History is a witness that if a truth gets institutionalized, it will become politicized and corrupted. This includes scientific truth or any other truth. Once it gets institutionalized, it can be subjected to the worst of fallen human nature. Those who stand for the purity of the truth and against its corruption will be seen as enemies of the institution and be persecuted by it.

       An example of this is how the movement created by the Maccabees to defend the faith of the Jews from being corrupted by the Greeks was institutionalized and became the Pharisees. The Pharisees did a lot of good in things like preserving the integrity of the Scriptures, the feasts, and the mandated form of worship of the Lord, as well as spreading the hope of the coming Messiah. When it became an institution, it became the most vehement and deadly resistance to the Messiah—the Lord Himself—who came to lead them back to God and to redemption.  

       We Christians may look at this and wonder how the Jews could have allowed this to happen, but as the Lord warned, those who judge others do the same things. This happened to the Christian church as well. The Lord also taught that He will view the way that we treat His people as the way we have treated Him, and the institutionalized church has brutally treated and massacred the Christians who would not join and conform to the institutions built throughout our history.

       The Truth Himself came to set us free, and His truth sets us free. However, for it to remain free as Jesus remained free, we must, like Him, remain outside the camp, outside of the establishment.

       The institutions built to defend and preserve truths have inevitably become the worst enemies of those same truths. Whether physical or political, they will end up seeking to use force on people to join and conform to them. You can make a parrot say and do what you want it to, but it will not come from its heart. True Christian faith is in the heart, and its purpose is not just to get us to believe it accurately but to live what we believe.

       Because of this continuous cycle of turning truth into an institution, Christian history is a continuously repeating cycle of each new movement being persecuted by the institutions into which the previous movements had calcified. Every denomination is basically a movement that stopped moving and became an institution.

       For this reason, most Christians’ concept of the church bears little resemblance to the church we see in Scripture. Some, perceiving this, try to wrest a “New Testament pattern for the church,” but there is no New Testament pattern given for the church. There are many! Each church in the New Testament was unique. The uniqueness of each congregation reflected the nature of our Creator who makes every snowflake, tree, and person different. But these differences don’t conflict; they complement each other.

       The Lord gave Moses a very clear and specific pattern for the Tabernacle because of the prophetic importance of each detail in revealing the coming Messiah. He did no such thing for the new covenant church, and it has been a devastating practice of some to try to wrest one out of the New Testament.

       The church is the dwelling place of the Lord, and we get a more accurate picture of what He wants this to be with His life. Almost all of His teaching and ministry was done in everyday life among the people. All of His teachings were unique, and He did not heal anyone the same way He had done before. He was authentic and original every day. That is the nature of true Christianity.

       True Christianity is a verb as much as it is a noun. The River of Life is a river that is moving, flowing, going somewhere. It is not a lake or a pond. Just as water must flow to stay pure and not become stagnant, so must truth and those who seek to live in the truth. As Jesus said in John 3:8, "The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who has been born of the Spirit." How could this apply to an institution?

       This does not mean that those born of the Spirit don’t have jobs, live in the same towns or same houses, or have any routines in their lives. The spiritual life in them compels them to continually relate to all of these in fresh, unique ways. In John 6, Jesus said He was the manna from heaven. Manna had to be gathered fresh each day, and the Christian life has to be a fresh walk with the Lord each day, as well as with our other relationships. This life cannot be institutionalized.

 

© 2025 Rick Joyner. All Rights Reserved.