The following article is transcribed from a taped message given in 1987 by Jack Gray.

I believe it is so important that we be able to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches in these days. There is a stirring that is all through the land and people's hearts are being drawn out toward something more. God has something more for us than we have so far experienced. So I want to begin by sharing some Scriptures to give a basis for what I want to share with you.

Zech 1:14 - "1 am exceedingly jealous for Jerusalem and Zion" - we know that these Old Testament prophesies for Jerusalem and Zion concern the New Testament Church for the book of Hebrews says that we have come to Mt. Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, to the City of the Living God. That's where we have come to in Jesus. These things are most relevant to the Church for the Lord says, "I am returning to Jerusalem with compassion ... my house shall be built in it." (v16) God is after His house - He wants to build His house and establish His house. - HIS HOUSE.

2 Cor 11:2,3 - Paul says, "I feel a divine jealousy for you" - Here's God's servant now with the same jealousy - a divine jealousy - a jealousy that comes from the heart of God. "I feel a divine jealousy for you for I have betrothed you to Christ to present you as a pure bride to her one husband. But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ"

This is a tremendously significant Scripture - for when we go back to the early church we see this burning passion on the heart of that man who did so much in the establishment and spread of the Gospel. The thing that burned in his heart was that same jealousy that God had spoken about in Zechariah. What was it about - it was that the people of God might be BETROTHED TO CHRIST and that there would be a SIMPLICITY OF CHRIST. That it would be CHRIST and ONLY CHRIST - and that we should be joined to Him.

That word betrothed is a very strong word ... It can also mean to be joined together as in a mortise and tenon joint that carpenters use. God wants us to be joined this way to Christ - linked to Him - betrothed to Christ. This is God's desire for His people.

Psalm 84 - "How lovely is thy dwelling place 0 Lord of Hosts. My soul longs, yea, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God ... Blessed are the men whose strength is in thee, in whose heart are the highways to Zion." God is looking for hearts that are highways to that House He wants to build ... "For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the House of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness ..."

In that Psalm I see two main things. I see firstly a man who knows God. He has an intimate, personal, continual relationship with God. He says, "My heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God ..." - that is a man who really loves God and really knows the Lord.

I believe the number one thing that the Lord is speaking about today for His people is that every Christian be a person who knows the Lord intimately and personally walks with the Lord and communes with the Lord. This kind of knowing of the Lord doesn't just happen - it has to be cultivated. Just the same as a marriage relationship has to be cultivated. If you really want to know God you need to spend time with Him, you need to give your thoughts to Him - you need to lay aside even good things so that you can know Him. So here is a man in David who knows God.

The other thing that is also expressed in this Psalm that is in David's heart is a desire for the House of God. Wherever you have a people who really love the Lord and know Him - they will have in their hearts a desire for God's House - that is, the people of God. They will want to see a manifestation of the Body of Christ.

This is the basis of what we believe the Lord has shown us. He wants to lead us into a deeper relationship with Himself - He wants to establish His House and bring forth a manifestation of the body of Christ so what the world will see is the body of Christ. What do they see when they look at the church today? They do not see a loving functioning body of Jesus. The church is meant to be the fullness of Him who fills all in all. This is what the Lord is after.

I would like to share some of my background so that you can see where the Lord has led us. You may be able to identify with what I have to say.

Both Margaret and 1 started off as Baptists. I was brought up in a Baptist house and I came to the Lord when I was seven years old. I was baptised when l was twelve and grew up to go to church from about the age of two. We were in the Baptist denomination for about 35 years. We were missionaries with the Baptist Missionary Society in the Belgian Congo for 13 years and moved around amongst the Baptist churches in Britain when we were on furlough. When we came to New Zealand we were still 'died in the wool' Baptists. I had been brought up in the strong evangelical traditions of Scottish Baptists and we believed we had all the truth - and that the Baptist Church was the only church that had it all together. All the rest were sort of 'also rans'.

Then we came to New Zealand and all sorts of things began to happen to me. I went through an experience of deep depression, which started when we came back from Africa after facing a very traumatic final year there. The Congo became independent and there was much upheaval and I saw all the work that I had been doing crumble before my eyes. It was a very hard experience.

When we moved to Wellsford I was in deep depression. Although I was counselling other people and trying to help them, I was a bit of a mess myself. One night we were sitting in the Baptist church in Wellsford and I was in the midst of darkness and blackness. A voice began talking in the back of my head saying, 'God has cast you off - God has cast you off.' I was really distressed. I had a Bible on my knee and I wasn't looking for any answers. I carelessly threw it open and as I glanced down I saw there in front of me, Isaiah 41 which said, "You are my servant. I have chosen you and I have not cast you off." God gave me an answer to answer the lying spirit that had been harassing me. I went home that night totally changed - up there somewhere on cloud nine. God began to speak to me and show me that up until that point my life had been working to serve Him. I had trained as a doctor and went to Africa that I might serve the Lord. And I did - I poured out my life working sometimes 16-20 hours a day carrying a huge burden for physical sickness - for the Lord. It was tremendously satisfying and fulfilling and all the rest of it. But the Lord was now telling me, 'Jack, I'm not really interested in what you are trying to do for Me - I am interested in our relationship, that is the most important thing to Me." There came into my heart that night a yearning and hungering for God that I have never known and I started to get up in the early hours of the morning and cry to the Lord, "Lord, I want to know you. I have known a lot about you, I've worked for you - but now I want the reality of really knowing you in a new way."

God began to respond. Nothing happened in a thunderbolt, but God began to guide me. I have always been a reader and I picked up a little book called, 'The Pursuit of God' by AW Tozer for about 50c at a second hand book sale - and I tell you it was the best bargain I ever had. I opened it and read the introduction - how it was written for people who were hungry for God, It could have been written directly for me. It drew me on after the Lord. After about four years I began to get hungry for the baptism in the Holy Spirit. I had been very anti - you know Pentecostals were way out somewhere, they were real weirdo's. But I began to meet people and see they had something that I didn't have. They were moving in a dimension that was beyond what I had experienced in God. To cut a long story short, I ended up visiting a farmer up near Kaitaia - about 11 years ago and I was baptised in the Spirit there in the farmhouse. I had a mighty experience of the love of God. It was beyond my ability to understand. The man who prayed for me had a prophetic word about how much God loved me - and I couldn't understand how God could love me so much. It was a tremendous night.

Once I had been baptised in the Spirit my Baptist brothers weren't very happy. They weren't very happy about that kind of experience. The time came when we felt we had to move out. So we and three other families moved out of the church. We didn't know what to do so we just began to meet together as families during the week. But we didn't stop going to church - not the Baptists but other churches. So we started this home group on a Wednesday night and it went on for about 5-6 years and that was where our life was. That group began to draw people from all kinds of backgrounds and they would come and might stay for a time - others stayed with us all the time. We were touching something in that home group I realise as I look back on it now. Nobody was obliged to be there - we had no leader or pastor. We just met together because we wanted to meet together. We wanted to meet the Lord and worship the Lord and we wanted to study the Word and help each other in our Christian walk. All this time we were still going along to church twice a Sunday. I was always brought up to believe that if you only went to church once you were only half a Christian.

We still went to church although we were getting nothing from it and many times we would come home and I would say to Margaret, 'That's the last time - I'm not going again - it's so dead.' But the next Sunday we would get dressed up and go again.

The next thing that happened was that the brethren people asked me to come and minister to them. I had known some of them for some time and one of the elders came to see me and said, 'Jack, there is something different about you - there is something different coming through. What is it? What has happened to you?' So I was able to share with them about the Baptism in the Holy Spirit. They encouraged me to join their leadership group in prayer. So we started to meet together - just three elders and myself to pray. We would just meet to seek the Lord together and to share what the Lord had been saying to us - and God really began to speak. We began to see that little Brethren fellowship move into an experience of renewal. A number of people were baptised in the Spirit and there were also a number of conversions. Some of the people converted had no previous church background and of course they would come into the church and have real difficulty with conforming to the Brethren ways and to the Brethren church. These people were radical Christians and there arose a tension between those who really wanted to follow the Lord and those who wanted to keep to the old thing. Some weren't happy with the free charismatic worship and didn't want to hear about the gifts of the Spirit - it caused all sorts of ripples.

So we sought the Lord about what we should do - eventually we saw that the Lord was calling us to form a house church and to leave the assembly. We asked the Lord to make it a separation that was carried out in love and peace - and it did happen that way. It was a peaceful separation and we told the assembly that we in the leadership were going to start a meeting in the home in a fortnight's time and that we weren't going to try and persuade anybody or try to get anybody to follow us - but that each person would have to seek the Lord for themselves and decide what they were going to do.

The first Sunday we met in the home we had a group of about 30 adults and children. For the next year we just met in that home and the Lord really blessed us during that year. We had about 12 new baptisms and numbers grew until the house was full to overflowing. You could hardly get in on Sunday morning. By that time we also had some links with other independent charismatic fellowships and we saw that they met in school halls. So we decided that that was what we should do as well. I believe at this point we made a mistake as I look back on it now. We moved into the local High School hall and for the next couple of years the blessing and the growth continued because our leadership was united and because we were continuing to seek the Lord.

As we grew and numbers increased - we were getting about 100-120 at the meetings - we found that organisation, plans and programs were beginning to take up a greater and greater part of our time together in leadership - and that prayer, waiting on the Lord and seeking the Lord was getting less. There was more organisation and less prayer.

Also I was aware that we were seeing the early seeds of Denominationalism coming again. As we met in our hall at 10:30 on Sunday morning all the other groups in Wellsford were doing just the same thing. They were meeting in their religious building and we were meeting in our non-religious building. I began to see that we were just another religious group in town. As far as the world was concerned that's what we were - another religious group meeting in their building to go through their little religious program. As we got bigger the possibility of real body life was becoming less and less. It just wasn't possible to have 120 people all share what the Lord was saying to them - we would have been there all day and night as well. We were getting away from where Paul talks in 1 Cor 14:26 "When you come together each one has ..." We were getting away from the possibility of that and instead we had the up front leadership, the up front teaching and the elders doing everything.

So at that point I presented a paper to the elders about what was happening and expressing concern about and pointing out the dangers. I suggested that we go back to the house church thing - that we divide the fellowship into three groups, two in the country and one in town so that we could take the church back to the grass roots again. We did that, yet there wasn't total unanimity in the leadership. They were not totally one about it. So we ended up with two rural groups meeting in homes and the town group continued to meet in that hall. Margaret and I were part of one of the rural groups. We met in homes and just went from home to home. We were meeting three Sundays out of four in the home and one Sunday together with the larger group.

The first time we met together I had been seeking the Lord as to what the direction should be and I had been reading the story of the wedding at Cana as recorded in John Ch 2. This was the wedding that Jesus was invited to with the disciples - and in this wedding the wine began to run out. They began to get concerned so Mary came to Jesus and said, "They have no wine" - and Jesus said to Mary, "What is that to thee, My hour is not yet come" . But Mary went to the servants and pointed Jesus out to them and told them, "Whatever He says to you - do it." Of course you know what happened; Jesus went to the servants and told them to fill some big water pots with water and then draw it out. And when they drew it out and it was wine! Wine like nobody had ever tasted before.

As I read that story I began to see something that was like a total revelation to me. Firstly about the wine. In the first part of the wedding they had wine that was made by human effort - the grapes had to be grown, fertilised, cultivated, harvested, pressed and the wine making process gone through etc. It was wine produced by human effort. And the Lord showed me that this was a picture of one kind of church life. That you could have your plans, your organisation, your programs, your structures etc. It all demanded a great deal of human effort and input and all the rest of it - and with that you could have a good party with the Lord. While the Lord is there you can enjoy a good time with Him and many big, 'successful' churches have been built up that way.

But the Lord showed me the other kind of wine is different. It was produced by a sovereign, divine act of the Lord - transforming the water into wine. Wine that was many times better than the first kind of wine. I am sure everybody at that wedding couldn't stop talking about that wine that was produced. Notice that there was no human effort - all that was required was obedience. Notice also that the Lord spoke to the servants - the lowliest people at the feast. They were the ones who had the privilege of drawing out the wine and distributing it. They were the lowliest, the humblest people at the feast.

Now how did they get to the point of having the new wine? Well, first of all the situation was that the old wine began to run out. And I looked around the churches that I know of - what I'd been hearing and picking up was that the wine had been running out. In churches all around this country there are hundreds if not thousands of Christians who go home from Sunday services with hungry and dissatisfied hearts. They know there is something more. The wine running out and they wonder, 'What are they going to do?'

Well, what had to happen in this story was that they had to come to the point where there was no wine. NO WINE. It was finished! At that point the servants were told - whatever He says, you do it. At that point also notice that the role of Jesus changes from being a guest at the wedding and part of the party to become the Lord and boss. The Lord showed me there are two kinds of church life - the second is so much better - but if we want it, we have to come to the point of ... no wine. If we still have a lot of the old wine, the best thing to do is pour it down the drain and then come to the Lord and say, 'Lord, we have no wine and unless you do something we haven't got anything'.

The night that I shared that with our group the Holy Spirit really touched us, He touched us all. We all got down on our knees before the Lord and after a time of just waiting on Him we began to speak out repentance and all the things we were holding onto .We asked the Lord to teach us and give us the new wine. From that point on when we came together, we didn't organise anybody to lead worship - we didn't organise anybody to take the preaching. We just came together and sought to make Jesus Lord of our gathering.

I didn't find that easy as I was accustomed to doing a lot of the teaching ministry and I found I had to take a very firm discipline on myself and hold myself back. As met together we found that every week was different. We had many different experiences, some weeks we had exuberant worship and praise, sometimes we had intercession take up the main part of our time other times we spent a lot of time just waiting on the Lord. If you're not accustomed to that, it's not easy to handle particularly if you've been an elder or something that. You think - 'Should I pray?' 'Should I read a word? What should I do?'. I'd be thinking like that and the Lord would say, 'Be quiet'. So I'd just keep quiet and then maybe after half an hour or so the silence would be broken and someone would say, 'I just think the Lord is speaking about this ...' Somebody else would say, 'Yes, and the Lord has been saying this to me ...' etc. Something would come out that the Holy Spirit was speaking to us and it would often be something uncomplicated. You didn't need to go home with ten points of a sermon filling your head. The Holy Spirit would be saying one or two things and you had to get hold of that and work it out in your life. We also found that spiritual gifts were beginning to appear in people who would never have exercised them in a large gathering. In particular we had two women who began to have a beautiful, quiet, gentle, prophetic ministry and were giving us real guidance from the Lord. Often very simple.

One day one of the girls was hanging out her washing when she heard a voice and the voice said to her, "Follow Me". When she shared it the next Sunday the Lord renewed that word to us all. The Lord was saying, "Just keep on following after me." There were various words that came which were encouraging us to go on in that way. Now it wasn't always like this. There were times when we didn't have a tremendous time together, but we were learning what it was to make Jesus Lord. As this went on there was a certain tension in our fellowship as a whole particularly in the leadership about the kind of direction that we had taken. The town group were still continuing in the old pattern and here were we out in the country exploring something different. As result of the tension I came under quite a lot of tension and pressure because I felt I had to know from the Lord where to go. There were even suggestions that the leadership should let these people become an independent church and I wasn't happy with that at all. I didn't want to start and be the leader of another group, so there was a lot of tension within me.

One morning I was really quite distressed about where we should go and I went to my study and cried out to the Lord for direction. I had been crying out to the Lord like that for a long time - many years in fact - but now it was all coming to a crisis point. I had been reading in Hebrews Ch.2. about Jesus being the merciful High Priest who was tested in every form like we are and is therefore able to help those who are being tested. I said, 'Lord, I see that I am being tested here - please help me to pass the test.' I had an experience that morning - the intensity of which I find hard to describe. I have known God speak to me on a number of times before. I had known what it was to be awakened in the night and to have God speak to me and have to write down what He was saying. But this was even more real and powerful than that. The Spirit started with the very passage in Hebrews and I sensed the Spirit ask me 'What was the greatest test that Jesus went through - what was the climax of Satan's attack upon Him? I said to Him that I believed it was the Garden of Gethsemene - for when the Lord was in the garden He went through terrible agony - wrestling and sweating like great drops of blood and crying to the Father that if it were possible that this cup should pass from Him. But then Jesus said "Nevertheless not My will but thine be done." This was the climax of all Satan's pressure on the Lord. It was here that Jesus faced the greatest power of Satan and the Spirit said to me - 'What was that about?' Well it was about trying to make Jesus avoid the cross. The enemy was intent on diverting Jesus from the cross. When Jesus said to the Father, 'Not My will but thine be done" - that was the victory. From that point on Jesus went straight to the cross and if you look at the circumstances He was totally in control. And then those who said they wouldn't kill Him on the Passover - killed Him on the Passover because God was in control. Then the Lord said to me, 'The way of Jesus is always the way of the cross.'

Then the Lord drew me to look at Matthew 16 where Jesus asked His disciples, "Who do you say that I am - and Peter answered, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." - and Jesus said to Him, "Blessedd art thou Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood have not revealed this to you but My Father in Heaven" and then Jesus said to him, "On that rook I will build My Church" - the rock of the confession that Jesus is the Son of God. Then immediately after that Jesus began to tell them about the cross and how that He was going to go to Jerusalem and that He would have to suffer and die and then that He would rise again - and what did Peter do? Peter took Him aside and said, "God forbid, Lord, that will never happen to you!" - and then Jesus turned to him and said, "Get behind Me Satan, you are a hindrance to Me - YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND GOD'S WAYS, YOU ARE THINKING LIKE A MAN." The Lord was saying to me that the way of Jesus is the way of the cross. He was saying, 'You have understood the cross in relation to salvation - you have understood it in relation to Jesus dying for your sins - you have understood it in relation to the death of the old man and being crucified with Christ. But you do not understand it in relation to Church life as you know it.' I sensed the Lord was saying to me was, 'I want Church life as you know it and as you have been brought up to it - as you think it is and should be ... to die. I want all that to die. I want it to go to the cross to die - and be buried - and then I will be able to give you something better.'

The continuation of this article (Slaves of the System or Servants of the Spirit - Part 2) is in the next issue, Issue 5.