• The rise of Evangelicalism through various reformers/evangelists sought to restore focus but even then this process became stalled into a conversion focus and the ongoing task of discipling hearers.

• This malaise became addressed in devotional discoveries that became known as Pentecostalism, but which was side-tracked into denominational programmes (a failure to distinguish between spiritual 'scaffolding' and the actual 'structure').

• The Charismatic Renewal sought to restart the impetus lost and had a positive effect in bridging denominational barriers within Christianity but was soon led astray, by claims in some quarters of a hierarchical status among the gifts of the Holy Spirit, swung off into feel-good religion (prosperity-formulas, healing ministries, etc.), recruitment outreaches, curriculum-based life-groups/cell-churches, etc....

and so another spiritual stoppage set in – and again Christianity's restoration slowed and camped.

does not begin in the Gospels, or in the Acts of the Apostles who were the historical foundation of Christianity as portrayed in the foundations of the cubic New Jerusalem in the Bible's concluding book (Revelation 21:14).

The precious open communication of God to us all as represented in His written Word begins in Genesis and it never looses that perspective which was given in the beginning –

all humanity was made "in His image" to truly and to fully represent Him toward all that He has made.

representative authority, given in the beginning, is that to which Jesus was referring when, after His disciples were so amazed that the fig tree which He had rebuked (Matthew 21:19) the previous day (Mark 11:20) was immediately dead from its roots, that Jesus then said to them, without any exaggeration –

In other words, that dead tree was just a sampling of an authority which was not connected in any way to the unique authority of God-incarnate in Jesus Christ as is often ignorantly taught! Yes, Jesus was God-in-our-flesh, but He had humbled Himself to the limiting parameters of our human existence – as God had set for us all in the beginning: in an authority derived from a relationship to God, hence the reference to "faith"; a relationship of unconditional trust, beyond understanding, as a child trusts, such as was demonstrated in the lead personality of this same first book of Holy Scripture, Abraham, and was recorded for our understanding today.

within this perspective that the Apostle Paul understood praying in [unknown] 'tongues' to be nothing special and therefore applicable to all believers, and so he could also say that he wanted all believers to so pray, beyond their own understanding, by the mind of the Spirit Himself, and therefore Paul was then ready himself to even publicly interrupt the official legal enquiry before the Roman governor of Cyprus, when Barnabas (leader of their mission) was being questioned concerning their mission activity on the island, with a radical rebuke that publicly struck the governor's advisor instantly blind.

So it was, that in response to the dishonouring of Barnabas by the Roman governor's favourite advisor, though not being himself addressed, he interrupts their court proceedings with a public rebuke which concludes –

This is why the history of Christianity in this world will not complete in a climax of mass conversions.

Conversions are simply a rightful response of those who hear the message of God-in-Christ reconciling the world to Himself, in respect to the representative character of the followers of Jesus, as restored in Him to their original status before God. And so, Jesus made it clear to His disciples that the End that they expected would only come after completion of the mission He gave to them concerning propagating to all nations the gospel that He Himself had been preaching (revealing God without distortion) –

So the Book of the Revelation teaches (11:6) that the history of Christ's Church in this world will conclude,
not in an Escapist Rapture, but in a climactic confrontation of Christ's Church with this world as
God's witness for His prosecution,
demonstrated with the supernatural authority that had been previously shown in
both the ministry of Elijah (stopping the rain) and Moses (plagues and water turned to blood),
in the symbolism of which the "two witnesses" are simply the minimum witness required to secure judgement.
This is not 'nastiness' toward the unconverted any more than Paul was nasty in publicly striking Elymas blind in the Cyprus court.
It is the rightful expression of a human relationship to God, restored through Jesus Christ,
that necessarily confronts all that contradicts God's design and purpose in God's universe.

Copyright © Lloyd Thomas 2016. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
Feel free to copy, as long as this full copyright notice is included.

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