Flush the Defilement

The Church Needs Some Flushing

I, for many years, have been experiencing something, a check in my spirit, a sense of an adulteration of the Life when the church engages in what are but modal expressions of Christ but not His life, His Spirit. I describe what are a spiritual “method”, things structurally Christian from church experience but which lack the substance and Spirit of He, Himself.

The above is not something that I daily experience but it is crucial for us to understand it, as I know that the Lord has made of me a gift to Wellspring that has been shaped for a particular ministry that includes a level of clarity, one that provides the kind of insight that I have described above. All things that I am in this ministry seem to serve what has direct relevance to Christ’s headship and the facilitation of His headship’s design for His body, that we be an expression not of “ways” of doing things but of His doing.

The “flushing” that the Lord spoke to me about in March of 2010 and again in May of 2012, on the very day I began preaching to Wellspring at the Cross, is now become the “Great Flushing”. I’m not sure that this is only my way of saying just how all encompassing this is but that this may be a present tense understanding of what the Lord has said past tense. Think about it as this flushing pertains to yourselves, as it does to me: has it not become something challenging and disruptive of the typical mode of Christian living you are used to? Does it not become all the more so, challenging and disruptive, as you allow this flushing to take more of what is defilement revealed for flushing?

The flushing is great when It loosens and leads away from stability those defiled institutional aspects of belief and identity that compose our understanding of church life and practical expressions of faith, those aspects of the Christians we have become that are functionally what we do and are now predictive, virtually as authoritative as the word of God. What I am getting at varies from Christian to Christian. For some this may pertain to a perverse sense of authority, that it rightly is absolutely legitimate no matter how it is used; but for others it may be more specific to the way we practice our faith in terms of how we speak and how we emphasize a “mechanical” or perfunctory correctness of thought, being careful to correctly speak that thought process. For others, what I am saying may pertain to what is objectively unbiblical. There are other problematic aspects that pertain, things specific to biblical illiteracy, or even things as typical as unrepentant attitudes that transgress the lordship of Christ. I am well aware of how difficult is the application of this degree of personal assessment that I am describing in this paragraph for I speak of things that pertain to who we understand God and ourselves to be, and that is the point.

Please forgive the way I write; I know that I may come across overly condensed and philosophical. I write in the way I think, like focusing on things in my spirit and straining to describe them to you exactly as they are. I do so because my attempt is to say to you as purely as possible what I understand, to leave it with you for you to consider and apply carefully, as you should. So in terms of functioning together as members of the body of Christ our head: who is God, and who are we? I implore you, in the most serious sense of the word, to humbly and with all honesty allow the Lord to reveal by the light of His word’s and Spirit’s fire those aspects of past and present defilement, those things not specific expressions of Christ’s headship, that those aspects of defilement would be flushed. This that I describe renders us vulnerable to God and one another and it will require significant prayerfulness and much time, interaction with the body of Christ, and grace, but “… he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent” (Colossians 1. 18). HE IS WORTHY! Amen?

In Christ’s love,

Douglas

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