K-046 True Fellowship — Art Katz

True Fellowship: Fellowship and Truth

Good class. If ever anyone needed it this morning, tis I. The Lord had me up at unusual hours with an irregular sleep and a partially comprehended message. Do I dare just go ahead and believe that he'll explain it as we proceed?

This is still in keeping with the theme of restoring the altar that has been torn down, restoring the twelve stones, and there are a couple of words that need desperately to be restored that are on my heart this morning.

One is the word fellowship and the other is the word truth. And both words are extraordinarily connected. Both words have suffered such slight in our generation that they are hardly recognizable. Fellowship has become some kind of easy, soft, pappy, slap on the back and chuck under the chin, how you doing brother?

And truth, well I don't even know if the word is used ever anymore, has almost an antique ring. But I want to say except that both words are restored to their original pristine meaning and restored together, there shall not be the glory of God in the earth.

So let's just pray that the Spirit of God that has stirred me about these words early this morning is now going to make sense over them. Gracious God, Lord, we want to hear what is dear to your heart.

And we are guilty, Lord, grievously of merchandising in holy things, in destroying the meaning, my God, of sacred things by abuse, by misuse, by familiarity, by neglect, by indifference. We ask, my God, that the Spirit of truth shall be with us in a very special way this morning to breathe new life into these words, into these terms, to bring them forth from the dead, to restore them, my God, to the central place in the understanding of God.

May we be so ashamed in a sense, my God, of things when you shall reveal to us what fellowship means, that we shall never again be callow or shallow about it, my God, and be satisfied with a back slap or a bear hug.

Show us how central it is to all of your great purposes and to the revealing of thy glory. Come, my God, and take a jaded, tired piece of flesh and animate and make alive with your own life the things that are dear to your heart.

Make them dear to ours also. And we'll thank you and praise you for this excursion that we're on and the unfolding, my God, that you've been giving session by session. In Jesus' holy name we pray, thy kingdom come, Lord.

Amen. Well, let's just turn where the Lord had turned me. In 1 John, from the first verses of 1 John, what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled concerning the word of life.

And the life was manifested and we have seen and bear witness and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested to us. What we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, that you also may have fellowship with us and indeed, our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

And these things we write so that our joy may be made complete. And this is the message which we have heard from him and announced to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.

But if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us.

Amen. Well, I suppose that my feeling about these verses is parallel to your own. They are strange, cryptic, unusual. Only John could speak like this, write like this. They seem to be a mumbo-jumbo of words and terms.

You wonder how one is related to the other. There is a sense of mystery about the writing of John that is not to be found in Matthew, Mark and Luke. It takes a kind of special revelation to put this together, to see the connection between life, between fellowship, between truth.

And somehow, if the Lord will do it, it's a masterful combination that we need to see. So, interesting that it begins with the subject where God left us last night. Not just life, but the life. The life was manifested, which he also refers to as the eternal life, and also as the word of life, all statements referring to the same reality.

And then he leaps right from that to another subject altogether, fellowship. And somehow it's intimated that there's an extraordinary connection between the life and the fellowship. And before we can digest that, he introduces yet a third element, light and truth, as somehow being connected with fellowship, which is somehow connected with life.

Now that's where I am this morning. Maybe we can just hold that for a moment and look at two very familiar, famous references to the first koinonia of God. Everybody's familiar with the word koinonia.

I took pains earlier this morning to look it up in a Bible dictionary, because I myself was guilty of relegating koinonia and fellowship to some secondary and lesser category of importance. I was a man for truth and for light, for the principles of God, for the purposes of God, for the kingdom of God.

But I did not myself recognize how central koinonia is to all of the things that I've just enumerated. Fellowship is not icing on the cake. Fellowship is not some kind of luxury or secondary thing which is nice to have after we have truth and light and righteousness.

Somehow fellowship is the expression of all of these things together and made possible by light and truth. If it's not in the light, if it's not in the truth, it's not koinonia either. It's some kind of substitute which is not the real thing.

And there's something so dear to the heart of God about true koinonia, the fellowship of the saints with each other in light and in truth, which is akin to his own koinonia and fellowship in the Godhead.

That the mystery of the Godhead somehow in the mind of God has also to be reflected in the earth. That in the same way as the three persons of the Godhead are in a special kind of integral relationship in light and in truth, the exact condition must be made manifest by his body in the earth.

Anything less than that does not release the glory of God and does not incite the approval of God which constitutes his visible presence and glory, as I hope now to show you. So, for example, reading from Acts 2, 43.

Well, we can begin with 41 about the thousands that were swept into the kingdom after the preaching of Peter's first sermon on the day of Pentecost. And by the way, just in passing a little footnote, if you've always wondered what it is that gave such extraordinary power to the message of Peter that resulted in thousands being swept into the kingdom by one speaking, the answer is not in Peter.

The clue is Peter rising with the eleven. That's more than just a symbolic statement. It's striking again at the heart of what's at God's heart this morning. Koinonia, fellowship, union, men being made one in truth.

Peter rising with the eleven was more than just a token gesture of men who said, Go get them, tiger, we're with you. It's men in such an extraordinary bond of union that the only way to describe the quality and the character of their relationship is to use the word heavenly.

And somehow when men achieve that condition of being, something happens in the heavenly that is manifest on earth, that has an extraordinary expression of the favor of God in presence and in power that swept thousands into the kingdom.

Peter and John going up to the gate beautiful together is more than a statement of two men strolling. Something happened because at the end of the gospel of John the last thing we hear from Peter is, And what shall this man do?

Very Jewish statement. Selfish, private, jealous, guarded. What about this guy? Suggesting that what pertains to him is unrelated to what pertains to me. But something happened from the speaking of that statement to the day of Pentecost that altered everything both for Peter and for John.

Well we need to recognize that though they were both Jews that did not make them one. And I think it's true then as it is now the axiom that if you have two Jews you have three arguments. There's nothing different between Jews and other men except that what they are is what men are multiplied many times over.

It's writ large. Jews are extraordinarily contentious and opinionated. Self-willed. Therefore what we see as the expression of the first church is a revelation of such a genius of God such an extraordinary thing that happened to this particular kind of segment of mankind and made them one.

Those that believed were together is another repetition of the sacred word together which means something more than sitting alongside each other in pews. Together in the book of Acts is not a statement of proximity.

It's a statement of heaven. Those that believed were together is something that most of us have never tasted in 10, 20, 30, 40 years of our Christian experience. We've had a back slap in the foyer and a handshake and a cup of tea and how are you doing brother so-and-so and sister so-and-so and little commiseration and sympathy and the kind of euphoric feeling that comes sometimes in the singing of choruses together but that misses by a million miles what adheres in the word together as it is expressed in the book of Acts.

Peter and John going up to the gate beautiful together and the man born lame fixing his eyes on them. What did he see I wonder? Did he see two Jews who were so, though they were Jewish they were so extraordinarily different?

One who always had his head on the bosom of the master and the other who was the bumptious upstart always first, always rushing to do things always blurting things out. Men of such extraordinarily different temperaments and kind that for them to go up together is an achievement that could only have been wrought from heaven.

It's a statement of a character and kind of relationship which except that we find it and come to it again there shall not be glory of God in the earth. Fixing his eyes on them, what did he see? They weren't both wearing holy dove pins or any other insignia but he must have glimpsed something that was indefinable.

He saw something so extraordinary in the relationship that it excited something in his almost dead heart who had been laying as a rat, as a reject all of his life begging, that he had not glimpsed in doctors of the law in scribes and Pharisees and priests.

He saw in two ordinary men that excited equality of faith in his heart that when Peter extended his hand he could take it and leap to life. I'll tell you guys there's a dead world just like that born lame waiting for just that kind of assist that will come when it shall glimpse in us a quality of something that shall excite a faith in it to believe that there's a God in heaven who can restore the dead who can make the lame leap.

And this is what Jesus meant when he said you shall be witnesses unto me. Probably you're not too far in your understanding now from what understanding I had about 17 years ago as a new believer first reading those verses.

I was a highly individualistic, self-willed man. I had gone through a variety of relationships all of which were disasters highly opinionated and intense and I brought that same mentality and spirit right into my new walk as a Christian.

And when I read you shall be a witness unto me Wowee! You, our cats, shall be a witness unto me. So I imagined all I needed to do was to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit and then I would be off in my own individual career for God doing extraordinary exploits.

Isn't that the way you thought of it? Well, I would be surprised if you had any other thought because you've not been fitted by the world to think in any other terms. The world has encouraged flattered and underlined every kind of individualistic impulse in your being.

The whole world encourages self-willed individualism. It has not at all a sense of that which is corporate and in that regard as in every other it is absolutely contrary to God. I want to breathe upon you the spirit of the corporate genius of God the corporateness of God for if you miss that, you miss all.

That's what made the Church the expression of heaven. It was the expression of the Godhead itself for as some wit once said God himself is a sweet company. How do you like that? No wonder we Jews cannot abide Jesus.

That Johnny come lately, that presumer who does he think he is? We have one God and that's God the Father. Who is this one who says he's the Son? And another one who says he's God the Holy Ghost. We can't reconcile ourselves with God in this complexity because we ourselves are so individualistic and see everything in terms of only ourselves and one that we cannot reckon on a God who has this character that he's three and yet one because the three are melded together in an extraordinary quality of relationship and integrity that they constitute one.

It boggles our minds it contradicts the whole tenor of our life and therefore the mystery of the Godhead must be revealed in earth by the mystery of the body. It's the same mystery. That's how come we can go to John 17.

I'll come back to Acts in just a moment. This is not going to be organized. It's going to be organic. That means sloppy. You know the great prayer in John 17 that they might be one. John 17 .21 that they may all be one even as thou father art in me and I in thee that they also may be in us that the world may believe that thou didst send me.

Can you understand the connection? How can Jesus say that if you see me you see the Father I and the Father are one when you know that the Father is in heaven. No wonder that religious sensibility was outraged by such a statement made through a man visible, present before one flesh and blood.

The same thing needs at the end of the age to be made manifest again. What do you think of the body of Christ standing before an unbelieving world and saying if you see me you see the Father. I think that the spirit of that is caught up in the phrase repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

When you shall see the kingdom you shall see the king. As a matter of fact nothing else shall reveal the king on earth but the kingdom. Now look, you're all clever and you know well enough if you but stretch your mind just a moment that a kingdom is a social phenomenon.

Right? I'm not just talking about heavenly kingdoms any kingdom is a social phenomenon. It requires subjects. It's a contradiction in terms to think of a kingdom but with one subject. It's a vast social phenomenon that includes many subjects whose wills are all submitted to the authority of a king.

It's social. It's complex. Yet one. And the nature of the king, his character is reflected in his kingdom. That was true of Great Britain up until recent generations. France and any kingdom in the earth.

It had a certain temper. It had a certain ethos. It had a certain quality. It had a certain common language, values, goals. It deported itself in a certain way. It was military or it was benign. It was imperialistic or it was something else.

It fancied itself cultural or intellectual or other kinds of qualities. It is very much a reflection of the authority that prevailed over it. And everything that I'm saying about an earthly kingdom is true also about the heavenly.

You shall be witnesses unto me was not spoken and is not intended to be spoken to a single individual. The you is plural. And the only way that he can be witnessed to in the earth adequately that is to say to the point where men shall believe upon him whom God has sent is to see the glory of the king in his various attributes revealed in the corporality of men.

That is to say in their relationship. What is divine love? How shall it be exhibited? Well, I got it. I know I got it. Can't you see my chest palpitating? That won't do it. They have to see it exhibited in relationship one with another.

A love that is different in character and kind from that which the world calls love which is sentimental, selfish, conditional. The love of God is unconditional, expansive, intense, passionate, unfamed.

What's that scripture in 1 Peter? Have what kind of love for one another? Have fervent love one for another. See, everything in heaven burns. God is a consuming fire. And if the God who is a consuming fire in heaven is to be revealed in earth, he needs to be revealed consumingly.

Fervently. That's why a backslap won't do it. A little chuck under the chin won't do it. How you're doing, brother, won't do it. But a demonstration of fervent love. Not just with Anglo-Saxons like yourself but with those who are extraordinarily different from you and who would in the natural rub you the wrong way.

That's what this lame man must have seen in Peter and John. Men who had rubbed each other the wrong way now going up to the gate beautiful together. The glory of that church I think was far more amply demonstrated in Antioch than it was in Jerusalem.

Because in Jerusalem it was in its inception Jewish which was an achievement. But in Antioch it contained all of the diversities of men. Now there were in the church in Antioch certain prophets and teachers and then it lists them in Acts 13.

One was from Cyrene, one was with the Tetrarch, one was Barnabas, one was Saul, one was Niger, a black man, a Roman, a Gentile, two Jews. And when they ministered unto the Lord and fasted the Holy Ghost said separate unto me.

And that was the beginning of apostolic glory. You think it was mere happenstance that the Holy Ghost rang out at a moment when men were lost in worship together? Or was it the moment that the Holy Ghost was holding his breath waiting to see realized on the earth?

When he found men of such extraordinary diversity of language, culture, nationality, race and even calling in God, ministering unto him, that was it. The condition was fulfilled by which the call of the Holy Ghost was released for the apostolic journey to begin, which was a glory.

Fellowship sort of today has kind of the ring of popcorn. Fellowship, well we'll have fellowship. That means a little back slap and here's what it means, that they may all be one. Not by sublimating their differences and swallowing them down or by concealing issues or turning your back to them, but by the most full giving of oneself over to the issues of truth.

To expressing what's in your heart. To speaking the truth in love. To exhorting one another daily while it is yet today. To confrontation. To bringing to the surface and to the light the things that are concealed and dark.

Rather than swallowing them down and looking the wrong way. And hoping by a little glib smile and a slap on the back to pass them over. True koinonia requires desperately the assistance of the Holy Ghost.

You know when Jesus said, you shall be witnesses unto me? Right after they said, is it time now to restore our kingdom to Israel? He said, don't worry about that. Leave that with the Father. But concentrate on this.

You shall receive power from on high that you may be witnesses unto me. We were all nice guys before we came to Minnesota. Really. We had it all together. We all could express the principles of the body of Christ.

We all believed in submission to authority. And all of these things. We were nice guys and great fellowship for the first couple of weeks. Then all of a sudden, whatever we had that was human and limited began to run out and dissipate.

Our nice guyism came to its end. And you know what began to replace it? Sullen resentment. Chafing irritation. Indignation and vexation with the saints. A difficulty to abide and to tolerate them. You know what I often say to churches when I speak in varieties of churches?

I say, you know, there's only one difference really between us. When this service is over, you'll go home. When our service is over, we are home. But that one difference speaks volumes. It's one thing to sit with saints for an hour or two on Sunday and put your best foot forward and look religiously polite and affable.

But to stay with them through Sunday and find them again with you on Monday of all days. And Tuesday and Wednesday through all of the vicissitudes of life after you've had a row with your wife and barked at the kids and kicked the cat and this went wrong and that and you're not at all in your best spiritual condition, but you are what you are with your face sticking out before the saints.

Then the conditions are there by which truth can be made manifest. Where the light must shine. Where relationship cannot be phonied up and gotten over glibly by virtue of the fact that you have a nice personality or a sweet manner.

It won't last beyond a few weeks. It's either going to be the life of God. That's how John begins. And the life was made manifest. It's a palpable thing. It's tangible or else we're finished. If it's not there in the clutch and in the crisis, when we run out of our good guy-ism, we're finished.

It's the life which operates in the light, which is truth that makes koinonia, koinonia. And as I read this early this morning koinonia, it says is not association, but participation. Those that believed were together does not mean that they merely associated.

They participated in a shared common life. And don't think that is not a supreme achievement for men who are diverse in temperament, background and even in callings in God. The foundation of the church built upon the apostles and the prophets.

My God, what a talent, what a genius God has to take the most disparate elements and say that until they come together there's no foundation for the church. You say, what's so odd about apostles and prophets getting it together?

You can't believe how hard it is. An apostle is a teacher. He's a builder, he's a master builder. He builds on the principles of God in the word and he's exacting a sure foundation and line upon line and precept upon precept.

But a prophet, oy vey, he'll recite from the back of a book of matches. He'll foam at the mouth, he'll come out at the seams, he'll perspire, he'll in one fell swoop he'll just brush aside all that is considered time tested principle and do something utterly ungainly and unique and freaky that you wonder if the man has his marbles.

He'll get up and say to a church, would to God I could frolic with you in the grass. And where does it say that in the scriptures? If there's anything calculated to rub an apostolic teacher the wrong way, it's a prophet.

You never know what's coming next. They have so little tolerance for the particulars and see the sweeping vision and everything for them is an event that's got to happen now. And they have, they're so impatient with these teachers with their slow plotting, line upon line, principle upon principle.

It's a contradiction of temperament and calling. And God says that the church is to be built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. What will it take to get those guys together? It'll take the supernatural enablement of God which is available to men who walk in the truth.

And in the light as he is in the light. And I want to tell you guys, that is no ordinary light. It's a light of the intensest kind that reveals every shadow. I can tell you of things that have happened in the intensity of our Koinonia shared common life that would never happen in 10 ,000 Sundays of conventional church experience.

For example, we have a food locker, a commissary department where whatever the Lord gives us goes into this little building. I don't know how small to describe it to you. Probably the length of this platform in a square with a freezer, a refrigerator and shelves.

Into which come the women of the community one by one to make their selections. Now we don't always have every kind of food stock available. Sometimes there are long dry seasons and other times the Lord sends up bagels and Jewish delicacies and we go wild.

But on this occasion we had a cotton, a cardboard box full of frozen orange juice. Very special treat. And no one says how many you are to take. Imagine a woman coming into this food locker and closing the door behind her, utterly alone with God to make her own choices.

I'll tell you that there is more spiritual work of a true kind performed in those minutes than 10 ,000 Sundays. And in this particular case the woman was from California who had been very accustomed to juice as a common asset in life and she was now living in a severely cold climate in northern Minnesota where she recognized that orange juice was even far more imperative than it was in California.

So she helped herself to a number of cans probably more than was prudent without a regard for what would be left for the others. This is not association, this is participation. She took home her little catch and she put it in her own little freezer in her refrigerator and began to enjoy the bounty.

And as the stock declined, one day a kid from across the road in one of the other house trailers came and said my mother sent me to ask if you had any frozen orange juice, my brother is sick. Well she chafed a little bit and she opened up her supply and she took out a can and gave it to him.

And sure enough the same kid came back the next day, have you got any more? And she said no. The kid went back to tell his mother that she had no more. And she had to go right from that statement to the daily morning prayer meeting.

And there we were sitting together face to face in the presence of God. And this woman shifted from one side of her seat to the other side of her seat in such restlessness and writhings until finally she had it blurred out that she was ashamed of herself that the spirit and presence of God was deeply convicting her that she had just spoken a lie.

And what was really the humiliation was that it was a lie for a paltry can of crummy orange juice. And she couldn't go further and we couldn't sit there longer because she felt that she was impeding the spirit of God by not bringing this into the light.

You see there's something about participation as against dissociation when you're together long enough and intensely enough that must reveal the issues of truth in the light. But if you have only to hold your breath for an hour on Sunday you can get away with it.

I think last year if someone would have said to me Art are you trying to say that community is not an option but that every believer must somehow find his way into one expression of it or another I would have drawn back and hedged a little bit well I don't know, I would commend it but I couldn't say, now I would say unequivocally yes.

Not to be in community is to be outside of the definitive relationship of the kingdom kind that God intends for all his saints. There's no way that the redemptive work of God by the spirit can take place in the light except that you're in a relationship with the saints that is long enough and intensive enough to accomplish God's purposes.

I don't care if it's on a farm I don't care if it's in the inner city because I've seen it in London from where I've just come what the arrangement is whether it's apartments whether a whole group of believers together have bought an apartment building as they've done in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada 18 units and have moved into the one building together or they're on a farm as we are with separate house trailers or what the arrangement is they went from house to house daily breaking bread is a principle that must be restored to God's people.

We must live together close enough we must have access to each other and proximity by which the redemptive workings of God can take place where the spirit of just men can be made perfect. I in them and thou in me that they may be perfected in unity is the cry of God that the world might know.

Now I know that we prefer other alternatives to this. Renting a football stadium a rally, putting stickers on our bumpers, is that what you called on both ends of the car? An evangelistic device a gimmick, a campaign, a hot shot evangelist something like that and maybe there is some justification for these things but the eternal and unchangeable principle by which the world shall know that the father has sent him is the demonstration of the koinonia of God and his people and nothing less.

Those that believed were together and had all things common and sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men as every man had need and they continuing daily with one accord, continuing daily.

Whatever made Christianity a Sunday venture? It's a distortion and a caricature and a grotesque that the great faith which is daily in the intention of God has been made a Sunday addendum. There's no way that mere Sundays even punctuated with a midweek Bible study can attain to this glory.

It's a daily thing or it's nothing. You say, Art, that's inconvenient. That's true. Gets in the way of your business, that's true. Your hobbies and your pastimes and your recreation, that's true. That's why you have to have a passionate desire for the kingdom come that will reorder your priorities and put fellowship first and not last.

That will show you that it requires an extravagant investment of time of patience of giving yourself over and not just mechanical time itself but time spent in intensity and openness as is described in the orange juice incident.

Because when that woman blurted out her sin, we were all convicted. Because we recognized that there but for the grace of God go we. She was describing our weakness and our sin, but she had the courage to confess it and by which we were all convicted.

And from that we got into a discussion about orange juice. Well, what is there about orange juice that would make cowards of us all, to paraphrase Shakespeare? Is it the vitamin C in northern Minnesota that is so valuable?

Well, if we didn't have frozen orange juice and we had vitamin C tablets, would she have done the same thing? It was evident, no, that she would not. It's not the nutritional content. So what then is it?

Well, it's something about the color orange itself. It's something about the flavor and the taste. It's something about the pulp as it goes sliding down your gullet into your stomach that is sensual and voluptuous and desirable.

And we got into a discussion of the sensuality of food and the world system as it pertains to food and to eating that was like a revelation as if God was taking a veil off that we gasped and spluttered to see how extraordinary a thing food is and eating practices as it binds one to a world system and makes cowards of us all.

It's a revelation that could not have come in any other way except by people who are not in association but participation in the kingdom of God. I can multiply the events if it's not orange juice or something else that has come out in the course of our life together.

Those that believed were together is more than a statement of sitting alongside one another in pews. As a matter of fact, I would say that the first priority, if we are to go from our present institutional death and Sunday Christianity which is a caricature of God's kingdom intention to the glorious thing that must be revealed if men are to know in the world that the Father has sent them, is to take those pews out.

My God, how long shall we continue staring at the back of each other's heads? How long shall we hide ourselves in the obscurity of the pews? How long shall we be encouraged in the passivity that comes in sitting in a kind of amorphous, faceless congregation watching men who are over-exerting themselves because we're passive?

My first recommendation, if you have a heart for the kingdom and it's going to take great courage and you're going to hear shrieks and howls that you can't believe, how deep-seated are these traditional furniture arrangements?

And whoever said that the church is a rectangle based on the model of theater with an elevator platform, it was not so in the beginning. We have to deal with our buildings and our arrangements and our structure and make it more conducive to the glory of the reality that God is after.

In true koinonia, or there will be no glory and no revelation. You pastors and leaders and elders, you'll need the courage of the Holy Ghost to take out those pews and to arrange seats in such a way that people shall be seeing each other face to face.

And not the least of what you'll have to suffer is a personal decline because you yourself will not be on the exalted place of the platform, but you will be with the others in the same circle, which is the perfect geometric figure.

Not hogging the show and taking over or manipulating or running or conducting, but participating together with the others. I think one of the greatest compliments that our fellowship has ever received came from a Jewish brother from another community who spent a couple of weeks with us daily and said at the end, if I didn't know who the elders were, I would have been hard pressed to identify them in the fellowship.

Not that they were not there, not that they were not present, not that there was not an authority that could be called on when needed at any moment, but they did not enjoy a kind of exalted and visible status that would make others to diminish.

They were just brothers in the fellowship until such time as their oversight was required. That means that when we come together, there's no looking to a song leader or to a pastor to guide us through the hour, but the Holy Ghost himself is the director, being expressed through the many.

That's where the waiting comes in, the awkwardness, the silence, the tedium, the tension, the suffering, because it's much more convenient to be led by men, but it rarely eventuates in glory. All that believed were together and had all things common, sold their possessions and goods and part of them to all men as every man had need, and they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple and in breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people, and the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.