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THE PURITY AND PERFECTION OF THE BRIDE OF CHRIST [Part 1]

The Bride of the Lord Jesus is comprised of every real Christian believer. Each member must therefore possess the same purity and perfection as the Bride.

THIS MYSTERY IS GREAT

In several of the Apostle Paul’s epistles he refers to what he calls a great mystery regarding the Body of Christ: He says that it is made up of every believer. Imagine that. This means that every real Christian, the only ones who qualify, are each a part of the Lord’s Body, which is also referred to as the Church. Of course, the Church is not a building. The Lord and the writers of the New Testament never refer to it in that way. Such an error arose a few centuries later as so many other errors have. No, the Church is the Community of the Lord. It is from the Greek word ekklesia which is defined by Strong’s as: A gathering of citizens called out from their homes into some public place; an assembly. Regarding its application to Christianity, the word refers to “The Community of the Called-Out Ones.” That is, each member has been called out from being a former sinful member of this fallen world to be a member of the Lord’s overall Community—His Church.

These words are therefore synonymous—Ekklesia (the Hebrew word is Qahal), Church, Called-Out Community, and Body of Christ. These are all terms which refer to the total collection of every real believer though there is yet another term—the Bride of Christ. Regarding the Lord’s Bride, Scripture states very clearly that His Bride will be perfect, pure, and holy:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless. [Ephesians 5:25-27]

She will be spiritually beautiful. She will be as Eve, the last of God’s Creation, the wife of Adam and the first woman, as she was in her perfect state before her fall into sin. She was, of course, originally beautiful and perfect in every way. And as the Lord Jesus is referred to in the New Testament as the Last Adam—an absolutely perfect and sinless Man and one who replaced the First Adam who fell into sin, so will the Bride of Christ be the perfect and pure Woman who replaces fallen Eve.

Since this is true (again, a great mystery), we must therefore consider how it is possible for the Bride of Christ to be pure and perfect since she is composed of seemingly imperfect human believers. Nevertheless, it must follow that each member thereof must also be pure and perfect:

“Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” [Matthew 5:48] [1]

And there you have it. The Lord commands His followers to be perfect. He raises the standard to the nth degree. He says each one of His real followers (believers, disciples, members of His Community) must be as perfect as God the Father. Now, how in the world is this possible, you may ask? No one can be like God! This word, however, does not mean perfection in our sense of the word but has a different connotation. It is from the Greek word τέλειος téleios (tel’-i-os) and is defined as “Complete (in various applications of labor, growth, mental and moral character, etc.); completeness:—of full age, man, perfect.” It is further defined as “brought to its end, finished; lacking nothing necessary to completeness; perfect.” The word essentially means to be fully spiritually mature.

Now, in light of all that Christianity in general has become over the last twenty centuries in that the vast majority of what is known as Christianity is nothing at all like the first-century AD original—the only correct and perfect version and the prototype—one must understand that all the corrupted impure versions put together in total worldwide comprises overall Unreal Christianity. This massive amalgam, of course, is also comprised of people who can only also be described as unreal Christians. And if you may be wondering how the New Testament defines a real Christian in the most simple of terms, it is one who has submitted completely to the absolute Lordship of King Jesus and does his or her best to honor and obey Him, to incorporate His full curriculum, to love Him with all one’s heart, mind, and strength and love one’s neighbor as oneself.

The real Christian is also a lifelong disciple seeking to become fully mature and complete, or “perfect” as the Lord commanded. This means any Christian who does not fulfill these basic precepts cannot be for real. I say this because any Christian who gives it his or her all will get there with the Lord’s help. The Lord will see to it. This means we are talking about a heart condition in which one’s heart must be circumcised to the Lord. One must be born again. One must become a new creation. No one can achieve these things without the Lord’s direct ongoing assistance, of course, and without all the work He did and fulfilled during His earthly ministry to make it possible.

Remember, the Lord was so committed to our salvation and welfare that He submitted to the brutality and suffering of the cross, without which we would all go to hell and have no chance. He was certainly perfect and had certainly been fully spiritually mature and because of this He had the greatest beneficial effect on this sinful world—the only One who ever did or ever will—which means every single person who ever lived is pretty much absolutely nothing by comparison no matter how great one may think one is, and each needs Him as Savior or else.

The relative few who do join up with Him actually achieve the greatness He created them for, become the persons He created them to be, and live lives of spiritual abundance and achievement per the Lord’s definition though not without successful spiritual warfare.

Each also finds his or her place within the Bride of Christ.

Posted in Teaching

The Image of Deception—Legacy of the Unreal

May 15

Posted by RJ Dawson

The following is an excerpt from Real Christianity, The Nature of the Church:

There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all. [Ephesians 4:4-6] [1]

Each of the principle foundation elements of the first Qahal were counterfeited by the Church of the Reversed. Specifically, Jesus became characterized as someone much less than God. He lost His place of total, absolute dominion. He was no longer honored as King of Kings, except possibly in name only, and there was no spiritual kingdom. Repentance became ritualized, and was replaced by the paying of homage to the new Christian Pharisees and the institution they controlled. Unreal Christian adherents no longer repented to the Lord, did a 180 degree turn toward righteousness, or changed their way of thinking to reflect their new spiritual nature (since no real change had taken place).

The correct water baptism method employed by the first church was corrupted entirely. Candidates were no longer even required to be immersed, for example. Like counterfeit repentance, water baptism evolved into a ritual practice which had much more to do with honoring one’s particular “Christian” culture and traditions rather than honoring the Lord.

In fact, to illustrate the true nature of the woolly wolves, the “name which is above every name”[2] was no longer invoked in baptism, but banned from the process entirely, and the doctrinal truth of the Spirit of Jesus living within believers continued only in a religious, conceptual sense, and was otherwise thoroughly denounced and disestablished. All four doctrinal points taught by the apostles on the first day of the Church morphed into ritualized practices with no spiritual meaning, and the truths from which they morphed were eventually declared heretical. The new Christian melting pot also contained the adulterated forms of fellowship, bread-breaking, and prayer which were presented as legitimate, though hidden behind each was the salivating, snarling visage of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

In the final analysis, we discover that the unreal church possessed little more than the fossilized remains of the practices which turned the world upside down in the first century. As a result, the Lord had little authority over its powerless and non-relational members, and church life became a routine practice with little or no life-changing purpose or ability to minister beyond mere human capabilities. But as in many locations in the world today, the Lord’s persecuted church continued to function just as it had in the beginning. Like the remnant of Israel spoken of by Paul in the book of Romans,[3] Jesus has always maintained a remnant of true believers within the earth. His Qahal has never ceased to exist.

Though only a small minority compared to the vast collection of Christian adherents in the world, its members continue to honor their Messiah as did the upper-roomers. However, since the Lord’s community has never been concerned with geopolitics, the forced subjugation of people groups, or the writing of very subjective chronicles, it has faded from historical view. Even if this knowledge cannot be satisfactorily documented for the skeptics among us, the fact of the matter is that the characteristics of the first Christian community, the prototype, remain extremely different from most of the churches and church organizations throughout history and modern times, both in practice and doctrine. Christians continue to be tied to structures promoting dual class division and institutional formats which have little to do with real Christianity. Christians have largely rejected the work of their most distant ancestors, and have lost due respect for the truths they taught, and the One who taught them.

Will we continue to be so blind and arrogant that we place the blame for this fact on them, rather than ourselves? They are the ones who built the foundation. They are the ones who paid in blood to set the example which all successive generations were to follow. If their very immature spiritual juniors of the present continue in this vein of quiet mockery and religious complacency, the Unreal Church of the Conformed will grow even larger with greater determination against truth. In fact, the bloody persecution of real Christians will expand from the present hell-holes of this world and will soon go international. Every nation will take part. The greatest enemy of the present day community of called-out ones, however, are not modern Herods and Neros, but modern religionists intent on protecting their turf.

And who are these chief persecutors? Who are the new Christian Pharisees? In what form do they exist today? Who are the ones influenced by the same spirit that gave Saul of Tarsus his commission to fight the Church? Such deceived ones are much closer to all of us than we think. Through their resolute and unwavering stand for their chosen form of Christianity, they have allowed themselves to become the very image of the unreal.

Our greatest enemy wears virgin wool.

[2] Philippians 2:9

[3] Romans 9:27

Posted in Real Christianity

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Tags: Christian Pharisees, Correct Water Baptism, Counterfeit Religious Traditions, Deception, False Prophets, Lord Jesus, Qahal, Real Christianity The Nature of the Church, Saul of Tarsus, Wolves in Sheep's Clothing