of this process is described in 2 Corinthians 10.

Jesus said that where two or three gather together in prayer there he will be in the midst. This is commonly misunderstood as happening in worship. It takes praying elders and deacons audibly praying together beforehand if Jesus is to be in the midst of that worship. No it is not a one man show or one minister’s responsibility.

Public unashamed audible prayer of the brethren, supported by the silent intercession of the sisters will bring a new dynamic. “Prayer changes things,” said Praying Hyde of India. “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of,” said Alfred Tennyson.

If allowed to be a stable part of the assembly’s weekly program inevitably the spirit of prayer will eventually be manifest impassioning and emboldening saints’ supplications with fervency. Cold hearts will become strangely warmed in the presence of interceding saints.

Without opportunity for the spirit of prayer no matter how pure an assembly’s doctrine; no matter how upright its preacher or elders; no matter how pious its members- it is nevertheless dying by attrition and all the evangelistic outreach and visitation efforts in the world will not keep the status quo from shrinking. This is why churches all over the west on both sides of the Atlantic finally shut their doors.

(TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2 & 3.)

PRAYERLESSNESS OF OUR CHURCHES. (1)
Without the spirit of prayer present in a congregation converts will be made by men, but not by God. They will be taught doctrine, creed, and biblical history, confessions of faith, and biblical verse memorization, but lack the inner Teacher in the absence of the spirit of prayer.

Without an opportunity for the spirit of prayer no matter how pure an assembly’s doctrine; no matter how upright its preacher or elders; no matter how pious its members- it is nevertheless dying by attrition and all the evangelistic outreach and visitation efforts in the world will not keep the status quo from shrinking. This is why churches all over the west on both sides of the Atlantic finally shut their doors.
Article by John David
Quoted Scriptures from the KJV Bible (King James Version- Public Domain.)

(TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2 & 3.)

OUR PRAYERLESS CHURCHES (2)

OUR PRAYERLESS CHURCHES (2)
by John David.
Without the spirit of prayer the pulpit may have the right jargon, fervency, and even ebullient oratory but its clichés and hackneyed phrases become worn. Above all the messages lack the energy and presence of Christ.

Even amid maximum human output, it is to no avail, because without the spirit of prayer God the Father cannot draw men to his Son as presumptuous pulpiteers and administrators think sermons, church evangelism and private prayer bulletins will be enough to feed sheep, reach the lost, and build the kingdom. None of the three goals will be achieved without reinstituting the old fashioned free-prayer mid-week meeting thereby allowing the spirit of prayer to return.

Some narcissistic ministers of the pulpit love the sound of their own voice several times on Sunday. They also feel their vocal cords must predominate, instead of the voices of the saints in prayer, during the mid-week meeting, once set aside for the brethren. This they do, at every possible opportunity, ensuring there is no such room for free prayer of the brethren, even though they resist the very fire they are trying to simulate.

As a side effect of the 19th C. divisive age that still pervades today, many are scared of any freedom that might allow a rebel to exploit free prayer for his own purposes. Yet many good ministers in the 20th C became adept in controlling any such eccentric without either havoc or abandoning the free prayer meeting.

Yet the euphemism of ‘security’ is often used to cover the common fear that administrators have should they permit such a regular prayer meeting. Though this is certainly true in the USA, it has also spread to the other side of the Atlantic.

Beware that today’s lock down on free prayer in the tabernacle does not prevent the incense of saints’ joint prayers from ascending to the gates of heaven.

So phobic have many overseers become that those who would meet together for spoken prayer participation in a home will rarely gain the required official permission. In the unlikely event that is allowed an administrator is delegated to govern such a meeting, which usually means it is dead before it starts. In other words once spoken prayer is controlled, timed, or conducted with selective participants it is not free but stilted, stale, and stymies free prayer.

One thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history. Viz: God has limited endowing the spirit of prayer to a church that has a public prayer assembly in its regular schedule. This assembly is unwilling to let busyness or the clock shut the curtain on the window of prayer. Other tabernacles merely go through the motions, to show they are prayerful, but are in reality resist the spirit of fire that will grow an assembly and make men holy.

Did this downgrade start with the new prayer methodology of 19th C. evangelists Moody and Torrey, who discovered the secret of prayer methodology? Their popularity elevated them to the literati as experts on prayer while their writings simultaneously discounted the importance of saint’s oral participation in any midweek prayer meeting. Instead the latter evangelist and teacher promoted a Bible Study in lieu of the traditional prayer meeting. This resulted in the saints’ audible prayer meetings being privatized to the home in the ensuing decades.

1. Two are better than one. Ecclesiastes 4:9-12

2. A threefold cord shall not be quickly broken. Ecclesiastes 4:12

3. “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father.”‘Matthew 18:19

4. “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them”. Matthew 18:20

Article by John David.
Quoted Scripture from King James Version of the Bible. (Public Domain)

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 3 & 4.

OUR PRAYERLESS CHURCHES (2)