God is Doing A New Thing

Praise God for salvation.

I feel liberated from falsehood and vexation of spirit. I look forward with joy to the work the Lord is doing to bring truth to bear in the city of my residence. Saints have been praying for this. A meeting will held in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, for this purpose. God will bring smiles to the hearts of all who love truth and hate oppression and deceit.

We pray for the disappointment of devil who has worked so much to enthrone arbitrariness in the place of  wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness, so that all the children of God might be set free from the fear and bondage of mortal men. One point is clear, I did not report them to the brethren, but they have reported me to the elders outside our city. The elders have called for us, but the ones who made the report are unwilling to answer the call. They have suddenly realized that they have reported themselves. We serve a God who taketh the wise in their own craftiness. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? We shall be there by the grace of God on the 5th of December. Our God will go before us and bring victory to His holy name. Let all flesh be silent before Him who presides in the holy assembly.  All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do. Every hidden thing shall be made manifest. Amen.

The 83rd Psalms speaks of men, who said, 'Let us take to ourselves the houses of God in possession'. Such as are they who love to have preeminence among the little flock of Christ. This is one reason the church of God in Benin City has suffered so much set back since the sixties. Men take the houses of God in possession. The church does not belong to man but to God. We join the psalmist to beg the Lord that 'as the fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the mountains on fire; so persecute them with Thy tempest, and make them afraid with Thy storm. Fill their faces with shame; that they may seek Thy name, O LORD. Let them be confounded and troubled ... yea, let them be put to shame... That men may know that Thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth.'

In a look into the church of God, we find that 'the apostasy of the church came by "ecclesiastical ambition and degeneracy." The human element got in the way where there should have been only the divine. There is necessarily the human element in the work of God, for Christian work is God and man working together; but in the true relation man is God's instrumentality and is altogether in subjection to the divine Head, who rules over all. When the human element supplants, gets in the way of, or acts in the place of, the divine, we have a fundamental error that always results in apostasy. This human ecclesiasticism, always more or less intolerant, reached its autocratic perfection in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and constituted the "man of sin" who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshiped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God" (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4). 

'The spirit of human government in church affairs has shown itself in, or has followed in the wake of, every reform movement of the past. The Spirit of God worked in the movement to accomplish good, but was always checked by this baleful element. Luther meant well but was himself dogmatic and intolerant. He held to many doctrines of Catholicism whose wrongs he could not see. He did not make proper allowance that others besides himself might be right, or at least have some truth. Neither did he or his associates or followers leave the way open for God to lead into more truth, much less the whole truth. Thus the reformation of the Sixteenth Century, while it recovered from the debris of apostasy the doctrine of justification by faith, became the occasion for Protestant sects, human-ruled institutions, and these were succeeded by other sects. Some of these have been as intolerant, inflexible, and as unlike primitive Christianity as the Roman Catholic Church itself. 

'Church government, as humanized in the sects, has taken forms other than the hierarchic. We have the episcopal, or rule by bishops; the presbyterian, or rule by presbyters; the congregational, or rule by the local brotherhood. Our object here is, not to discuss which of these forms most nearly resembles or is most different from the Scriptural, but merely to show that man rule has manifested itself in various ways.'

We pray that these things will be sorted out. So that all the children of God, being delivered out of the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life in this city. We shall indeed stand free and be aloof from the great city, where the fire of the Word and the Spirit are put out from men's heart, the city which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified. Oh, how many good ones have been killed there!