29.1 Applying Life Together
© 2018 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
There is only one application of life together and that is life together.
Throughout this volume, I have set before you a model of the Father’s Home, each local church, brethren walking together in love. How this vision is fulfilled in your local gathering together will be as varied as humans are varied. But it will always be a commitment to walk together as you are already members of one another.
Now, many of you reading this (and I as well), do not have the gift of gathering like-minded believers together in a location. That lack is entirely Christ as us.
Two Options. Nonetheless, all who reject the Church as God’s end goal must, of necessity, place the fulfillment of all that God speaks into “heaven” after death. And thus all who hold to a solitary fulfillment of Christ, a fulfilment that has no need for walking together as one with other believers in Jesus, place Death as the goal and not Church. And since being dead in heaven causes all that God speaks to be real, what need is there of one another?
Two options, really. All that God speaks comes only through the curse, that is, through death VERSUS God IS all that He speaks now through His Church.
Our Face Is Set. This is the contest, this is the battle of the ages, which one does each chose to believe? And it’s easy to know which choice each one is making by the set of their face. Is their face set on death or on Church? Our face is set on Church.
And that is what God is after for us. You see, listening to Winnie the Pooh gave me a real answer (out of the mouth of babes and sucklings). In complete expectation dwelling in complete rest, I sit here waiting where my friends (my local church – my Christian Community) can find me, knowing that they are on their way, knowing that all things needed are at the door.
God Has Chosen. It is a real problem that God has called the foolish, the weak, the incapable because how, then, can anything get done? How are we to cause Church to happen? Yet it is a far greater problem when those who are wise and capable, those with powerfully convincing personalities, establish churches, for they will always be in charge. And their hearts will not carry Father’s heart.
All of my feeble efforts over many years have come to naught. Yet now I can truly say, with all joy, that I want only the place God has chosen, with the people who willingly and joyfully come and by the provision God sets for us. Nonetheless, I have accomplished something important in these pages.
Not Right. You see, I am done with Nicene Christianity, yet I am more able to receive all who believe in Jesus than ever before. And I am done with the fellowship of communities called “the move,” though friends and family continue there. That sect is as Roman Catholic as all the rest of them. All these years I have held a deep, unspoken concern, that God would “require of me” to return to that form of community. I have never believed that He would, nonetheless –. Yet, as I have shared, all those years during which I was in that fellowship, though I walked only with God, and though I tasted of and received much good, yet they were years filled with the agonizing whisper, “This is not right; this is not what life together is meant to be.”
Finding Christ Community. How could I articulate what I KNEW in my heart must be? How could I find the Christ Community that IS Church as God means Church to be? I have not looked to “heaven,” that is, to death, to fulfill any such thing for over forty years.
Yet I know God’s people, and I know that without the true WORD, what God actually says, all through the fabric of their knowing and doing, there can be no such life. And so, I want to talk about this course you have read, this “book” you hold in your hands. And then, I want to talk about me, what it is I want.
Nothing Compares. I am working on the final proof copy of Symmorphy IV: Covenant. At the same time, I have all of Symmorphy V: Life into InDesign and am working it towards completion. I have read thousands of books in my life, from Dr. Seuss to Leo Tolstoy, many of them more than once. I have never read anything that compares to Symmorphy IV: Covenant in power and in depth. And that has nothing to do with the fact that “I” wrote it, but rather, with what is in it. I do not know how Symmorphy V: Life reads, for I have not yet read it, but I am very eager to do so. I do not know what God will do with these Symmorphy texts in the future, but I have written them so that He might do with them as He wishes.
As Jesus Wishes. And I have written these Symmorphy texts, and especially these last two, for no one but myself, that I might find what I have longed for and known to be true, though I could never before articulate the agony of my heart.
And so I give what I have written, and especially this text on Life Together, to the Lord Jesus, that He might do with it as He wishes. If He wishes to do nothing with it, I am content, for I have found what I sought. And if He wishes to use it in the shaping of His Church over the next thousand years, He is free to do that as well. I know that I would like very much to be part of a Church coming out of these pages describing life together, coming out of Covenant.
St. Benedict. I am reading again (for the fourth time), the Cadfael mysteries, set in Shrewsbury, England of the 1100’s, in a Benedictine monastery. It is a wondrous thing to see the Lord Jesus moving in grace as His Church, even in the midst of a whole lot of wrong thinking. The wrong thinking never bothers Him; He dwells in the hearts of all who belong to Him.
Benedict, who lived in the AD 500’s, wrote a manual for Christian Community that has been followed by many from then until now. As is typical with all Nicene thinking, Benedict mixed Christ with anti-Christ all through his definitions, just as everyone else seems to do.
Coming out from These Pages. This manual contains no such mixture. Everything of Daniel Yordy found in it is filled with Christ, and everything of Christ found in it is filled with Daniel Yordy.
Yet if the Lord Jesus so chooses, the fabric of life together coming out from these patterns of home merged together with the most important verses in the Bible, is a way of living that would be glorious indeed. And Christ Communities, coming out from these pages and out from your hearts and spreading across the earth, would transform all things into a brand-new universe. Every answer to every human problem on this planet is found ONLY in life together filled with Father at Home.
What Do I Want? From Christ Communities, as you have read of them in this text, will go forth the Word of the Lord and the rule of Christ, a rule of shepherding and care. There can be no society or culture of freedom on this planet or among humans without Life Together, Father at Home, as its beating heart. And I know that a Christ Community, coming out from the patterns on these pages, would be life as I have always desired, life as I always knew life must be.
But that brings us to what it is that I want. When all the clatter and clutter is stripped away, what things remain, certain and leaping, in my heart?
My Abundance. Here are the words I penned several years ago that catch something of what fills my heart. ~ The delights of strong and healthy children, warm and inviting homes, the aroma of herbs, the cackle of chickens, the richness of the soil, shaping wood into beauty, tinkering with machinery, the comfort of a full and well-stocked pantry, the beauty of growing things. Dream of a simple life, of the increase of the fruits of the earth and of your labor. Share with others from your abundance. ~
My favorite building that I designed and built was a trapline cabin large enough for a family. I know now that the reason why I loved that cabin in its place was that it fulfilled all ten of these patterns of home.
My Own Classroom. I would like to build a slightly larger version of that cabin for my wife and I, nestled among other similar homes around a shared dining room called the Tabernacle. I would like chickens and a raised-bed herb and vegetable garden in my back yard.
But whenever I drive by a small college nestled among the trees, something far deeper stirs inside. I want my own college, a Bible school, a school for teachers. I want my own classroom, my own teacher’s desk. But most of all, I want you, sitting in front of me, and I want to teach you of the love and life of Jesus so precious to me.
A Miracle of God. What you have read in these pages is the fruit of more than fifty years of learning, step by step, day by day. I know what it has taken to plant this word in me, to transform my mind until I know that I am loved and filled with Christ.
I know that I am a miracle of God, as are you, every bit as much. And I know that it would take an even greater miracle to reduce the amount of learning required to KNOW Christ as He is, to know WORD as God speaks it, from fifty years down to seven years in the classroom and in the practicum of life together. As Jesus said, the days are shortened for the sake of the elect.
Yet two things have brought me more direct opposition than all else put together – a Bible School in Christian Community.
I Would Build a School. I do not go contrary to those who are contrary to me, but I do go in a different direction. Going in a different direction than all the naysayers makes me very happy.
But enough of that. What if?
What if I had an unending, continuous, and large supply of provision? A supply sufficient for all I would do? I would build a school among the trees, Christ Revealed Bible Institute, that would also include a teacher’s college. I would pay for the tuition and room and board and travel costs for you and for many to come and to drink of life together. I would tend my chickens and I would teach and I would joy in our shared meals together.
I Would Teach Teachers. I would teach the weak, the has-been’s, the losers in this world, who want Jesus above life itself. I would teach teachers of Symmorphy, of Life Together with Father and with one another.
I have a history of God giving me that which I truly want deep inside, though I waited long for it, and though the fulfillment of those things cost me much. I wanted a wife and children, I wanted to go to college, and I wanted to build buildings of my own design. Yet I could never obtain any of these things, for they were entirely beyond me.
Yet God does what He says He will do. God fulfills Christ in our lives.
God Does What He Says. And so, when I say, with Winnie the Pooh, that I am sitting here in quiet and confident expectation, in perfect rest and joy, waiting for all that belongs to me to come and find me, this is what I am waiting for, a Bible School in a Christian Community. A classroom where I can teach you and many, face to face, to know Jesus as He is, to be just like Him.
Here is our application. Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass (Psalm 37: 4-5).
God does what He says He will do.