In the last chapter we have seen that the speciality of the church life is our Christian faith. Our Christian faith is composed of the beliefs concerning the Bible, God, Christ, the work of Christ, salvation, and the church. According to the Bible, these points comprise the fundamental and sound faith. We should not take anything away from this faith or add anything to it. If we take something away, we will surely be divisive, and if we add something to it, we will also be divisive. Christians are the same only in this faith. To keep us from being divisive, we must only hold this faith, nothing more.
Hence, our Christian faith is the ground of all the believers’ genuine oneness. The last night the Lord Jesus was on the earth He offered a unique prayer (John 17). His prayer revealed the importance of the oneness of all His believers. Nothing is as important as the oneness. When the church is divided, this oneness is lost. Satan also knows that oneness is the crucial thing, the strategic point. He also knows that as long as he can keep Christians divided, he is successful.
The early apostles ministered to the church what they had been commissioned by the Lord. However, it was not long before the things that they had passed on to the church began to be lost. At the beginning the church received all the right things. But from the last part of the first century the church gradually began to lose these things. On the one hand, by the fourteenth century nearly everything that God had given and committed to the Body had been lost. On the other hand, with those fourteen hundred years, the so-called church had picked up many heretical, dark, and sinful things. Whatever the church lost was something given by the Head, and whatever the church picked up was something injected from Satan. Thus, this period of time, as history shows us, was the darkest time.
Then, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Lord raised up Martin Luther. Before him some others had been raised up. (Actually, throughout the previous fourteen centuries, there were some faithful saints raised up by the Lord to recover the lost truths.) These paved the way for the Reformation. It was at this time that the Lord started His recovery and recovered the first item, justification by faith. Since that time many things have been recovered, such as sanctification by faith, holiness by faith, the living of a life by faith, victory by faith, and many other items.
In the 1700s some of the dear saints who were in the Lord’s recovery began to pay their attention to the church life. As a result, at this time in Europe, there were many kinds of brethren meetings. In the eighteenth century, some brothers moved to Bohemia to be with Count Zinzendorf. Under his leadership, they began to practice the church life, and to some extent it was proper and also quite wonderful. John Wesley, after going to Bohemia and staying with these brethren for some time, said that if he had not been burdened for England, he would have stayed in Bohemia with them the rest of his life.
The practice of the church life by the brothers in Bohemia was good, but in 1828 to 1829 some brothers from England under the leadership of John Nelson Darby began to meet. Their practice of the church life was a great improvement. D. M. Panton, a great writer fifty years ago, said this movement was greater than the Reformation. It was quite powerful and extremely influential.
Before the Reformation, as history shows us, the Bible was shut up by the Roman Catholic Church. Through Martin Luther and the Reformation it was released. However, it was opened through these brothers. There were many great scholars and teachers of the Bible among them-John Nelson Darby, Benjamin Newton, C. H. Mackintosh, William Kelly, and others. Through these brothers the Bible became not only a released book, but also an open book. Today’s fundamental theology is based mostly upon the Brethren teachings.
Because these brothers were so much for the doctrines, the doctrines became a source of many divisions. The first division occurred not long after their beginning in 1828. It happened because of the different concepts held by John Nelson Darby and Benjamin Newton. They had a big disputation mainly over the Lord’s second coming. Since that first division, hundreds of divisions have occurred among them. All of them were due to the different concepts regarding teachings.
At the beginning, the Brethren were very good in the matter of life; but later they were distracted from life to doctrine. Due to this, as history shows us, the Lord was forced to react.
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