Back to the New Testament Church Part 1

[Music] good morning and thank you for coming we're going to spend most of the day together talking about a very important subject namely New Testament churches and I'd like to give a welcome to the people who will be watching and they're joining us too why have I chosen this subject well simply because I believe Finland's greatest need right now is for New Testament churches the reason is quite simple I'm going to spend the first talk with you taking you through church history that may sound a bit boring but we need to know where we've come from most of the churches in this country as in my country are geared to the 16th century or the 17th century or the 18th or the 19th a few are geared to the 20th but we're living in the 21st we're in a whole new situation and therefore because of the time and place for living in we need to change church life quite radically not just the time but the place we're in Europe and Europe is a unique continent it has been Christian for so long almost from the beginning when Paul left what is now Turkey and came over to Macedonia to Europe so we are in a Christian continent but I want to say we're in a post-christian continent now and that's the change in the situation Finland is no longer a Christian country nor is England we all used to be at least Christianized to a degree but we're now in a totally new situation we are witnessing the end of what's been called Christendom that's a word that unites Christian and Kingdom and Europe has been full of a Christian Kingdom for centuries and now it's all over there are some vestiges still around but it's it's passing away so rapidly that we have to be the Church of Christ in a very new way let's just run through a bit of church history for the first 300 years of Christianity church and state we're enemies the Roman Empire persecuted the Christians for 300 years interestingly enough the church never grew so quickly or was so effective in impacting society as it was when it's was persecuted and that's still true today in many other countries where is the church growing where it's under pressure where it's persecuted and so for the first 300 years Christianity was taboo it was illegal partly because it wouldn't join in with the other religions see Roman religion was based on what we call syncretism bringing religions two together and they put up a huge building in the city of Rome called the Pantheon which means pan all theon gods and in this big building which you can go and see today there are niches all around the walls and when a new country was conquered by the Romans they had to give one of their gods to be put in this temple well of course the Jews refused they said there's only one God we're not joining in this multi religion and they got special permission they were registered as atheists because they only believed in one God but they got away with it and in fact therefore they were not persecuted by room at first the Christians were thought of as a kind of Jewish sect part of the Jewish religion but it became very quickly obvious that Christianity was not Jewish and that it was a new religion and so it became a religion elicitor which is Latin for illegal religion and they were not registered and therefore for the first 300 years there were what we call an underground Church and they suffered enormous Lee literally it cost you your life in many ways the Greek word martyr which originally meant witness became a witness who was willing to die and the the word martyr as it is now means someone who's willing to die for their faith those days are back do you know how many people died for being Christians last year for example if I have said 3,000 what it's shocked you if I said 30,000 what would you think if I said 300,000 what would you think well that's over the top it was two hundred and sixty-eight thousand people died for Jesus last year we don't even think about this unless you know about it most of it I have to say was in Muslim countries places like Indonesia Iran Iraq Sudan northern Nigeria and here to be a Christian is to run the risk of losing your life but that was normal in the early church right up to about the end of the third century so the New Testament church was in that situation and the next few generations had the same pressure on them I'm gonna tell you that that pressure is going to come here and it's going to come everywhere in the 21st century and we need to get our people ready for that we need to be the kind of church that can cope with that kind of pressure well now that's first 300 years then the Emperor Constantine became a Christian at least it sounds as if he did when really never sure how much it meant to him but he decided after seeing a vision in the sky to conquer in the name of the cross or the name of Christ and he said I'm now a Christian and that meant for the first time that Christianity became the official religion it was therefore able for the first time to have military or political force and could use it both to promote Christianity and to protect it and the result was that when Christianity became the official state religion everybody of course had to become Christian go to church that I think filled the church with the world it certainly improved church attendance the quantity of church membership I'm not so sure about the quality and in fact it was a reaction to that the world flocking into the church and joining the emperor in his rally religion that the monastic movement grew up as a protest against a worldly church and people went into the desert to get away from this worldly church they became Hermits they became little communities and eventually all kinds of monastic orders and then another is as people withdrew from a worldly church and decided to be pure Christians it wasn't the best way to do that to get out of the world is not the will of Jesus he prayed that we'd be in the world but not of it he didn't pray that we'd get out of the world but to be in it and therefore to suffer but the first religion that constant-time prohibited was Judaism and the Jews were the first to suffer from the fact that the Empire was now officially Christian and I'm afraid there's been a sad history of anti-semitism in the church ever since the church has persecuted the Jews for centuries now which is to our shame thank god that's changing recently anyway for the next seventeen hundred years church and state were interlocked interlinked they belonged to each other they affected each other each country in Europe was officially Christian one by one every country adopted Christianity in the year 1000 AD when a lot of Christians expected Jesus to come back country after country decided to become Christian Poland did Iceland did I was in Iceland a month ago and reminding them of when they became a Christian and so Christianity became the official religion it wasn't that a lot of people decided to become Christians the state rulers decided and when they decided to become a Christian everybody else had to toe the line and become Christian also it produced a whole lot of what we call nominal Christianity people who said they were Christians and went to church but really many of them had little idea of what real Christianity is about it became very professional became a church dominated by professional priests or professional people trained in college to lead the church and the there was a sharp division from then on between priests and people so that when you talked about the church you tended to think about the professional priests mainly supported by lay folk and that went on right through the next 1700 years and have 1700 because people say well what about the Protestant Reformation the Protestant Reformation didn't change a thing as regards the relationship between state and church the state authorities still decided which religion all the citizens would be and so what Martin Luther did was to persuade a lot of European rulers to become Protestant and then everybody in that state or in that country had to become Protestant but it's still the same arrangement whereby the state and the church are virtually in partnership and that's when christened 'm as we call it really came to dominate Europe so Europe was totally Christian are the Protestant in Northern Europe or Catholic in southern Europe but it was all decided by the state authorities and as you can imagine there was a bit of a struggle between church and state as to who was boss who was on top of the other sometimes it was the Holy Roman Emperor who was the top dog and often it was the Pope and they would struggle between them to say who was top dog the Pope to this day still carries two keys a gold one and a silver one have you noticed that on his crest well one of them the goal is that he's head of the church and the out of the silver one that his head of the state and of course the Vatican is a state as well as a church so that's been the pattern right until the 20th century if you were born in Finland you were considered a Christian and considered Lutheran and that's why the vast majority of people of babies in a country that has a state church are baptized they are considered as much part of the church as part of the state and no state Church has ever been able to introduce believers baptism because the state Church can't it cannot say the church is only believers it must say the churches everybody born here and of course if you were born in a Muslim country you were Muslim if you're born in a Hindu country you were Hindu this is the kind of state religion situation all over the world and usually it persecutes what doesn't fit and so in each state where there is a state religion other religions are under pressure and have real difficulty to get established well now all that is dying it's disintegrating state churches are on the way out they only survive with a vestige of state support and you live in a country where the full-time workers of the state church are paid out of taxes and that creates an artificial situation in which a church may be very small but have a large staff in which it's possible to be living in an artificial unreal situation where the church is dying but it's still surviving because the state is giving it some kind of support now when Christendom dies Christianity loses all privilege and we all have privileges if we live in a Christianized country we are not persecuted by the state we're not considered enemies there are usually great financial privileges to churches where the state has officially acknowledged Christianity in our country our priests are not paid out of the tax but every church is considered a charity and doesn't have any tax to pay for its buildings or anything else and when we give money to the church the government will repay the tax we've paid because the church is a registered charity all that's going to go there will be no financial help from the state anywhere in the future and no privileged access let's just summarize this in the 21st century with the decline and death of Christendom and it may not appear to you immediately here but it'll come mark my words in this century if the law doesn't come first the state church will go and the church will have to support itself govern itself propagate itself will have to do its own work for the Lord with its own resources and in its own way to put it quite simply we are coming in the 21st century full circle back to the situation of the early church but let me say this is not a totally new situation situation nor is it a very old situation any other country outside Europe or America you go to where the state religion is not Christianity the Christian Church has to be more like a New Testament church because it is a persecuted minority in country after country I go to I'm in touch regularly these days in the last few weeks with Christians in Burma Myanmar as it's called now I can't get used to that I've always known it as Burma where the cyclone is and I'm in touch with Christians who've had their lost their homes in the cyclone pastors who are trying to hold a church together in the chaos but I've received only a few days ago photographs of Christians in the forest in the jungle picking up sticks now God that photograph 2 days before coming here what are they doing it's the only job they're allowed to do to pick up sticks in the jungle and sell it for firewood the Christians are not allowed to go to school or have education so a Christian must see their kids grow up to be beggars and here they are picking sticks in the jungle to try and get a bit of food and that's going on well there's a cyclone or not and a cyclone has hit everybody heavily but they're making sure it hits the Christians hardest they don't get priority in relief so they're in a New Testament situation and so are they in many other countries that I'm in direct touch with but praise God there are New Testament churches in those countries and they are so like the church in the first 300 years and the church in the New Testament that you realize that only a New Testament church can survive in that situation so let me just summarize what's happening first Christians are being moved from the center of social life to the circumference to the edge we are constantly feeling we are being marginalized that were on the margins of society that we less and less fit we're moving from the majority to a minority movement we're moving from maintaining church life to a situation of mission where we are in a mission field we are all going to be missionaries now instead of going to darkest Africa to be a missionary we're going to be missionaries right where we are we're going to face other religions right where we are so we are moving from priority to plurality plurality is the belief that all of us need to learn how to live with each other this doctrine of pluralism has really taken over my country nobody has a monopoly of faith or anything else Christianity today is a private faith that people are welcome to practice provided they don't try and tell other people that they should be Christians too we must accept different cultures multiculturalism is the order of the day and so we are going to be persecuted from safe position we're moving to a very insecure position in which we need to prepare our people for suffering now I started saying this ten years ago in Britain whenever I had passed us together I said are you preparing your people for suffering and they looked at me as if I was crazy they don't laugh now because for the first time in my life people are being put in prison in England for preaching the gospel in the marketplace I never thought I'd live to see the day when that would happen in England I expected it in other countries but England Christian country Queen claiming to be the head of the church surely this wouldn't happen but it's happening official persecution more and more laws are being passed in my country that are anti-christian the Sex Discrimination Act and the race Discrimination Act are now being used against Christians we are losing the freedom of speech in England and remarks that are sedid offensive by other people on now a criminal offense so if I speak out as I do against Islam and a Muslim is offended by what I've said I can be arrested and charged with criminal and so you see were heading into a very different situation as a suffering situation a situation in which we feel alien strangers we don't fit society regards us as odd as misfits now at first it becomes embarrassment that's all and if you talk publicly about your faith in England you were considered tactless you considered not very wise not very sensible you keep your faith quiet if you want to be accepted in society that's the first stage just a bit of social embarrassment when I say to people I said it to the taxi driver who drove me to London Airport yesterday or the day before and he said what's your job I said I'm a preacher there was a deathly hush came in the taxi and he just didn't know what to say we'd been talking about his job and all sorts of things and they'd been talking nonstop but as soon as I introduced religion he closed up and he was a very nice English chap but he was embarrassed and then he tried to fish around for some distant relative relative who went to church or some connection to try and please me but he failed miserably and the rest of the journey was really an embarrassment see I'm a Christian and he was typical of English society today which isn't you don't talk about your faith in public now this is exactly where the New Testament Christians were they were aliens they were pilgrims there were strangers they were just passing through they belonged to the colony of heaven they were misfits and that's where we're getting we're coming really full circle in northern Europe back to the early centuries and therefore back to the situation of the New Testament and therefore we need to be a New Testament church or we won't survive will die out that's the background to the talks I want to share with you today we've got to ask what was a New Testament church like how did they manage to cope when they were under such pressure how did they manage to live as aliens of strangers as pilgrims passing through and how did they manage to grow in that situation and spread the gospel because they did it's a funny law but it's a law of history that when the church is under pressure it grows that when it's not under any pressure it declines it's almost as if the more the pressure from outside the stronger we grow inside and the devil knows that if you throw opposition at the church from the outside it'll get stronger the devil knows the only way to destroy a church is from the inside to corrupt it from the inside and that's what has happened so many churches and could happen to us so we are fighting for our life and yet we're going to overcome we're going to grow and spread if we become a New Testament church that's the background to the message I've just painted a quick picture think of it the first 300 years persecuted yet growing the next seventeen hundred years church and state together and has done a lot of damage and it certainly won't survive now and now in the 21st century back to the beginning back to the New Testament back to suffering if I can put it this way in the last minute I've gotten this talk a suffering Church is a normal church for us it's abnormal in Northern Europe but for the New Testament that's normal they expected it whoever would live a godly life in Christ Jesus as Paul will suffer and they counted that they were worthy to suffer worthy and you know that reminds me of a prayer meeting in an India when they were praying for the Christians suffering in Tibet and they all prayed Lord bring them out of this suffering keep them safe but one lady said Lord why did you give them the privilege of suffering and not me she was a New Testament Christian alright that's enough for the first talk and we'll leave it there and pick it up and say no what is a New Testament church [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: David Pawson - Official

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Keywords: David Pawson, New Testament Church, Finland 2008

Id: i06FjKavvPk

Length: 28min 37sec (1717 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 30 2018