MESSAGE BEARER MEMO

By Ryan Shaw

These bi-weekly memos are to provide encouragement, exhortation, and spiritual nourishment in the lives of those who have signed the Message Bearer Creed as you prepare to serve the Lord globally, and are influencing your peers with this vision.

Lessons from the Dark Ages

I am a student of church and revival history and have been stirred as of late as I’ve been learning more about the dark ages. The Lord did a mighty work during the years between 1400-1600 to bring about the greatest reformation that the church has ever seen and he used stalwarts of boldness, courage, and absolute focus as His vessels to do it. The man that led the charge was Martin Luther. There are rich spiritual lessons to be grasped through these lives and through understanding the realities of the dark ages. God is longing to bring about continual reformation in His church as without it each generation becomes complacent and loses spiritual vitality, vision, and subsequent fruitfulness for His kingdom. I don’t know about you, but I long to be as fruitful in my lifetime for God’s glory and for His kingdom as I possibly can and I don’t want to be lulled to sleep by a business as usual mentality.

The Dark Ages

Hosea 4:6 declares, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge!” This was the reality of the dark ages. They are called dark because there was very little true spiritual light present. The Catholic church (the only legal church of that day) was corrupt and power hungry and disallowed the Bible to be printed in the common language for the people to understand. Even in Mass, the priest would read the scriptures in Latin and the commoner was unable to understand it. Thus they were able to develop any doctrine they liked that helped them meet their own ends, and no one knew enough truth to refute them. Some of the man-made doctrines included the selling of indulgences (pieces of paper that claimed to free a deceased relative from purgatory), the ability to appease God only through the doing of more works (praying more, confessing sin more, fasting more, etc), traveling to Rome and viewing old relics (that were actually not real at all, but contrived) that would give you a higher standing with God and much more. In this setting these precious people were being manipulated and deceived because they had no true knowledge of what the Scriptures really said.

Those that sought to please and appease God through their works were always led into despair and doubt regarding their faith. Everyone in that day saw God as full of wrath and judgment and that His primary role was to banish people to hell. They believed in ghosts and demons that lived in forests, lakes, and hills. There was no understanding of God as love and the one who is ravished with holy desire to live intimately related to His people. The Catholic church was able to hold people captive to whatever they taught and this always led people into more bondage. Thus the people never ceased to try to do more to somehow gain God’s ever elusive approval.

The Religious Spirit

This is the essence of the religious spirit and it is one of the most powerful and diabolical strongholds that the church faced throughout history and that we too face in our day. It disguises itself so that we think we are serving God. Its nature is thoroughly wicked and jealous. It demands extreme works that a person continues to do, but to no spiritual avail. In fact these works eventually send people into sin and further error. It seeks to substitute religious activity for the power of the Holy Spirit. This is the core of what Jesus faced among the Pharisees (devoted, God-fearing and committed people who did much more religious activity then any commoner) and the primary lying spirit that was behind the betrayal and murder He underwent. Paul declares in 2 Timothy 3 to “avoid men such as these.” The religious spirit keeps lying to us telling us to do this or that to gain God’s approval and love (most times these seem to be good and right things, but they are done with the wrong motivation behind them). It bases relationship to God on personal discipline rather then the propitiary sacrifice of Christ. We overcome this spirit by fully accepting the work of Jesus on the cross alone as the only work necessary for salvation. We then choose to be motivated to action and work not to gain God’s approval, but out of a heart of gratefulness, love, and a desire to serve Him for all He has done for us. 

Loving God is our highest goal as believers. Due to this, the enemy seeks to use any means necessary to keep us from doing this effectively. Jesus referred to the religious spirit as the “leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees “(Matthew 16:6). It can never be appeased as its need for more grows and grows. We will never please God in this fashion, though so many of our teachings today subtly promote the religious spirit. We try to look good in front of others instead of being real about what we’re facing and dealing with. We even seek to do better at praying and reading scripture or a devotional, but it’s not out of a heart passionate to pursue and know God better, but to say we’ve done our “quiet time” for the day. A key characteristic of the religious spirit is pride. Pride that surrounds our ability to pray, read the Bible, witness, serve the poor or anything else we seek to do to look “spiritual”. Pride, and thus the religious spirit, is the hardest and most difficult stronghold to remove. The key way to come against this is to consistently grow in and clothe ourselves in humility. Humility always attracts the eye and the presence of God. As we recognize the religious spirit within, we own this sin, confess it before the Lord, and ask for His enabling grace to walk completely differently in the future. We then clothe ourselves with a humble and broken outlook and do not allow pride to run its course and deceive us.

Luther’s Reforms

Luther was a priest who was afforded the rare opportunity to actually study the scripture in a monastery (only a few priests even read and studied the scriptures, as they were in Greek, and there was only one Bible in a monastery and it was chained to the wall). Luther was so desperate to find God that he learned Greek and studied the chained Bible and realized how misled the people were and it outraged him. The God of the Bible was nothing like what the Catholic church had painted. The practices and rituals they mandated were completely foreign to the Bible and he began to teach these things publicly, drawing much fire and persecution from the powerful Catholic hierarchy.

The primary issues that he taught and preached were 1) our final authority is what the Bible says, not what the pope says. 2) the man-made doctrines and rituals needed to perform were not necessary to salvation; and 3) every Christian can be involved in ministry, not just the clergy. These truths stood in stark contrast to the teachings of the church and his commitment to preaching them revolutionized the church, as people were set free from the lies and bondage. The Bible was soon translated into the local language for the first time and distributed to the common people to read and gain understanding and revelation of truth. This touched off the greatest transformation in a society ever recorded as the people could now learn for themselves what God really required of them and how to follow Him by faith alone. 

A Price to Have the Word of God

I want to exhort us to realize the price that was paid for you and me to be able to read and study the Bible ourselves. Satan waged a war for hundreds of years to keep the Bible out of the hands of the common man and he was overthrown during the reformation. Now, Satan is equally seeking to keep us from it by distracting us with everything possible from actually growing in our understanding of the deep and timeless truths that it teaches. Most in the emerging generation today see the Bible as boring and outdated. Those who are believers seem almost as disinterested as unbelievers. It is as if the enemy has purposely made it overly available today to make it commonplace and thus seemingly unimportant. We appear as if we know exactly what is in it, when in truth we simply don’t bother to read the Word.

A Reformation Today

There is a reformation of today’s church that needs to happen. It won’t look like what it did during the dark ages, as we face very different issues. But we must come to a realization that what we are experiencing in “church” may not be the fullness of what is available to us as believers. But it will only take place through the studying of the Word of God and the revelation and illumination of Scriptural teachings that comes from it that have been blatantly ignored in our spiritual climate. A rediscovery of the essential place of the Word of God must be re-established. It is often stated that today’s generation is the most Biblically illiterate generation to date. We cannot be content with this but make a firm decision to overturn it by individually and corporately becoming people who value the freedom of reading and meditating on the Word of God and all that God wants to reveal to us through it. This takes more than a 10 minute quiet time, however. It takes time and energy every day devoted to seeking God and asking the Holy Spirit to illuminate its contents deep into our hearts and minds. What kind of spiritual reforms will we see take place that become thoroughly mainstream as a result of the emerging generation studying God’s Word like never before? My prayer and hope is that the understanding of the God who loves and desires every person in every culture to be given the opportunity to respond to Him in a culturally relevant way will be one of them.

My Preaching…In Demonstration of the Spirit and Power

One of the changes that I believe will continually take place in the church is the renewed place of the power of God’s Word to change a life and God’s overall power, manifested in signs, wonders, healings, deliverances, etc. As we look honestly around us, we realize that we generally do well at preaching and exegeting Scripture, and yet Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 2:4, “My speech and my preaching was not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.”  I often ask myself how much demonstration of the Spirit and of power that we see regularly. Paul seems to imply that every time he preached this happened. We’ve let our scientific minds seek to figure everything out and have seemingly grieved the Holy Spirit as a result. Remember Jesus could not do any powerful work in Nazareth because of the people’s unbelief (Mark 6:5-6).

Closing

May I encourage us to look in the mirror as we consider the insidious power of the religious spirit today. To walk in spiritual authority and impact a dying world with the truth of freedom through Jesus Christ, we need to be set free from the bondage of the religious spirit. Especially as much of the world (Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists) are steeped in its clutches. There are several ways to do this. Some are following: Develop a secret relationship with the Lord, pray that the same love with which the Father loved the Son would be in us, study to show yourself approved unto God (not men) – 2 Timothy 2:15, seek to hear the voice of the Lord each day, ask the Lord to give us the love He possesses for our neighbors, seek to turn your criticisms into intercession, continually ask the Lord to see His glory, and seek to manifest the aroma of the knowledge of God in every place you go.

Ryan Shaw