16.1 Out of Whack!
© 2018 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
The fifth pattern of home is “Parts in Proportion.” The prior four patterns have fit the intentions of the Holy Spirit regarding our life together as the church far better than I could have imagined. The fifth most important verse in the Bible, the primary how of God, is the verse that places us beyond the finished work of the cross and into our full and personal union with Christ.
So, how does our union with the Lord Jesus Christ fit the construction design concept of parts in proportion? And how do both of those concepts from seemingly unrelated fields fit into essential qualities of our life together as the Church? At the very least, I am intrigued to discover the answers.
My Agony. I have begun to understand the agony in which I lived throughout my eighteen years in the experience of Spirit-filled and godly Christian community. Inside of those years I tasted of many good things, things which belong to me as the fruit of promise.
I lived in Christian community for two reasons, however. The initial reason was that such a way of living was the call and set of my own heart. The secondary reason that grew over years was my understanding of God and His word, that Christ is a many-membered body. Nonetheless, all through those years, my experience outwardly and inwardly did not seem to be fitting proportionally with that calling and set of my heart.
All out of Proportion. Of course, that is not how I defined my distress then. Rather, I was taught and accepted the idea that my distress was the cries of my flesh in opposition to God.
I now know it was nothing of the sort.
Now, don’t get me wrong. My flesh was perfectly capable of crying about anything and everything. Yet the difference between momentary lusts and aggravations versus the wrenching distress of my heart was significant. Equating one’s heart with “flesh” in the negative sense is an unimaginable cruelty.
So what was all that agony for so many years about? Why on earth did I persist for so long in bearing that distress?
Beginning to Understand. Most would say that the problem was the actuality of living in intentional community. I have never thought that and disagree vehemently. My experience never once altered the calling and set of my heart to live inside of God’s house, to know God as He is and to walk with a people who know God as He is. Yet, through all those years, something was not right. And that something was NOT ungodliness nor the lack of Christian goodness and integrity nor the absence of the Holy Spirit.
At the present time, inside my present knowledge of God and His word, and out from that wondrous practice of putting the Lord Jesus Christ upon every moment of my life, I am beginning to understand.
Parts in Proportion. God gave me a memory that holds most significant things almost as if they are current. This quality has carried much pain, but not anymore. Placing Jesus upon every moment and inside every difficulty has been the ongoing work of the last sixteen years. Now that my union with Christ has drawn into itself every moment of my past, that same memory serves this work of sharing with you the wondrous riches of Christ I tasted as a spy.
As I am sitting here, considering that agony through all those years, that sense that something was not right, that my experience did not fit the longing of my heart, AND as a builder and designer of homes, I see that one phrase best describes the answer to all my distress – PARTS IN PROPORTION.
Turned into a Garden. You know what, up until I wrote this little bit just now, I imagined that I was “stretching the patterns” more than just a bit by fitting this pattern of home with Galatians 2:20. Now I know that this single merging of Galatians 2:20 with “parts in proportion” is the essential union that turns the experience of Christian community from faltering and pointless human endeavor into the garden of God.
In my community experience, we possessed every ingredient needed for the revelation of Jesus Christ through us His Church. BUT – all the ingredients of a glorious Church were all out of whack, fitted together in the wrong manner, and terribly out of proportion.
Where Jesus and We Belong. In saying that things were “out of whack,” I am not suggesting that one way of doing things is better than another, or that “my ideas” for community are God’s answer. I am saying that Jesus was NOT where He belongs inside our hearts, inside all that we are, in our understanding, and we were not where we belong inside of Jesus, inside all that He is, in our understanding.
We did not know Gethsemane. – Here am I, I and the children whom You have given Me.
Now we are ready to merge the pattern of “Parts in Proportion” together with Galatians 2:20, our entrance into the Lord Jesus Christ.
From Patterns of Home. This is awesome. I did not read the first paragraph of “Parts in Proportion” for this purpose until after I wrote the above.
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You can probably remember seeing a building that instinctively felt right. The various parts all seemed to fit together in a harmonious and comfortable way, each part apparently in the right place and in the right relationship to the whole. At the other extreme, you can probably remember seeing a building that felt somewhat awkward—either unbalanced or confusing, with its parts appearing to be neither the right shape or size, nor in the right place. These feelings are intuitive, but nonetheless solid and real. They come from our innate sense of proportion, from a feeling that the parts of an object should relate well to each other.
An Evil Balance. Wow. I must insert this thought here. Good and evil do not fit together except as death. A God knowing all good AND knowing all evil, a God who splits us as believers in Jesus into partly Christ and partly anti-Christ, a Salvation that leaves the universe with an all-evil in opposition to an all-good, just does not fit any sense of proportion. And that absolute is known intuitively inside every human heart.
The purpose of the Nicene Creed brought forth at the bottom of Roman darkness is to force upon Christian understanding, with Christian terminology, the definitions of God and of man given by the serpent in the garden. And Calvinism, then, is the effort to force the serpent’s definitions onto every verse in the Bible. No wonder we always knew something was wrong.
The Serpent in the Tree. That was exactly what I witnessed last Sunday. The speaker read 1 John 4:15-16, God in us and we in God – as He is, so are we in this present age – the words of the tree of life. But then he turned the congregation immediately away from these wondrous words (Get away from that tree.) He did so by presenting the “obvious image” of a super-Christ, an above-you Christ, a Christ far separate from you, the outward appearance of external and fantastical power. Yes, you can be “like” this image of Christ, but you are obviously not like it now. Thus the bulk of the sermon was an exhortation to stop being yourself and to pretend, with all your might, to be like this image of external perfection, something that is not.
It felt to me as if I was watching the fall of man in Eden all over again.
Saved from the Lie. What is the one thing that saves us out of the horror of this abyss? Galatians 2:20. The cross is already complete; Jesus, Himself in Person, has now become me in all that I am, carrying me inside Himself all the way into life.
This is an extraordinary thing. You see, all expression of the Christian Church that we have known in our lives or read of in history, including my years in Christian community, is a Church built upon the conviction that the serpent spoke the truth in the garden. That Christ is NOT our life; that we have a life NOT Christ. We dare not use that false balance, everything out of whack, to define life together as the Church, for we did not know God.
The True Image of God. Galatians 2:20 takes us out of the serpent’s twisted malarkey and places us entirely into John 14:20, we in Jesus and Jesus in us. And it is this one word, then, that puts everything back into harmony and balance.
Galatians 2:20, however, is the words that express that one action that stands above all other actions in the history of the universe, a Man rising to His feet in Gethsemane. And from those words and that action, we place our own image of God. – God always reveals Himself through weakness, swallowing up into Himself all that we are including our sin and rebellion, becoming us in our present state, limiting Himself by our weakness. Thus, carrying us inside Himself, stumbling and falling along the way, He arises out of death into life, ascending on high, and we inside of Him. –
In order to discover Church, then, what a Community of Christ might be as every part is shaped and placed by Galatians 2:20 out from the JOY, you and me, set fully inside Jesus’ heart, let’s continue with the points given by the authors of Patterns of Home regarding parts in proportion.
Working with the Pattern.
A house needs to feel well proportioned, combining the variety of particular needs with an overall sense of stability and order. Rather than being a patchwork of disconnected elements, it should have the same fitness of form as a living organism.
- Organize the house along lines of movement and growth, both in plan and in elevation. One line, or axis, normally starts at the main entrance, branching out toward the sun and views, away from the street and its noise. Another begins at the ground and grows up towards the sky.
- Balance the area and mass of the house around these lines of growth. Let the plan grow outward on both sides of the main axis toward privacy and sun. And place the highest part of the house in the center, surrounded by lower supporting parts of the building.
- Give the house visibly specialized parts: solid structural elements that can be seen supporting the building, generously shaped rooms to contain activities, and distinctive circulation paths to conduct movement and flow through the house.
- Create a rich variety of room sizes and orientations, always including human scale in the circulation, structure, trim, and openings.
- Unify the rooms with a similar shape, typically compact in plan and chubby in volume.
- Let the overall form of the house grow naturally out of the forms if its various parts, rather than being super-imposed from outside. In this sense the form of the house equals the form of its parts.
And that is exactly what I observed happening in my past community experience and why I knew, somehow, that this was not what my heart knew to be true. It was a community and a church built entirely upon shame.
Building Inside of Jesus. In complete contrast, the cross to us is our doorway into all that is Christ, fulfilled now in us. Thus everything we build together flows out from our full enjoyment of one another in personal union with Jesus.
BUT – I do like sevens. So let me peruse the chapter and see if I can come up with a seventh point from my experience as a designer and builder of homes. You see, my problem is that I am not an artist, I do not have that inherent sense of proportion. When we had completed the Graham River Tabernacle, I knew that it’s shape, inside and out, was out of balance, but I did not understand why.
Proportion in Nature. I think I’ve found the point that connects the Spirit of God to the essence of being real as humans that will serve as the foundation of the next session, “Order by the Spirit.” This is not a different point, but rather the source of the other six principles of balance and proportion.
The authors provide a picture of a branch from a bush under the caption of “Proportion in Nature,” with this statement. “Virtually any fragment of nature, like this cutting from a back-yard bush, can serve to demonstrate the organizational properties of axis, balance, variety in unity, specialization, and similar form. These properties are at the heart of what we term good proportion.”
Seven Points of Proportion.
- Draw the sense and balance of proportion from the asymmetrical, yet pleasing forms of nature, rather than by imposing rigid symmetrical notions of human mechanics.
We will specify the parts of Galatians 2:20 in the next lesson.