Disciples and Sheep: Why is it so complicated to understand something so simple? By Josimar Salum

Disciples and Sheep: Why is it so complicated to understand something so simple? By Josimar Salum

How to follow Jesus and understand the Jesus who freed all men to worship God everywhere, anywhere?

What does it really mean to love? To worship is to serve God as we serve one another and others everywhere.

Worship is no longer going to Jerusalem or anywhere else to worship, because the hour has already come when true worshipers worship the Father in Spirit and Truth.

Worship God who serves, who serves men and sings, raises his hands and dances, never failing to serve one another and men.

Devotion is to pray hand in hand not only as we sing and speak together with God, but in the day to day life as we live.

You would never find Jesus directing a service in the Gospels! You find him initially going as usual to the synagogue of the Jews, but you will soon find that his journeys almost always ended in his expulsion.

You find Him, the God and Creator of the universe, Jesus, just in the courts of the temple.

Jesus could not enter into the holy place much less in the Holy of Holies. He was not a priest of the tribe of Levi. Remember that David, like Jesus, from the tribe of Judah dared to enter the holy place and ate the loaves and then what happened?

Well, it was hundreds of years ago that the Holy of Holies did not even visit that place anymore. The Ark of the covenant had already disappeared from that little place behind the veil hundreds of years ago.

For when Jesus was taken to the temple as a child and when he went to the temple, the Son of God did not set foot in that "most holy place."

Well, the people and the priests did not know God. Jesus the Holy of Hollies, the Ark of the Covenant could now be seen and even touched on the streets of the cities and on the roads of Israel by anyone, seen by Greeks and pagans and even touched by wounded lepers and bleeding women. 

The journeys of Jesus and His disciples to the temple and synagogues always ended in conflict. There was no more place for the Word of Truth in religious structures. Not today. Long ago there were times when the Word manifested itself, but since the age of Samuel it had become scarce.

Where do we find Jesus and His disciples doing what they love to do?

In the houses eating with his guests and friends while Jesus taught His Kingdom.

In the daily meals, eating together, yes, having supper together, for every supper among disciples is holy. This is what the Holy Spirit really means when He says "not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another - and all the more as you see the Day approaching." Hebrews 10:25

How dare religious people think that meeting together is about worship services?

Jesus and His disciples would also be found in the streets and squares of cities proclaiming the Gospel, doing good, healing the sick, casting out demons, freeing the captives, raising the dead, eating and drinking with publicans - public officers, politicians? - and sinners and announcing that every year now is acceptable to the Lord.

Jesus was never a religious leader, a cult leader, a church worker, or a pastor of any flock. Jesus is the Shepherd of one flock. And there are no others. Only one! One Shepherd and one Sheep! That simple!

Jesus never performed any worship in the empty temple of the Jews, nor in a public square, anywhere.

Jesus is a Teacher, He teaches, He makes disciples, He has no organization with members. The Church that Jesus built on Himself has no structures, because it is the Body. The Church is the structure.

The wine-skins of men, houses, temples, seminaries, buildings, and any others are just wine-skins. Maybe Kingdom Wreaths if they are useful for the Kingdom. As God always has new wine, men's wine-skins always break, break, shatter and lose wine, because they can not handle God's new wine. For God, all these structures have nothing to do with the Church. And invariably they become scandals and offenses in the Kingdom. Ultimately they will be uprooted from the Kingdom forever.

The Church is the Bride, the Body and the House of the Lord. And the Kingdom is the Lord! And His children as He, kings and priests, all of them. In the Kingdom all are kings and priests. All!

These wine-skins have never been able to restrain the Church, to mold the Church, to organize the Church, to surround the Church, to subject the Church to leadership as pious as it may be, to "commemorate" and bind disciples in a community in itself under men who while insisting in being the church, fragment, divide, and separate the disciples of Jesus from one another.

Yes, men shepherd the Church of God, the flock of God, not the churches. But they are shepherding like sheep, for they are not essentially shepherds, they are only sheep. Yes, men make disciples, but they are not "discipl-ers", they are essentially disciples. All of us, one by one, each one, are only sheep and disciples of Jesus.

Let us return to Jesus and His disciples who in the cities and fields as laborers worked the harvest to gather the sheep before Jesus and the nations made disciples only for Jesus.

And, "following the truth in love, let us in all things grow up in him who is the head, Christ, of whom the whole body, well adjusted and strengthened by the help of every p art, effects his own increase for the building up of himself in love." Ephesians 4: 15-16