I see no pleasure on the altars. By Josimar Salum

I see no pleasure on the altars

By Josimar Salum

"I can not fit into the church any more. I have been a minister of praise for many years, traveling all over Brazil, but I no longer enjoy being on the altars. What can I do? Is something wrong with me?"

That is a message I received from a desperate young man. But I want to know this from someone who has deepened their relationship with Jesus. Life with Jesus is very simple, it is like eating "rice and beans" every day, without banquets and fancy diets. It is the simplicity of the day to day, the same beat of times past, without exaggeration.

Constant.

When someone has to invent news things to remain interested in church, it is because they are not satisfied with Jesus day by day. "Give us this day our daily bread!" Living with Jesus is life, one day at a time, without losing one day. When one begins to lose his encounter with Jesus, even for one day, he will end up losing his communion and pleasure in life.

To persevere in the doctrine of the apostles is to persevere in the Gospel, pure and simple.

Knowing the Gospel requires only a Bible, a water jar, a bread sandwich, a lonely place and a lot of hunger and thirst for God, one that has never before been experienced. Find Jesus personally each day and be satisfied with Him. Today, tomorrow, every day. Without ceasing.

It will seem a little weird to have this encounter every day, with the pages of the Gospels open, reading and always wanting more, invoking the intense heart. Like one who is never satisfied. Like someone desperate for water on a dry land. As someone who is not content with anything but what he wants to achieve. There will be no immediate answers. Sometimes God hides. It will seem He does not listen. But it is the daily insistence that will lead you to meet the Lord when you seek Him with all your heart.

Churches do not please, simply as it is. Who found Jesus earnestly is already satisfied. To attend a religious service, most of the time, is to participate in a service. The "ministry" provides a service to members. Everything is already planned, prepared, rehearsed and 90% only participates in the program. The other 10% minister commanded by the presenter, the pastor. It's like a fun show. In English, even the name is consistent with this description: worship “service". Brazilian services are exact copies of American and European services. When there are those who lead the people to the praise of the heavens and there are those who preach the true Gospel, it is worth it. But usually, many gatherings are just religious agglomerations.

The services are not meetings of the saints for true communion, long conversations of edification, looking directly at one another, face to face and not at the necks of the saints, but they function by being commanded from a platform, from a pulpit. The truth is that all this is foreign to the New Testament Church.

But the system is the same almost everywhere. Altars, all of them are human fabrications, many are just platforms for "ministers". In the Church of God, there are no ministers of the Word, ministers of praise and ministers of intercession, there are no Levites or special priests. All the saved and saints are ministers, of the Word, of Praise, of Prayer and of one another.

The Church is not a Business show. All Gospel artists, even the saved and the saints among them, are expendable to the Church of God as Church. They are necessary and important in the Kingdom to carry through their art the message of the Gospel to society and influence culture, but it has nothing to do with the Church, the Church of God. There are no artists in the Church. The Greek spectacle serves the Pantheon and its gods, but not to the congregation of the saints. The applause, the tie, the marketing, the merchandise, the tickets, the clothes, the glamour, the corporatism, the career, the millionaire contracts, have nothing to do with the Church.

If you found pleasure on the altars, it was not God's pleasure. Any pleasure in this world is just the same. Churches by the thousand, with their altars and the world are made of the same material.

Then there is the pleasure of the evangelical altars in this whole system designed to function without the Holy Spirit. Evangelical and Protestant churches do not need God to function. Everything is already programmed, meshed so that one after another, those that are divided from the others, have the same program, the same liturgy, the same hierarchy, with only a few variations. They are all of the same.

There are, however, many men and women of God among us, true ones, who serve the saints within these houses of religion; those that dream of experiencing the Church as Jesus lived and planned.

"How lovely is your dwelling place, LORD Almighty! My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the LORD; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God. Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young— a place near your altar, LORD Almighty, my King and my God.” Psalm 84: 1-3 NIV

For thousands of years, the temples, not even the one built by Solomon, absolutely none of them, are inhabited by God. If you and I do not find the altars of the Lord in our communion with Him and in communion with the saints, we will not find it in any human structure or church program. It is certain, however, that there are thousands upon thousands of gatherings throughout the earth where the Lord is present.

And if I do not meet God at any of these meetings, not even when I meet a brother or sister on the street, the problem is not with the postmodern Church. The problem… is me.