He said to them, “All too well you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your tradition.
—Mark 7:9

The walls of Jericho have fallen! Hallelujah! Today the Lord has begun to set Christians free from the shackles of tradition and to lead them out of their “church boxes”. What am I talking about? About the fact that many can no longer listen to what is preached in churches and bend their necks to have an unbearable yoke hung on them. Believers have a question: “I can’t go to ‘my’ church any more. What should I do? Where can I find a church where Jesus is preached?” I have good news for you: “You don’t need to climb back into a box. You are the temple of the living God.” So what is happening? The Lord is bringing the church back to its roots, to its original purpose, which we can find in the book of Acts.

I want to say straight away that I am not against the church. The church is the body of Christ, and my wife and I came to Ukraine with the desire to start a church, only it never worked out the way we wanted, because we didn’t understand that He was saying: “you are My church”. And thank God it didn’t work out! The problem is that when someone starts a church, everything follows a certain plan, or rather traditions, and not the Word of God. To make it clearer, I’ll ask one of the questions that troubled me for a very long time: “Where in the Bible is it written that a church service must follow this format — praise, announcements and testimonies, sermon and communion?” In all churches, including the latest charismatic ones, the service follows this pattern, and all because the foundation of church building is traditions that arose in the Catholic Church in the time of Emperor Constantine. In Acts I see something quite different: “And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers” [Act.2:42].

The Lord drew my attention to an interesting “coincidence”. When we had a house church in America, several people came to us who also attended another church on Sundays. They didn’t agree with the teachings preached in that church, but for some reason they kept going there. Strange, since with us there was the teaching they fully agreed with, and fellowship, and the breaking of bread, and prayer. Everything needed, as they say — so why go there? I said coincidence, because the story repeated itself here, in Ukraine, and the explanation they gave [though no one asked them], both there and here, was the same: “I only go there for the praise.” Interestingly, Acts 2:42 says nothing about praise. I’m not against praise, because I praise the Lord in spirit and in truth, as Jesus said, and I listen to songs and sing not only on Sundays. As the Lord showed me, they were simply afraid to step out of the box, or the tradition they grew up in.

Traditions are the leaven of the Pharisees, which Jesus warned His disciples about, and which the woman [the church] hid in the flour [the Word of God] until all the dough [the teaching] was leavened. And when everything turned sour, the power left too. Notice that all the new revivals began really powerfully — there was power, and the Spirit moved — but then everything gradually died, because people were sat down on benches and locked into a box, or a tradition. Many, I think, have heard of the man of faith Smith Wigglesworth and the miracles the Lord worked through him. He was one of the founders of the Pentecostal movement, and in those days many moved in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Go to any Pentecostal church today — will you find everyone there moving in the gifts of the Holy Spirit? They may not baptise infants, and there is no Pope, but it looks more and more like the Catholic Church. And all because the foundation of the church was not Jesus and not the Word of God, but traditions.

In today’s church there are many other traditions that there is no room to write about now, but if you want to see with fresh eyes what the church looked like after the Lord’s resurrection and the disciples’ baptism with the Holy Spirit, just open the book of Acts and read it not through the lens of traditions and of what you were told or saw in church, but relying on the Lord. You will be surprised how little today’s church resembles that church, free of leaven. Some may object: “God makes all things new”, but “Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever”, and so is His body, and everything that was revealed in new denominations was long-forgotten old things, and then it faded, because from the start they never got completely rid of the old leaven.

At first the devil tried to destroy believers by killing martyrs, but when that didn’t work, with the help of Emperor Constantine he put the church in a box behind walls and separated the church from the street and from society. Thank God the Lord has broken down the walls, and now His disciples are beginning to come out of the boxes of slow decline and traditions, living in the Spirit and in truth.