We can be humble and contrite as the ones the Lord is seeking to build His house with, but this will not guarantee that we will not fall into the same traps as others have. Being humble and contrite is a good foundation for the other qualities we need, but there is more needed. Our trust cannot be in our humility but in God, whom alone we must follow.
We follow Him by knowing His voice and only responding to His voice (see John 10) and by staying filled with His Spirit, who has been sent to lead us into all truth. All truth is in the Truth, Jesus. To be His dwelling place, we must grow up into Him.
So, humility is required to stay on course. True humility is first the understanding that without Him, we can do nothing. With this knowledge, we will be far less prone to try anything without Him. Let us always keep in mind that, “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (see James 4:6, 1 Peter 5:5). There is no treasure on earth as valuable as God’s grace, and one definition of humility would be to keep that foremost in our minds and hearts. Arrogance and presumption are deadly enemies. These caused the first fall and almost every one since. Humility is not the path of life, but it is how we stay on it.
I have been redundant in sharing some of these basic principles that help us stay on the path of life and be part of what God is building, because just knowing these things does not mean we’re doing them. The repeated rebukes, warnings, and challenges to the seven churches in Revelation are also necessary. To understand these, we must examine some of the darkest times in human history and how much of Christianity is still doing what led to this terrible darkness that was manifested through the church. If we are just looking at the specks in other people’s eyes and not seeing the log that is in our own, we are failing to see what we must see.
Again, the “Great Harlot” in Revelation is man’s church that could not remain a pure, chaste virgin while waiting for her Bridegroom, the Lord. Instead, she became married to the ways of the world. Her work “came up out of the earth,” the result of earthly mindedness, not from seeking that which is from above.
After seeing what we are about to look into, we can become bitter toward this false church, both in history and as it is manifested today. We must keep in mind that there is no bitterness in the River of Life, or on the Path of Life, and there cannot be in those who travel them. Just as the first test of Israel in the wilderness was to turn the bitter waters of Marah into sweet, we must first learn to do the same. Every bitter thing that has happened to the church worked for good in us, as the Lord promised, so even its memory should be sweet to us, not bitter. This can only happen by taking them to the cross, just as Moses turned the bitter waters of Marah into sweet by throwing into them the tree that represented the cross.
Instead of becoming bitter at what we learn about church history and fall into thinking we are better than they are, we need to consider that, had we lived then, we would very likely have done the same things. Even worse, we’re still doing the same things today, just with more subtlety. It is more than just a cliché that, regardless of the depravity we may see in others, “Except for the grace of God, there go I.”
For this reason, as we look at the terrible mistakes of the church in history, instead of thinking that it was “them,” let us consider how it was “us.” The same things that enabled the church to do such diabolical acts in history would likely be done by much of the church today, if we had the political power that the church in the Middle Ages had. These things were done by those professing to be Christians to their Christian brethren who didn’t hold to the same doctrines that the institutional church did. Those who were persecuted held on to Christ through the worst persecutions the world has yet seen, as we will see.
Few Christians today know this history, or if they have gotten a glimpse of it, few want to learn about this history. We must have the courage to face these past events if Christianity is going to get free from what produced them. Even so, we must keep in mind that there is man’s church, which we are told in Revelation “came up out of the earth,” and there is God’s church, which is being built from the top down, coming down out of heaven. It is a part of the kingdom that is “not of this world.”
In virtually all of the works of men, including churches, there is a mixture of works from the earth and from above. However, at the end of this age, the tares will be removed from the wheat, and the Lord will have a church that is a “pure and spotless bride.”
© 2025 Rick Joyner. All Rights Reserved.
