“Great is Yahweh, and greatly to be praised
in the city of our God, His holy mountain.
Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth,
is Mount Zion… the city of the great King.
God is in her palaces;
He has made Himself known as a stronghold.” (Psalm 48)
This is not a description of a remarkable individual—it is the generational story of a city set upon a hill whose light cannot be hidden. The Spirit is not gathering us to admire the lonely crown on a single human head but to behold the royal diadem in the hand of God—a people, a city, a corporate life in which God Himself dwells.
The psalmist says that the kings of the earth assemble, they pass by, they look upon this city, and they are terrified. They flee in alarm. Panic seizes them. Why? Because there is something in Zion that makes principalities and powers tremble, and it is not the charisma of one gifted leader. It is the sight of a people formed by revelation, ordered by covenant, and indwelt by God.
“With the east wind You break the ships of Tarshish.
As we have heard, so have we seen
in the city of Yahweh of hosts, in the city of our God;
God will establish her forever.”
The ships of Tarshish were the proud merchant vessels of the nations—the systems of trade, power, culture, and prestige. The psalmist says, “As we have heard, so have we seen.” We heard God was mighty. We heard He was a fortress. But then we saw His truth splinter the strongholds of the world the way storm-driven waves break hulls on the rocks. Where did we see it? In the city of our God.
God did not just drop ideas from heaven. He raised up a people, and in that people He brought forth revelations—truths like a hammer—that shattered the ships of this age. Powers that had trafficked in souls for generations suddenly broke apart on the reefs of God’s judgments, right in the midst of Zion.
“We have thought on Your lovingkindness, O God,
in the midst of Your temple…
Let Mount Zion be glad, let the daughters of Judah rejoice
because of Your judgments.”
The world hears “judgment” and thinks only of doom. But Zion rejoices when the ships of Tarshish break because God’s judgments are the splintering of lies that held us captive. When He judges falsehood, He frees us. When He tears down what cannot bear His glory, He makes room for what can.
And then the psalm turns and gives us a charge:
“Walk about Zion,
go around her,
count her towers;
consider her ramparts,
go through her palaces—
that you may tell it to the generation to come.
For this is God,
our God forever and ever;
He will be our guide even unto death.”
“Walk about Zion,” he says. Go all around her. Look carefully. Count, consider, go through. Why? So that you will have a story to tell. If you want to tell your children, your neighbors, your world about God—about His power, His love, His Spirit—then tell them about Zion. Tell them what God has done in a people. “For this is God”—some translations say. To speak of Zion is to reveal what God is really like.
Walking About Our Zion
Not long ago, I spoke with my mother and created a simple list of what God did in our fellowship in just about three years: 1976 to 1978. In that short window, God began to fashion towers and ramparts and palaces in our midst. He began to build a city.
I want you to “walk about Zion” with me and look at what He did.
During that time, for the first time in our fellowship’s journey:
- God unfolded the revelation of His name. Elohim. El Shaddai. Yahweh. Yahshua. Not mere labels, but revelations of His character—His sufficiency, His covenant faithfulness, His saving presence. His name ceased to be a theological term and became a living banner over a people.
- He revealed that ministry was never meant to be a one-man show. God began to speak of a plural eldership, a fullness of ministry shared among brothers. The lonely “Reverend” on the platform began to give way to a team of shepherds.
- Home groups were born. Ministry and discipleship moved from being a pulpit performance to a relational, daily reality. The church discovered that shaping souls is not achieved through programs but through lives intertwined.
- The fivefold ministry came into view. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers—not as titles to be coveted, but as functions to equip the saints. Leadership ceased to be a clerical class and became servants given for the maturing of the Body.
- My father laid aside the religious title he’d been given. He removed “Reverend” from his credit cards and correspondence; he refused the pedestal. “Just call me Brother Blair.” That was not a piece of modesty—it was a declaration that all the systems that create spiritual celebrities had to bow before Christ’s design for a Body.
- Matthew 18 accountability became more than theory. The church was called to live as a discipling Body, not merely an informing pulpit. Nouthetic, Biblical counseling—loving, direct, restorative confrontation—became the expectation, not the exception. The goal was not to keep people comfortable, but to form them to Christ.
- The meetings themselves changed shape. Church gatherings were no longer three songs, a sermon, and a bit of program material. The Spirit called for Body ministry: prophecies, words of knowledge, testimonies, exhortations, songs that God brought forth from His people. “When you come together, each one has . . .” ceased to be a verse we admired and became a way we lived. We weren’t aware of any church that truly functioned like that. Where have you ever been to a place where there is no real gap between what happens on the platform and what happens on the floor, because all of it is one thing in the Spirit of God?
- God spoke about serving one another in the ordinary fabric of life. Supporting widows and orphans ceased to be a sentimental ideal and became a policy, a commitment. Needs were not outsourced to professionals but met by a community that cared for one another as family.
- He gave revelation about children and community. The children no longer disappeared to Sunday school while the adults “had church.” God showed us children should be discipled by their parents in the midst of the people. Sunday school activities were delegated to family settings; children came into the meeting. Then He began to speak of calling the children out through education. A church school was born in New Jersey, and that seed grew into the revelation of home schooling and a redefined relationship with the State. The first pieces of curriculum were written with fear and trembling, but they were the first stones in a new wall.
- He called us to completeness even in the beginnings of life. The Lord stirred hearts about home birth, about caring for one another in pregnancy, birth, and aftercare. Chains of prayer and webs of practical service replaced the distant sterility of industrialized systems. What had been handed over to professionals was taken back into the embrace of the Body.
- We embraced a biblical pattern of diet as a corporate discipline. Not as legalism, but as a way of pursuing health and unity together—severing ourselves from a culture of excess to help establish the culture of Christ in our kitchens as well as our doctrines.
- He called us back to the land. Postage-stamp gardens appeared where previously there had only been lawns. A longing for agrarian rootedness was awakened. It would culminate later in our move to Colorado, but its first fruits were small plots of earth turning under our hands, teaching us again that bread comes from God and not from the supermarket.
- Holiness took on the shape of simplicity. Holiness had long been equated only with modesty of hemline and sleeve. Now the Lord began speaking of simplicity—a turning from fashion as competition. The brothers laid aside three-piece suits and ties. The sisters changed the way they dressed. We stepped out of the fashion race the churches around us were running and chose instead to embody another kingdom.
- Finally, this fellowship resigned from organizational affiliation. It was a costly obedience. It brought slander and persecution, not from atheists but from fellow believers. Yet it was necessary. New wine was coming forth, and old wineskins could not contain it.
Do you see? These are not just organizational decisions. These are towers, ramparts, palaces. These are wells dug in Zion. If all we remember is that “once upon a time, some people left a denomination,” we miss the miracle. You have to walk around Zion and look at what God has actually done.
The New Wine and the Stories We Remember
Think of the Gospels. We are familiar with the man whose daughter was sick. We know the woman with the issue of blood. But why do we know their stories? Because they unfolded in the midst of something far larger.
Jesus was preaching a word about old wineskins and new wine when those people stepped out of the crowd. He was declaring that the Spirit was doing something unprecedented and that the old forms could not hold it. While He spoke, real human lives—Jairus and that desperate woman—became living illustrations of new wineskins and ways of responding to what God was speaking on the earth at that moment.
We love to tell the story of the man and the woman. But their stories only make sense in the light of what God was speaking to the crowd—to the city—about the new wine of the kingdom.
In the same way, yes, all of our testimonies are stories of the gospel—repentance from dead works, faith toward God, being buried with Christ, union with His death, being filled with the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues as the resurrection power of God breaks into our lives. If you don’t have that story, you haven’t yet experienced the full gospel.
But I ask you: If that is your entire story, how is that different from denominal Pentecost? Many had the Holy Spirit before they came here. So what made people leave not just worldly modernity but the mainstream church that was comfortably yoked to it? What made them radically change their lives?
They walked about Zion.
Wells, Walls, Watchmen, and an Altar
Some of you came to this place and discovered a well called love. You had known the word for years. The well had been there in Scripture all along. But its waters had been poisoned by a culture that destroyed the very forms of relationships in which love can survive: marriages, families, covenant communities.
Yet when you walked about Zion—at least this small expression of it—you saw that someone had climbed down into that muddy, poisoned well. Folks had labored to clear out the corruption and reline the inside with stones of truth. The forms of marriage, of fatherhood and motherhood, of church covenant, had been restored. And you said, “This well can still give fresh water. Love can still succeed. Relationships can still last.” You drank, and that became your story.
Others walked about Zion and saw walls—walls still standing. You had wandered through many cities of Israel, many churches of every stripe. You had grown accustomed to seeing ruins: stones thrown down, gates burned with fire, no distinction between the people of God and the world around them.
But here you saw walls of covenant still intact. You saw gates that had not been consumed. You sensed that God must have sent a Nehemiah, a Zerubbabel with a plumb line, to raise up again the walls of commitment for Christ and His bride, and to protect believers bound in covenant love. And you realized that this was what kept the curse from settling on households that refused to mingle with the nations.
Others looked, and on those walls they saw watchmen—but not like the watchmen they had known. Many “watchmen” in the religious world had sung lullabies instead of sounding alarms—melodic love songs that entertained the people and put them to sleep. But here were shepherds who had searched the Scriptures to rediscover what it meant to lay down their lives for the flock. They preached the fivefold ministry not as a theory but as a living pattern. And their trumpets sounded a clear note. People were actually preparing for battle—and winning.
You walked farther and found, in the midst of Zion, an altar of sacrifice. You watched God’s people serve, and something in you felt: this is different. We are used to seeing another altar in the temple of this age—the idol of Molech, where children are offered to the culture so that its image and kingdom might advance on the earth. Why are these children not being burned there—why are they not being fed to the public schools, the dating scene, drugs, the gangs, the violence, the immorality that the world calls normal?
You saw children being raised for God, not for Molech. And something in you cried out, “Maybe my children could be like yours. Tell me the truths that pulled you from the fires of destruction. Tell me what God did in your heart that gave you faith to teach your own children and trust His faithfulness.” And that, too, became part of your story.
Walk further with me through the streets of of Zion—the portion God has entrusted to us. Come through the gates of Zion, and you see craftsmen: men and women who find joy and meaning in their work, artisans and homemakers, weavers and farmers, furniture makers and builders. You hear laughter; you see worship woven into labor. And you realize—many of these people used to be brick makers.
Once, their vocations were little more than cogs in a machine constructing an ever-rising tower called Babel, glued together by the pitch of this world’s economy and ambition. But something has changed. They are no longer making bricks for Pharaoh. Somewhere in Egypt, the words of Exodus and the cry of Moses quickened their hearts. They left, crossed a wilderness, and finally plunged their hands into dark soil in a promised land, saying, “We can root our families here. We can live a different kind of life. We can rediscover a new reality under God.”
And you ask, “Tell me what happened. Tell me about Zion.”
From Heap of Bricks to a House of Glory
Many come from churches that were, as we now see, only heaps of bricks—no order, no form, no true distinction from the world. We called it “church,” but we were simply stacked together in religious piles.
Then God sent master craftsmen. He took fallen stones from ruined houses—our lives, battered and stained with the mortar of old systems—and with the blows of His hammer He chipped away the old bonds. He set each of us as living stones in a spiritual house, joined together by what every joint supplies, until we became a place where He Himself could dwell.
Now, instead of waiting vaguely for “many mansions” in the sweet by and by, people step into a mansion God has already begun to build on earth—a house with many rooms, each with its function, all filled with glory. We are not rivaling the heavenly Jerusalem, but we are tasting it. We are refusing to wait for heaven to begin being the house of God.
This, too, is part of Zion’s story.
So I ask you: when you speak of your testimony, do you merely describe your private experience on “the rivers of Babylon”—where you tried to “have church” in a land of exile? Or do you tell of the city God led you into? Do you speak only of the places you came from, detailing the ruins and the fires of judgment, but never portraying Zion? Or do you make hearts jealous for the city whose builder and maker is God?
Blind to the Miracle—or Carried into It
The disciples themselves once missed the miracle in front of them. After Jesus had fed the five thousand, after He had walked on water, after He spoke of food they did not know of, their minds were still occupied with the bread they had forgotten to bring. They were blind to what God was doing in their midst—something that had never happened in the world before.
When He took a towel and basin and washed their feet, they received the act but missed the meaning. He asked them, “Do you know what I have done to you?” They rejoiced when He performed resurrections and healings. They could shout when the spectacular broke in. But when He reordered their relationships, humbled their ambitions, and called them to be servants of all, they barely understood.
We can be like that. We can enjoy the blessings of a city God is building and yet be blind to the miracle of the city itself. We might want a place at His right or left hand, crowns in a kingdom, without realizing that the great honor is to be a small accomplice in the gospel—a living stone in a city set on a hill that cannot be hidden.
You have not come to a mountain that can be touched, says Hebrews, but to Mount Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem, to the great assembly, to God, the judge of all, to the church of the firstborn. That is not merely future tense. In measure, in foretaste, God has brought us into that reality even now.
So tell me the story of Zion. Tell me the words that snatched your children from the lap of Molech. Tell me not only how the cities you once belonged to were burned and left desolate, haunted by unclean spirits—but tell me the city you found when those cities forsook you. Tell me of the house where glory filled the temple and no flesh could stand, when communion became more than a ritual and God’s presence silenced every human agenda.
Her Salvation Like a Blazing Torch
Isaiah says:
“For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,
and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not keep quiet,
until her righteousness goes forth like brightness,
and her salvation like a blazing torch.”
Notice: her salvation. Christendom has preached for a generation now about individual salvation detached from the city, the commonwealth of God. But Isaiah speaks of Zion’s salvation—a corporate blazing torch. And when I speak of Zion here, I speak not of exclusivity but of our share in the great Zion, the one Body of Christ with expressions scattered across the world.
We do not need more private “decisions for Christ” torn away from the life of His Body. We need Yahweh as our fortress, our stronghold. We need a city on a hill whose light cannot be hidden. We need her salvation to burn like a torch that the nations can see.
You can pluck a tile off the roof, a stone out of the wall, a branch from the vine, and wave it around, but outside of its place in the house, it has no meaning. In the same way, an isolated testimony, detached from the city of God, loses its true glory. It becomes religious self-help. But placed back in the wall, in the vine, in the temple, it reveals Christ and His Body.
“Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God.” We can lose the honor of our origins if we forget what it took to bring us here—the blows of the hammer that freed us from old systems, the revelations that reordered our lives.
Or we can see our lives as one snapshot in the great narrative of the gospel of Jesus Christ—the power of God unto salvation unfolding in history. We can say, “Lord, wherever Your story is told, I just want to be part of that story. Use my life, not as a solitary torch in the dark, but as one flame among a thousand, surrendered to the light of a city.”
Jesus: The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me
When our brother Denny passed away, we sang a song whose refrain still lingers in my heart. It said, in essence: “If anyone ever writes my life story, for whatever reason, I want them to see that Jesus is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Not Jesus as a private spiritual event, commodified to fit an individualistic age. Not “my personal Jesus” as a lifestyle accessory. But Jesus in His Body—Jesus in His fullness, Jesus expressed in a people who together are “the fullness of Him who fills all in all.”
That is my testimony: Jesus is the best thing that ever happened to me. The only thing worth telling in my story is what He has done—His cross, His Spirit, His people, His city. I will tell of failures and triumphs, of battles lost and won, but I will tell them all in order to take you by the hand and walk about Zion with you. To show you wells that still give living water, walls that still stand, watchmen who still sound a clear trumpet, an altar where lives are still laid down in love. And while He has done like wonders in countless communities and generations, I get to tell the story of what He has done in ours. Many expressions around the world are moving toward that crowning culmination moment of ultimate oneness that we all anticipate and pray for.
I want you to see that there is hope and a future, a kingdom descending from heaven, a city whose builder and maker is God, so that you, too, can stand before it and cry, “Grace to it, grace to it!”
For Zion’s sake, I will not keep silent.
For Jerusalem’s sake, I will not keep quiet
until her righteousness shines out like brightness
and her salvation like a blazing torch.
This is God,
Our God,
Forever and ever.
He will be our guide, even unto death.