SPEAKER_02 0:16

Christ is revealed in community, obviously. And as people are around that community, they're affected by the conviction that that community holds. And when people see that interaction in reality, without any programs involved or anything that would demand some sort of education, they can actually organically learn Christ. That's what the church was. That's what the church is supposed to be, and that's what it is now. Our greatest opportunity as believers is to live in a family of believers because that's the church. Ecclesia. That's the fellowship of the believers. We don't have to leave our house. We don't have to leave our living room. We don't have to do anything other than be an experienced being with someone else. That's called community. That's what grace is. That's so simple. It's so simple. Yet we look out across I look out across all of the religiosity that we confront every day, and there's always an ulterior motive for something. Build more, give more, do more. What we have is an eternal package of grace that can't be taken from us. And that we're gonna walk right from this grace, right into the eternal grace that Christ has given to us. What an opportunity that is. I mean, what a you know, the the biggest thing for me all the time is uh the song, Why Me, Lord. Aren't we just so privileged to be able to have experienced this because you know the Bible tells us that no one comes to God unless he calls them. So we've been called to grace.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Yeah, a lot of people I think have a hard time with the fact that they don't have to go somewhere to be in church. They are the church. We all make up the church.

SPEAKER_02 2:03

You bet. We're equipped, and so many people have a hard time with that because we're so used to sitting and listening. We equate education with spirituality, and we think that knowledge is spirituality and it's not, and neither is education, it's not spirituality. And I think that Jesus knew that well in advance when he said, you know, you really need to become as a child to see the kingdom of heaven, because that's the truth.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

If we're talking about the early church, there was a learning going on. I read a book called The Mystery of Romans, written by Mark Nanos. And some of the stuff that we were looking at when we did our intro to Romans podcasts, Melissa and I, we were looking at the cultural study Bible. And looking at that, history, and then looking at Mark Nanos' study of history, I found that history has an interpretation and a speculation and a doctrine all its own. What he uncovered was that the early church, they were meeting as subgroups of the synagogues, if they were meeting in a home church. You couldn't express Christianity according to Roman law. Christianity wouldn't have been allowed. But it was allowed and it was legal and they didn't face persecution because they were a subgroup of Judaism. The Romans were very pleasant to the Jews, actually, even though the Jews hated that they ruled over them. The Romans were quite uh giving to them in the way that they allowed them to do their rituals and their have their religion and not have to subdue to emperor worship. They were allowed to express their religion however they saw fit, and the Christians were allowed to because Christianity was seen as a subgroup of Judaism. It was just another doctrine of Judaism. And so when they met in these homes, they were probably under those structures because they wouldn't have been legally meeting together otherwise. The structure that they had in the synagogues was probably pretty strongly followed in their home gatherings because that's what made it legal. And they probably had some concern of spies and whatnot. Case in point, the history of it all was eye-opening to me. And Paul was most certainly throughout Romans and throughout his letters encouraging the Gentiles to go learn Christianity the Jewish way, because you needed the Jewish scriptures to understand your Lord. In those days, if a Gentile was gonna share Christ with a Jew, they would have had to known what they believed, and they would have had to known the scriptures. And so they spent a lot of time in the synagogues because that's where they had their scriptures. Be careful to not discount knowledge to the point where we um erase it from the equation, because without knowledge of scripture, we have no foundation. What are we gonna argue? You know, it's not an opinion. It's the knowledge that we were given that we build upon, and that's what allows us to learn and grow. And through very difficult and challenging times, we need that. We need that remembrance, we need that constant reality because life's problems are gonna guide us if we don't. There's no coincidence that we have Bibles today. We were saved by our knowledge of Christ. My paradigm was shifted through a knowledge of Christ, and if I wasn't digging into scripture, I wouldn't have affirmed any of it.

SPEAKER_02 5:17

I think that the knowledge that you're discussing is a knowledge that points to grace. When I'm speaking about knowledge today in the church, it's more of a knowledge that points to the person who has the knowledge. They're more interested in you knowing that they know something, and because they know something, they're important, and that's a terrible error. It's a terrible error. You ever been around somebody who has they just are a deeper person. They have a deeper concept and a deeper perception than maybe most people or the other people that you've known, and it's because they're pulling from a wealth of knowledge and experience and wisdom in their life, and they're sharing that. By the way, when I came out of Bible college, I knew everything. You know, I could have told you I know everything. So that took a couple years for you know, Christ to work that out of my body, my system. And that's part of the reason why I say what I say, because scripture will never do anything but point to Christ, unless we determine it shouldn't. I agree with you, Lenny, wholeheartedly. Knowledge is why we are here. Knowledge is uh the mechanism that God uses. But remember, we also have a new heart, literally, that God has given to us at redemption, and that new heart is learning, keeps sharing with us what pleases our Father. That's very difficult for folks to grasp because we don't know how to do that. We don't know how to do it because you don't do it. We rest in it, and it takes a while for us to learn. We use the buffer of God's word that is in our heart. Well, David said that. He said, put it in your heart so you don't we don't sin against you. But nowadays, in the New Covenant, people, we put that word of God in our heart, and it is reflected by the Spirit of God in our heart, and there's a living word that comes out of us as a result of us.