Community: The New Heaven on Earth – the Call to the Becoming
What is community as modeled by the first-century church? What does it mean when they said that they had everything in common and that they enjoyed the praise of the people prior to the outbreak of the persecutions? And we will also address the why of the persecuted.
Community was and is the Blood of the Holy Spirit within the Body of Christ. This is what makes us born of Him or not—not flesh, but Spirit. This is what makes us family. The flesh is then the extension of the interior inheritance, modeled after the apostles as they modeled the Christ.
Community was not separate from Church. Church was family community—the all of the global and the all of the near, and the all of the interior heart. Thus community is understood to be possible only through the All in the All. The sustaining factor is the Body of Love as flesh clothing the Spirit entwined with the soul, serving as vessel for communicating to others the surpassing worth of the interior revelation by action and word.
Community is understood as not individuals operating collectively, but as a body operating as shared identity that supersedes the ideology of self. This community is the model of the New Heaven and New Earth. We see it all over history as they pop up and are snuffed out or abused and become the abuser—power, when not yielded to the Greater Identity of community as identity under Yeshua’s mantle. The yoke He showed us was easy, and the burden He gave was light.
We have borne weight and burden under the heat of the Carolina sun, and we can attest that it is indeed easy, because the secret is like all yokes: we grow into it, as pebbles before mountains. The burden is easy because it is never given more than the measure pre-poured and planned as training to bear the thing that strains and stretches yet never breaks.
Community then becomes the preservation of the heart. The apostles in those days reflected and lived the lessons in front, openly among and with the others who learned actively by living and watching. There was teaching; there was a deep familial sense. There was grievous loss and anguish of soul at the members sharing suffering.
Thus community behaved like the body: the outer layers the most prepared and willing to sacrifice themselves first to protect the heart, the living waters. The first shall be last and the last first. Community was all as identity, and the individual was able to entrust itself to the greater being because it had tasted and knew that the Lord was good, and the evidence and fruits were displayed for all to see. Thus the new members—and as some might call them, aliens—were greeted on the outer fringes by the martyrs and sacrificial examples, the hands and faces. They greeted, they displayed, with words and, more importantly, with a life lived before all as openly desirous of Love and the Father—not sensual with debauchery and intercourse lest you stumble, but seeking with heart for all in earnestness.
The deeds were the willingness to suffer wrong openly in front of others with good cheer—not as goading, but humble; the ones who smile when beaten, even when weeping, for the joy afforded as witness and softener to the hearts of those stoning around them. The witness borne as familial scorn beats stripes into personality and flesh both, and still they carry the burdens of the flesh for others in love.
The outer layers reflect and are nourished as they draw and learn from watching the heart—both the Body’s and community’s heart, and also their own—with an exacting degree. For all corruption begins within the heart and must be taken as seriously as a heart attack, lest we kill that which we hoped to build.
The systems of the community naturally gather and meet the needs of the body slowly and unfolding in a sustainable manner. The unfolding will never be allowed to grow past the center’s ability to nourish the flesh in its outermost reaches. This is crucial, for relationship is what all community in heaven or earth is built upon.
The sacrifice is the highest form of gift the one who is to die is given when done for the greater identity of the Body as a whole. This is the how of a soul like Stephen willingly dying while testifying and asking forgiveness for the ones killing him. He knew. He saw. He died because the Name was bearing witness as a stirring echo, and another crucifixion with stones by the same Jews was enacted again.
The sanctification of the great and total persecution—that the rod would strike the earthen vessels and scatter the pottery wide and far by ordaining Saul, later become Paul by ordination in the blood of Stephen.
The community thriving, then beaten, for the purpose of disbursal and community modeling abroad—that the message might be read as lives everywhere, in isolated places and home wherever the body roamed.
Thus when Ananias and Sapphira perceived that they would look better if they kept a little bit for themselves and then presented it as the total amount—the first account of modern Christianity in recorded history—it ends the same way then as it does today.
Death. For those two sinful souls and early adopters of the faker ideology, it was physical in order to spare their spiritual souls. The sin was against the Body, against the Blood. It causes spiritual death today as numbness and craven appetites that never are curbed: open pornography addictions by nearly all. And for what? You craven souls who claim community are dead twice over and damned by self-sublimation, and named craven by this singular Body of Christ.
The sin was fakeness—and what we all accidentally do, not willingly usually, but some do it so. No, they reap themselves to the shoulders of others and say, “Well, the others are doing it, so I guess it’s okay.” Sin always begins the same as sanctification: slow, and then ever increasing in its magnitude.
The opposite of community is isolated islands of self.
Think on that.
Amen and Amen.