Vision Glorious

~ by Pastor Rob Krause
TCC = True Christian Community

Through the Roof - Mark 2:1-12 
Tip: You can hold your mouse over any of our Bible references at VG to read the passage

 Tearing a hole in the roof, a crippled son of Abraham must be let down into the living room to encounter the Bread of Presence. Step into this man’s ongoing, paralyzed pain for a moment. "What sin did I do that left me like this? I thought I covered them all? Am I to blame? What did my parents do? I’m so miserable! I’m so tired of my body! Every day I have to bear this pain as a public spectacle on this sweat and urine stained mattress! People have coins but very little care. Pharisees have answers but they have no action…" However, there is One. There’s the kind-hearted carpenter, Yeshua, who this paralytic most likely knew personally and presently seeks. Can you taste the mounting fury in his spirit? Can you sense the fleeting window of opportunity closing before his eyes? Will you imagine the frustration filling his flesh over his complete helplessness? Cry with him! "I just want to see Jesus! I only want to show Him what I am." And now, the very people who walked over him like an obstacle every day have become his obstacle; his singular wall to scale for the Solution to his life.

Jesus seems very familiar with this house. In fact, it was probably His own or Peter’s. The point is that we see neither flinch nor adverse reaction to clay chunks and descending dust upon His teaching lesson. Culturally, a dust shower upon a rabbi and gathered scribes would be a dishonorable thing to do! Quite the opposite is taking place when Jesus actually admires the faith of the wall climbers. He wants this to happen. The only way a homeowner admires the destruction of his home is if a greater cause is going to be served to the homeowner. In Jesus’ case, every action and every miracle was to reveal the Glory of God (to make Him known!). We don’t know why the man in our account was paralyzed. The Israelites of the day thought that almost every sickness was due to some specific, related sin. And, while some other rabbis would deal with the healing of disease, they would not nor could not deal with sin.

What we do know is that regardless of the root cause of the paralysis, there was a disease that was meant to bring God glory through His Son healing it. There was a man who really wanted to be healed and his friends who wanted the same thing — desperately. And, there were two obstacles hindering the miraculous act — the congregating hearers and the roof of the building housing them.

The Faith of Five

The handicapped Hebrew is lowered through the roof on a one-way trip. The act took all five men. They wanted a healing which Jesus gave them and more. Jesus forgave his sins. He delivered our pain-stricken man from his past, present, and future spiritual and physical slavery. And Jesus did all of this "when He saw their faith" Mark 2:5.

Don’t miss this point: There is a special level of co-operation with God that can only be accomplished in true Christian community which unlocks His glory that He rightfully deserves in the lives of many.

God’s Pleasure in Small Groups

God wants to be known in your city. The Lord wants to be glorified in your neighborhood. Jesus wants to be understood, active, and lifted up in your Church (It’s His community anyway). All over your region there are pains and problems coupled with sins and sicknesses that are ripe for the picking of the glory of God. People are waiting to be unlocked from the works of sin and the devil — and many of those won’t happen until groups of earnest, caring Christians pick up their mats and carry these captives out of Signor Strongman’s dungeon. True Christian Community, then, brings credit and praise to God by how they act with His mind and move in His ways.

Yes, there are good works for the individual believer-priest to accomplish but not all and not many of the God-revealing works are available to individuals only. No, there are deeper and grander works for the community to do together. We need each other. We really need each other. This is why we are to confess our sins to one another — the glory of God in deliverance through community. Or, why two or three gathered in the character, the will, and the essence of Jesus (His Name) are promised His very presence in a special way.¹ Commenting on our now joyous, jumping Jew, Edwards writes the following:

The Gospels preserve several instances of Jesus fulfilling the petition of one party on behalf of another. The power of Jesus is actually enhanced in intercessory healings, for the cure cannot be attributed to auto-suggestion or to the victim’s inner preparedness…an intercession even better illustrates the rule of Jesus, which is not to destroy faith.²

When Christians get together in the form of small, strategized teams (Jesus had one of 12) and bring the blind, diseased, demonized, or paralyzed to Jesus in urgent faith there is a heavenly authority that is released. And when the watching world gets a glimpse of the genuine article of Heaven, they will say the very same thing the residents of Capernaum said on the forgiving & healing day of their local invalid, "We never saw anything like this!" ( Mark 2:12). Wouldn’t you want that said about people around you in your Church? Wouldn’t you want that said about your Lord & King?

1. yes, I know that this passage deals with church discipline but I believe a "both-and" principle is in context here. I will be writing another article on this in the near future. [back]
2. Edwards, James R., The Gospel According to Mark, (Eerdmans, 2002); p. 76 [back]

A pastor once used the analogy of a burning fire to represent the Church. He told me that if you place many logs together and strike a match, the mass of logs will ignite and create a roaring fire. As long as the logs are together, the fire continues. But if you take one burning log out of the fire, the flame will soon die out. Nothing changed in the log; it is still the same flammable materials as before. But something changed in the environment; without the heat and flame of the other logs, it simply won’t burn as readily. ‘So it is with Christians,’ he said to me. ‘As long as we are together, we burn for Christ as lights in the darkness. But if you separate one Christian away from the Church, in very little time he will be reduced to a smolder.’¹

1. an excerpt from Finding the Will of God ~ a Pagan Notion? by Bruce K. Waltke, p. 105 [back]

Genuine Church

For every believer in Jesus Christ there is a quest for authentic spirituality. Throughout the New Testament, the Scriptures inextricably link genuine spiritual life to be lived out in faith within the context and confines of the local Bride; the Church. The study of this spiritual-communal practice is Ecclesiology. The methods of spiritual formation that a believer follows within becoming more and more like Jesus is called discipleship. Both Ecclesiology and discipleship need each other.

The Vision

Many people commonly use the phrase, "He has a great vision." Some will say of themselves that they have a great vision. However, the Scriptures reveal the intent of the Sovereign God. It is He Who has a Great Vision and He Who created for His glory and He Who desires that none should perish. No, we believe that for men’s statements of having a vision to be true to the Bible, a Glorious Vision has ahold of them.

Vision is not a thing. It’s definitely not a program and absolutely not another guy’s dream. Vision is a Person; the Person of Jesus Christ. The Vision is the Christ. The Apostle Paul wrote "that in everything, He (Jesus) might be preeminent." Colossians 1:15-20 In other words, everything that was made and everything that has any meaning is only fulfilled when Jesus has first place! Therefore, since the Church (the prized possession of Christ) is at the center of God’s cosmic plan in our age for reconciling all things to Himself, we can see that common, programmatic, & entertainment-oriented church life leaves hundreds if not thousands of biblical principles untapped, unused, & unfulfilled. Buried under the centuries of Romanist baggage, the Church struggles for distinction and survival in a world that is pouring poison over its walls. Instead, the Church described in the New Testament is vibrant, community-oriented, community-changing, a reckoning force of peace, the violence to evil, the declarer of the mysteries of God, and Jesus-saturated. This kind of Church was promised, in fact, required to Christian believers for ages to come. Where we only taste hints of what these first believers lived, we want to write and collect principles that show us how much more is available to the Groom’s disciples. We want to raise the Church. We want to open its darkened and blurried eyes to its Glorious Vision. We want to cut across rugged individualism and fight back against the misnomer of independent, Lone-Ranger Christian living. We want to push the emphasis (if not idolatry) of bigger buildings back to where it belongs — second place & supplemental to the formation of reproducing Christians. We want to help Pastors, disciplers, & spiritual parents alike to be filled-up with healthy and joyful understanding about Church-work and not just pushing another program hoping it will *click* or be the magic key that unlocks the door to bigger crowds.

Our Goal Here

Our goal for Vision Glorious is that it become a repository of Church values that will assist the heavenly harvest-workers. Including what we wrote above, it is our objective to explore and share the treasures that we’ve found through the small group model, one-to-one discipleship, the Hebrew worldview, and the integration of all of these into the spiritual army of the community of God’s people. We believe the Lord is restoring these precious and long-lost, long-forgotten treasures back to His Bride. We believe and want to share that the Church is worth living in because that’s where we will see the fullness and meaning of life — in the Lord Who walks intimately through the midst of His covenant people.

How We Do This Blog-Forum

Among our invited contributors, we assign a crucial theme (i.e. community, discipleship, small groups etc.) that we see is lacking among many churches and ask our guys to write something specific to that theme. You will notice that the first theme we chose was True Christian Community. And, for a number of weeks, VG camped out, in, and around that theme. We assign the theme every-so-often and then introduce the different submitted articles every 5-8 days. We don’t want to submit new stuff every day because you won’t have the time to digest it. We know that flies in the face of blogging technique but we think you’ll actually be able to enjoy it more if you can come back to new content a couple times and keep up with the different readings. And, it’s our blog-forum and that’s how we want to do it. After a theme has been sufficiently explored (we know that some themes can have volumes written), we’ll begin posting content on a new theme. However, you’ll be able to go the "TAGS" page and instantly look up any articles on a theme or author. And that’s how this blog becomes a repository of Vision nectar.

Commenting: We want you to interact with the authors on the content of their postings. You can do this in the commenting section at the bottom of every article. Our guys are great and always willing to help others. However, you need to keep the spirit of the article in mind and not argue over semantics. We want to discuss substance that will help you or encourage you. If you’re looking for a fight because you just like to quarrel or you just like the feeling of being a big digital-tiger hiding behind your little clicky mouse — go find another blog. We promise you, there are a ton of blogs out there that like to beat their chests before their 15-inch monitors.

Who We Are

Let’s start with who we’re not. We’re not seminary professors. Although a seminary prof would be welcome to contribute — and we like seminary profs. We know that that might turn some of you away already because you like to just "know" a lot of things. But, quite honestly, the Vision is much more caught than taught. This is for the catchers. We are front-line people. We’re Pastors, Missionaries, Deacons, teachers, disciplers, and small group leaders. We’re Churchmen. And we believe the contributors that we have chosen to write on this forum have something worthwhile to say. These are people that have been tested. We have seen them in others’ lives. We have seen them caring for the afflicted and praying with the newborns to enter the Revealed Faith. These contributors are the little children found in Luke 10:21-23. We are simple servants that want to share the joys of what we’ve learned along the Way. The main impetus for the creation, design, and strategy of this blog is Pastor Rob Krause. Rob has been a Missions-Pastor for over 10 years and currently pastors the Serenissima Bible Church in northeast Italy. The technical credits get passed to brother Mike Rosowski. Mike built the behind-the-scene pieces to get this blog to work so nicely. Mike is a missionary-candidate to Italy and currently resides in northern CA while raising his final needed support.

Tags: Christian community, small groups, vision, Church, cell church, values, community, discipleship, Hebrew worldview