The Coming Divine Reset of the Body of Christ
May 16, 2023
In technology experiences we often hear the word “reset” referring to that red button that allows us to return a device to its original settings. This usually follows a period in which a series of errors have produced a breakdown in the technology and its effectiveness. For many years the traditional church has allowed traditions to displace the word of God and the leading of the Holy Spirit. God is sending many clues that He is inspiring a divine reset of the body of Christ to bring it back to its original settings as revealed in His word and led by the Holy Spirit.
In some ways we have come to a point where we have accepted the position of the Catholic Church concerning tradition. Their idea of tradition states “According to the theology of the Catholic Church, doctrinal issues must be interpreted looking to sacred tradition and scripture, under the teaching authority given by Christ to his Apostles and their successors the Pope and Bishops.” In other words, traditions that developed over time have as much authority to Catholics as scripture when interpreted by “the Pope and Bishops.”
Those of us who are not Catholic have made the same serious mistake. We allow traditions to develop over the years just as the Catholic Church solidified into the traditions that developed after they began to leave the simplicity and purity of God’s word. The big difference is that they established a doctrine about tradition that allowed them to develop a massive religious organization based on scripture skewed by tradition.
Evangelicals have allowed traditions about worship and church life to replace the leading of the Holy Spirit who would keep us in living waters instead of the dammed off stagnant waters of stilled spiritual rivers. Once we discover something with a little life in it, we do it, and do it and do it until it becomes a tradition that we view as the work of the Holy Spirit but is really the work of failed humans who constructed a religious system.
Jesus sent His Holy Spirit to His church with the promise that “He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak;” (John 16:13). The promise was He would guide us into all truth. We would not be left as orphans He had promised earlier in the same upper room message (John 14:18). The all in this passage pertained to our individual walk in Christ as well as how we were to conduct ourselves corporately as one body in Christ. We know that because the first thing the Holy Spirit did was show the early church how to live together corporately (Acts 2:42–47).
Jesus gave us the Spirit and the Spirit gave us the scriptures as men in the Old and New Testaments spoke and wrote from God as the Spirit moved them (2 Pet 1:21). So, we have two balancing sources of truth — the guidance of the Spirit and the scriptures He inspired.
If we will let Him, the Holy Spirit will speak through these two channels concerning the reset that is being inspired by Him. Paul gave this warning to us: “But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ” (2 Cor 11:3). Eve was deceived by the craftiness of the serpent when she was led away from two things — simplicity and purity. Simplicity is single mindedness — not allowing our minds to drift away from the simplicity of God’s message to us. Purity results from not allowing the world to corrupt us into the image of its god — Satan.
Religion is one of Satan’s deadliest weapons. It is the result of doing what Eve did in the garden. She decided she knew better than God. We do the same things when we devise traditions that have no foundation in the word or in the leading of the Spirit. Religion is what man makes of God. Christianity is what God makes of man. A.W. Tozer put it this way:
God never called man to walk knee-deep in the sludge of the world, nor did He intend for man to be mired down in the traditions of men. Therefore, the Lord sets us free and opens a fountain of living water for the wounds of the world. In spite of this, man deliberately chooses the bondage of religion over the liberating freedom in Christ. (Tozer, The Purpose of Man, p.73).
This reset will slowly bring us back to the simplicity and purity that the early church possessed but lost when they started listening to crafty men who led them into religion (Eph 4:14). The Holy Spirit, if we will allow Him, will show us which traditions have robbed us of our simplicity in Christ. He will show us the places where we have allowed the world’s pressures to affect our music, our doctrines, our preaching and programs and practices that we have borrowed from the world in order to be popular and accepted. Those things rob us of our single minded devotion to Christ and our purity in Him.
A spiritual reset is on the way perhaps in preparation for the last days. The world is on a headlong plunge toward one-world government and persecution of followers of Christ. The traditional church is in many cases caving in to these attacks. People are leaving the church in droves thinking that it’s message is trumped by science. This reset will pave the way for people seeking church God’s way to find it and grow in Christ. For those steeped in the tradition of the organized church, it will provide a way to leave the confines of religion in search of real life in Christ with others.
