John G. Lake Article Page 1 of 4

"Remember the days of old,consider the years of all generations" Deut 32:7 P. Keith Davis Page 1 of 4
This admonition, given to Israel through Moses, required the children of Israel to examine their past and gain understanding about the Lord’s ways. This same admonition has even greater value today as we challenge ourselves to understand our Christian heritage and learn about God’s sovereignty and His dealings with man. While we do not want to live in the past, we can examine and extract from the past, nuggets of wisdom concerning God’s ways with His church.

Since the days of the Reformation, the Lord has brought a progressive revelation of Himself to the church. This revelation has been line upon line and precept upon precept continually unfolding fresh revelation of Himself and His Word. This process is for the purpose of restoring the church to her former apostolic authority as realized in the first century church. As we consider the prior generations, we can relish the revelation given to them and also learn from their mistakes in order to avoid those same mistakes in our generation.

True Apostolic Ministry

Apostolic ministry can be defined as Jesus Christ manifested and abiding in His church doing the same works through His church that He did while living on the earth in human form. True apostolic ministry is a fulfillment of John 14:12, with the Holy Spirit performing the same works through the church that He did through the life and ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ. There is a ministry of perfection coming to the church that will prepare her for the return of the Bridegroom. However, before we can begin to move toward this ministry, we must first "return back to our future" and realize the complete restoration of biblical apostolic ministry. This ministry will call out and separate the church from the world so that she can be prepared in perfection for the Bridegroom. In Joel 2:25, the Lord makes a wonderful promise to restore all that the palmer worm, cankerworm, caterpillar, and the locust have destroyed (KJV). These four stages of a maturing locust are used to prophetically symbolize the way that the spirit of the antichrist would attack the church.

The early apostolic church is like a tree that the Lord planted and nurtured to full fruit- bearing maturity. The spirit of the antichrist is compared to a locust which devours first the fruit, then the leaves, the bark and finally gnawing into the very heart of the tree in order to destroy it. In church history, this final stage culminated in the era known as the Dark Ages.

The Lord’s promise to restore the apostolic church began through the ministry of Martin Luther and has now matured to a level so that this generation can expect the complete restoration of biblical apostolic ministry. This is our quest: to return back to the future.When our Lord was on the earth, He chose the 12 apostles to groom and prepare for the birth of His apostolic church. For three and one-half years, He planted the seed of the Word of God within their hearts. When the day of Pentecost had fully come, the Holy Spirit descended upon them and watered the seed within their hearts, producing the life of Christ and the apostolic church. This same process must be realized in this church age as well.

Tokens of Apostolic Ministry

Throughout church history, there have been examples of true apostolic ministry raised up by the Lord within the church. These individuals attained a mature stature qualifying them as a dwelling place for the Spirit of God through whom the Lord was able to function and do His works. They were men and women so thoroughly filled with the Holy Spirit that they exercised the Lord’s dominion over demons, disease and death. These saints were true expressions of the life of Christ with His divine nature radiating through them--men and women who were crucified with Christ and lived by the faith of the Son of God. Tremendous lessons can be learned by examining the lives of these spiritual champions in order to determine the secrets of their success with God. One example of true apostolic ministry can be found in the life of John Graham Lake. (con't.)