DAVID: Hi, my name is David...and I was running into a cult member and I said, the Hare Krishnas,
and I said, “How often do you folks get together and share meals and their fellowship
together?”
And they said basically almost every day with meals.
And then I look at Hebrews 3:12 and 3:13 it says, “See to it, brothers, that none of
you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God and encourage one
another daily for as long as it is called Today so that none of our hearts get hardened
by the deceitfulness of sin.”
And I look at our pattern and I look at cult’s pattern, even the cult down the street, and
we have a tendency to not meet as much as they do.
Can you shed some light on why we have our pattern and how it was established?
JOHN: Well sure, and I can go as far as I can go.
Let me say this.
I spend an awful lot of time with Christians.
I married one.
So far I’ve raised four, they married four and I’ve got fourteen more coming along.
My whole life is surrounded by the people of God, every day of my life, wherever I go,
I’m in fellowship.
It is a very rare day in my life, even if I go away somewhere in the world, or somewhere
in the country that I’m not in fellowship with God’s people.
What you’re dealing with, with Hare Krishna, is communal living which is a kind of socialism,
it’s a kind of communism.
It’s the same thing with the Buddhist temple down the street.
We have in recent months, as Rick was talking about, I guess it was back in December, gone
down there and talked with them and spent...essentially Rick gave them the gospel, I don’t know
if you knew that.
Majesty...was it?
One of the singing groups at the Master’s College went down because they were interested
in finding out what Christian Christmas music was like, so we put on a concert.
Rick went and preached the gospels to the monks inside the temple.
And they were saying they wanted to come to the concert but there were certain limitations
upon what they could do.
They had to wear their orange robes.
They kind of work in a collective kind of environment.
And if they came here, they would have to come in that garb and they were under authority.
And it’s turned out they didn’t come.
But that’s a very different thing.
It’s a very circumscribed communal socialistic living where people who...it’s like Buddhist
priests and these people, they give up all their freedoms, they give up all their ownership.
They step into that kind of communal environment.
That is not to say Christians aren’t responsible to spend more time with each other.
But I don’t think there’s a biblical mandate about that.
I think the family is the unit in Christianity that is the primary unit.
That is where...and you can go all the way back to Deuteronomy chapter 6 where parents
are told to lead their children to talk about God every day when they stand up, walk in
the Way, rise up, lie down.
The family is God’s unit by which righteousness is passed from one generation to the next.
We saw an illustration of that tonight in baptism.
So we are not a communal society.
In the book of Acts, early in the book of Acts that was not communism, it wasn’t everybody
selling everything they possessed and taking the money and pooling it and doling it out
equally to everybody, such as in the Communist or Socialist structure.
It was merely families, individuals willing to make sacrifices to give money to the elders
that could be disseminated to the people who had need.
That was all discretionary.
In fact, in Ananias and Sapphira’s case where they sold a piece of land, it wasn’t
that they didn’t give it all to the Lord.
It was that they said they gave it all to the Lord and they lied.
And you remember, Peter said to them, “You didn’t have to sell it and you didn’t
have to give it all.
But the Lord’s not going to tolerate your lies.”
So there’s no biblical justification for communal living, for any kind of socialism,
any kind of communism.
I mean, that’s...that’s a lot of answers to the question, but I appreciate it, David.
But I am saying this, where believers know someone has a need, they need to open their
hearts and open their homes and embrace those people and meet those needs, right?
How can you say you love God if you see your brother in need and close up your compassion
to him?
Okay?
And you know what?
One of the reasons we have a Sunday night service is because we want to be together
more than just on a Sunday morning.
Most churches don’t even have that.
And during the week, I would be interested to know how many of you people sitting here
tonight meet at least one other time other than on Sunday with other believers during
a given week, put your hands up.
There we go...there we go.
Grab one of those hands and they’ll take you to their next meeting.
DAVID: Do you think food would facilitate fellowship a little better, like rolls or
something?
JOHN: Yeah, David, let me put it this way.
There is no fellowship without food.
[Laughter]
It never happens.
I don’t know...I don’t know how coffee got into the Kingdom of God, but it’s certainly
there...as we know when we have to spray wash the church patio every Monday.