For those visiting here this morning, my name is Dana Cong, and I come from Long Island, up in New York—down here to get away from the cold weather.
I came here last weekend for the planning session, and then last night I spoke a little bit on evangelism in the church. This morning I have yet again something else to share.
Before I begin, I would like to express my thanks to all of you who know me and who prayed for me while I was in India for a period of ministry. I really am thankful for your prayers. I believe I came home by airplane rather than in a pine box, probably because of your prayers and the faithfulness of our God.
I had a tough time out there physically, but it was a fruitful time spiritually. Being around here this week, I have recuperated some strength and certainly received spiritual encouragement through being with my precious brother, Ernie Heil, fellowshipping with all of you, and being with my brother Stephen.
So I am glad to be here. I am glad that I can worship together with all of you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is a precious thing to be in God’s house.
I would like to share some things that are simple—actually, some things that are already the experience of your life. But I believe, now as I get older, in a good dose of preventive medicine. I think while things run smoothly, it is time to share about keeping things in a proper tone.
So I have a burden to share that you will probably guess after we read some verses of Scripture together. I would like first to read Psalm 133.
Truly, one of the most precious and beautiful psalms—and so short that when I was taking Hebrew, I actually could translate this whole thing in Hebrew. I was glad; I felt quite good about that.
Behold, how good and how pleasant it is
For brethren to dwell together in unity!It is like the precious oil upon the head,
Coming down upon the beard,
Even Aaron’s beard,
Coming down upon the edge of his robes.It is like the dew of Hermon,
Coming down upon the mountains of Zion;
For there the Lord commanded the blessing—
Life forever.
Perhaps some of you were not surprised that we would turn to John 17. We will begin reading in verse 20. We know this is the prayer of our Lord Jesus before He went to the cross—for His disciples, and for those disciples after these disciples.
I do not ask in behalf of these alone,
But for those also who believe in Me through their word;
That they may all be one;
Even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee,
That they also may be in Us,
That the world may believe that Thou didst send Me.And the glory which Thou hast given Me I have given to them,
That they may be one, just as We are one;
I in them, and Thou in Me,
That they may be perfected in unity,
That the world may know that Thou didst send Me,
And didst love them, even as Thou didst love Me.
This is a very wonderful and practical exhortation of the Apostle Paul along the same matter.
I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord,
Entreat you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called,
With all humility and gentleness,
With patience, showing forbearance to one another in love,
Being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.There is one body and one Spirit,
Just as also you were called in one hope of your calling;
One Lord, one faith, one baptism,
One God and Father of all,
Who is over all and through all and in all.But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift.
Therefore it says,
“When He ascended on high,
He led captive a host of captives,
And He gave gifts to men.”Now this expression, “He ascended,” what does it mean except that He also had descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is Himself also He who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.
And He gave some as apostles,
And some as prophets,
And some as evangelists,
And some as pastors and teachers,
For the equipping of the saints for the work of service,
For the building up of the body of Christ;
Until we all attain to the unity of the faith,
And of the knowledge of the Son of God,
To a mature man,
To the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him, who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by that which every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.
Father, we see before us such an ideal of oneness. We see in the Godhead such a fulfillment of oneness, and we see in Your purpose this oneness for us as well.
Now, as we share this word together, we pray that this precious Spirit, who brings unity to all of us in the bond of peace, may take us and mold us even from this oneness of Spirit into the unity of the faith.
Even as we share together, we pray that Your Spirit will do an inner work in our lives toward this end, that we may fully testify and represent the absolute and delightful unity that we find to be Your work here upon this earth. We pray in the name of Jesus, our precious Lord. Amen.
In the church today, the Lord desires His testimony in fullness. Until we all come to the stature of the fullness of Christ, we notice here in Ephesians 4, there is a fullness for us. We have been saved by His grace, and He desires us to enter into a fullness.
What does that mean? The testimony of our Lord Jesus in fullness.
It means when the church gathers together, we know His presence is here. It means that He is able to speak into our midst when we gather together. It means that He brings us correction, and He brings us life, and that we live out of His life.
When we gather to worship, we worship out of His life. When we come to pray, we pray out of His life. In other words, His presence is manifest upon us.
This testimony can only come to us in fullness as we maintain the unity that the Lord gives us even from our new birth.
In recent days, as I have already mentioned, I traveled to India. One of the most disappointing and heaviest burdens that I took away from that place was that, in a number of assemblies there, a very deep, seemingly irreconcilable division has come.
Some of these saints, who used to meet together for thirty years, now meet apart from each other—across the street and in competition with one another.
They are doing this for various doctrinal reasons, or for various reasons of leadership, without realizing that by this division they have destroyed the very testimony of the Lord Jesus that brought them together.
All those years they maintained the unity, but in relatively short history they have given these things up for the sake of a position—a stance. In doing so, even the churches around them see that there is no testimony there anymore.
There used to be testimony there. Even though there was great diversity in the assembly, and even differences of opinion, there used to be a testimony that the Lord had done a marvelous work in drawing so many different people together. But now they are separating on more homogeneous lines.
In the process, the testimony can never come to fullness in that present condition.
So when I see such things as that, a conviction grows in me regarding simple things. I am a doer. I love to serve the Lord. I love to see the Lord accomplish things, even in the house of God. But I see more and more that it is an absolute priority for us to hold to this unity of the Spirit that we have been given together.
This is a precious inheritance that we have. Because we have had it and it has been ours since our new birth, sometimes we hold it lightly or take it for granted. But it is the very basis upon which we can testify of the oneness of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit—and the oneness we have with Him.
Without that essence, what do we have?
Jesus, in John 17, prayed that we might be one as He and the Father are one. Up in heaven, the angels are all agog at how one the Father and the Son are. They are really essentially one, and in fellowship one. They are one in agreement, one of mind, and one of purpose. There is a tremendous oneness between the Father and the Son.
Then, by God’s grace, He comes down and touches us, and we are born again by the Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. This Holy Spirit is also one with the Father and the Son. As soon as we are born of the Spirit, we become one with God the Father and the Son, and with one another.
It is given to us when we are born again. We did not have to do anything except come to Jesus, and He makes us one.
I remember when I got saved at twenty years old. I was so happy to meet every Christian who was born again. I did not know whether they were Baptist or Methodist or what they were. But when I met a real Christian, I sensed some kind of intuitive oneness. Such a wonderful thing.
From our new birth, we are given this unity of the Spirit.
But if we want to come to fullness, there is this matter of the unity of the faith described here. Paul talks about the unity of the Spirit in Ephesians 4:3: we need to be diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
But then he says in verse 13, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith.” Here is a goal ahead of us: the unity of the faith.
We start with this unity of the Spirit. We maintain this unity of the Spirit. Then we proceed toward the attainment of this unity of the faith.
What a precious possession this is. Imagine us living in the good of Psalm 133.
Psalm 133 is actually a picture of how precious it was when the saints came together in Jerusalem at feast time. These were the Songs of Ascents that were sung as the saints proceeded to the feast.
These were joyous times. They gathered three or four times a year, and when they gathered in Jerusalem, of course, Jerusalem was a beautiful city. The temple was all of gold, and you could smell the lamb cooking on the altar from miles away. It was an exciting time. It was a time of abundance.
Most of the children of Israel had to eat simply in their homes. They did not have much money. But on those feast occasions, they ate. They had a feast. They worshiped. The old man in the house would recount the story of the Passover, or of the tabernacle, or whatever the particular occasion was. All the children, uncles, daughters, cousins, relatives, and in-laws were together.
A marvelous unity—maybe not always so marvelous! But the picture is how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together at feast time in God’s city. There is just nothing like it.
In the days of David, and even in the days of Solomon, there was nothing like the worship of the saints when they gathered together in Jerusalem. Their worship was so much higher than the worship of the Canaanites and the people around them, who were cutting themselves and offering bribes to their gods.
Here came these children of Israel gathered together, trumpets sounding and psalms being sung to a God who could not be seen but was adored. There was truly great worship together, and they found themselves together in unity.
There was abundance, displayed when the oil poured down from Aaron’s head, right down off his beard—so much oil, just poured-out oil of abundance. And precious dew: God’s provision day by day.
This is the kind of unity the Lord desires for our living.
But, you know, we have an enemy. He does not like this kind of unity. He likes to divide us along the lines of temperament, personality, experience, doctrine, and all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle things.
He comes along and makes differentiations. Here in the body of Christ, we are all the same. There is no race recognized by God. There is no spiritual level, in that sense, that makes one different from another.
But we get hold of experiences, and we say, “Oh, well, I have had an experience. I can do somersaults in the Spirit. Can you?” Now we find that we have the somersault people and the people who just sit in chairs. We have two levels now.
Or whatever kind of subtle way or tool the devil can find. Mind you, sometimes the devil does not have to work too hard at division, because our own flesh is so ambitious, grasping, and full of ourselves. The devil can pretty well sit back, and the saints will let fly and have a good fight all on their own.
Paul, knowing this, writes to the church in Ephesus. At the beginning, he confesses that they were absolutely one. They loved one another. They had love and faith toward the Lord. But he says, “Now you need to walk worthy in this.”
The fact of the matter is, in Ephesus there were Jews and Gentiles. That could be a cause of great division. So Paul stakes down the ground: the barrier between Jews and Gentiles has been removed, and now you are one.
If we do nothing, we can maintain the unity of the Spirit. But we will not come to fullness. The Lord wants us to grow, and when we grow, we grow into the unity of the faith.
What is this unity of the faith? It is a very comprehensive term. It means probably everything to do with our faith. We find the oneness together.
It comes at the same time that we come to a full knowledge of the Son of God. It comes at the same time that we come to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. This is something we attain to. It is a goal we have ahead of us. It is something we have to move toward.
Practically speaking, I understand the unity of the faith in this way as it works itself out.
We start with our unity in the Spirit. Paul expresses this in Ephesians 4:4-6. We are one body. We have one Spirit, and we are called in one hope. We have one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father over all.
That is the unity of the Spirit that we have from the moment we become Christians. We stand in that unity.
Then we begin to grow together. The Lord wants to express Himself through His body, and we have to learn how to allow the Lord to express Himself through the body. This is a process that has to be worked out in our assembly together.
As we work out this process, He brings us to a unity of the faith and a maturity together. We have the unity of the Spirit that we begin with, and we have the unity of the faith that we move toward.
It is a process. It is a hammering out of the Lord’s presence in our midst. How do we express the Lord? How do we express Him as we gather together? Just exactly what are we supposed to be doing?
It is the Lord’s life that is to be expressed. As we gather for this, the Lord teaches us. We hold fast to the Head. We grow up into the Head. As we hold fast to the Head, we begin to work out our life together.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. Most of us know Acts 2:42. Right after the Day of Pentecost, the Christians continued steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers.
Now, we all know that if we are today a vibrant testimony of Jesus Christ, assembled together as the church of God, we should also continue steadfastly in these four things.
But just as an example, how do we gather together for corporate prayer? I look in Philippians and in 1 Corinthians to see if there is something that spells out exactly what we are supposed to do.
Should we have some songs first, or just start right out with prayer? Should we worship, or should we just take up a list? Should we not have a list, but just move as we feel some kind of flow? Just exactly how should we work this thing out?
I keep looking, but I just do not find a one, two, three, four. Many assemblies establish a one, two, three, four, but hopefully the Lord leads us and teaches us how to pray corporately.
The principle of prayer is something we all agree on, but the actual working out of corporate prayer is unique to the particular situation we are in. This is Richmond, and the Lord wants to work out the corporate prayer meeting in a way that He works it out here. It may be different from the way they work it out in India or New York.
Basically, it is the same. In principle, it is the same. There is even great similarity, but there is difference.
Or let us take worship. How do we worship? Should we have instruments? Some say, “No instruments.” Some say, “Yes, we should have instruments.” Some say we should sing all the time; some say we should pray all the time. We have all of these ideas.
But the Lord has a living way of worship, and we need to learn this living way. Because it is a living way, with time it may change. We cannot develop a practice and say, “Okay: two hymns, announcements, offering, sermon, and we go home,” because maybe it will change.
Worship in India, again, may be different than here. As a matter of fact, when I was there, it was quite different. They had a worship time, and one of the leaders always stood up in front. He would say, “Okay, now brothers, you pray and worship.” Then he would say, “Oh no, sister, do not worship right now. Only brothers worship.”
Then he would say, “Okay, now sisters, you worship. No brothers—no more worship over there. Sisters worship. Now you in the back, you can worship. Sisters in the front, be quiet. Sisters in the back, worship.”
During the whole worship time, he was saying these kinds of things. You would say, “Boy, this is mighty strange.” But they had two thousand people there, and he was trying to encourage everybody.
Then he said, “Okay, the young people who have just been baptized, you worship. Nobody else worship—only the baptized.” He made room for the children to worship.
Then I went to another meeting, and they were worshiping. A man stood up in front. Of course, he was talking in a language I could not understand, but he kept calling out. Then one of the brothers told me that because I had come to speak, about twelve assemblies had gathered together there.
He was calling out an assembly name and saying, “Now all brothers and sisters from such-and-such an assembly, you worship now.” Then he would call another assembly. Finally, the home group would worship. It was quite different.
The whole point is: is it the Lord’s living way? This is what we have to find.
Even in terms of the breaking of bread, should we use wine or grape juice? Should we use little cups and Baptist chicklets, or should we use one loaf of bread and one cup for everybody to drink from? What should we do?
We have to work these things out together. The Lord leaves these things sufficiently vague, if I might put it that way, that we have to seek the Lord together. We have to find His way together, and sometimes we have to adjust that way as we go along.
In this process, we come into a unity and then through a fullness. How the Lord delights to see His saints receiving teaching, fellowshipping, breaking bread, and praying.
How does fellowship work out? Where do you find it? What should you do? Do you need Friday nights, groups one, two, three, and four? Or do you need it all together? If we met in six groups in Huntington, there would be one person in each group.
Where I live, we have a smaller group of people, but that would never work. The Lord says, “I am the Head. Hold fast to Me. Ask Me what you should do.” Then He begins to work these things out.
If we maintain the unity of the Spirit, the Lord enables us to come into the unity of the faith as we hammer out in our practice the way He wants us to walk for the present time.
When a group first comes together, sometimes we have to find what we often call emergency measures. For example, when a group first comes together, many times there are more little children than adults. We need to teach the children, but who is a teacher? Everybody has been saved only in the last two years.
So we do something. Sisters may be better for the younger children, and brothers may rotate with the teenagers. This is an emergency measure. We have to do something.
Then the Lord takes up the issues one by one. He says, “Okay, no more emergency measure with teaching the children. Now let us pray and find out who the Lord has gifted to teach the children.”
Likewise with leadership: perhaps you have had a male free-for-all for a couple of years. Now, do you see that there are some brothers who have gifts of leading and varying responsibility? Issue by issue, the Lord takes it up and says, “Now let us find out the living way.”
It is important when He takes up an issue that we follow it through and find a way to proceed. I am very happy when I am invited to come here and share something about evangelism, because it says to me that the Lord is stirring you regarding evangelism.
Whether what I shared last night helps you or not, the basic point is that the Lord is stirring you. Now He is saying, “Okay, let us find a living way.”
When we first come together over such things, we have a whole host of different ideas. This is part of the diversity. In Ephesians 4, after Paul says, “Here is the unity of the Spirit: one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” he says in verse 7, “But each one of us has been given a different grace.”
Let us say we are taking up the matter of evangelism. How should we reach out? We all have different ideas—a hundred ideas.
Some say, “We should evangelize through music.” Well, guess who they are? Maybe the musicians.
Some people say, “What we need is a coffeehouse. We can all kind of lay back and rap awhile.” Well, guess who that is? That is the lazy-bum young people. They like to have coffeehouses.
Others say, “Let us have a straight-out, cold gospel meeting. Bring people in, tell them they are nasty sinners and need to get saved.” Somebody else says, “No, we need plenty of singing, a little entertainment, and some drama.”
So we pile in a hundred different ideas. A lot of times it is from our background. When we bring in that kind of baggage, we say, “Okay, let us take up this issue.” We begin to pray, and we get nowhere—nada—because we want our own way too much.
That stifles the process, and nothing comes out on the other end. It gets bottlenecked somewhere. There is a traffic jam of fleshly ideas, and the Lord cannot give us a living way. So we circle around the wilderness.
Two years later, we come back and say, “You know, we need to do something about evangelism.” Now we pile in only eighty-five ideas this time, because some of the young people got older and left off the coffeehouse.
Well, you get the point.
It is in this process that we forget about maintaining the unity of the Spirit. We get charged up with our deep burdens, convictions, experiences, and ideas.
I graduated from college, and I was in the thousand-watt Christian Full Gospel Fellowship. We were doing everything zippity-doo-dah, and three hundred people got saved the first year. We prayed all night. So I come into the assembly and say, “We want to have evangelism. How should we do it?” I bring in that idea.
But it is a little too radical for older people who cannot stay up all night and pray. So what happens? We have collisions with one another. We have conflicts.
Here is where Paul says, “Look, when you are working out the unity of the faith, you have to bear with one another. Be diligent to preserve this unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, even when you have these differences.”
There is nothing wrong with having differences. The key is to lay them down, to bear with one another, and to say, “Now, Lord, not my will; let Thine be done.”
Maybe He will start with an emergency measure, or maybe He will give us some living way. Maybe He will raise up some people with an evangelistic burden who will help lead us in what we should do. But in any case, we cannot split off and separate over issues like how to worship or how to pray.
We have to endeavor to keep this precious unity of the Spirit that we have together in the bond of peace.
There is one brother I heard who described it this way. It is a little play on words, and if it is too complicated for you, scrap it.
He says we have two things: church business and the business of the church.
Church business is the ministry of the church, the teaching of Sunday school, and the leadership of the church. But the business of the church is to love one another and maintain the unity of the Spirit.
Whenever church business conflicts with the business of the church, church business has to be stopped, and the business of the church has to be taken care of.
When we are ministering, serving, or trying to lead, and someone gets hurt, or there begins to be some kind of division, then we need to table for a moment what we are doing and deal with the most important matter: maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
Paul calls this, in verse 2, longsuffering. Sometimes we do suffer. Sometimes when we do not do anything about evangelism, some people suffer. But we must suffer until we can come to something together that the Lord wants us to do now.
Individually, you can do something about it. But as a corporate matter, we have to wait for one another.
When we wait for one another, we come into some aspect of the Lord in worship, evangelism, or prayer that has fullness to it. Why fullness? Because the diversity has found a single way. In the midst of that single way, there is a diversity of expression.
It takes a longer time to find the unity of the faith in a particular matter. But when we find it, we find it with fullness.
Then we do not have divisions. We do not have the worship side of the church and the traditional side of the church. We have one church. We have agreed before the Lord on a specific way, and we all feel that this is the Lord’s way for us right now.
Can you imagine Jews and Gentiles taking up such issues? Paul never wrote down exactly, “A, B, C: do this, do that, do the other thing.” The Jews and Gentiles had to thrash things out.
The Gentiles might say, “Let us have a love feast. Let us bring in a big roasted pig.” The Jews might say, “No, no, no, no, no. Let us have bitter herbs.” The Gentiles would say, “We hate pickles and all these things.”
But they had to find a living way.
The temperament of the Jew and the Gentile was very different—their customs and everything. Yet Paul says, “Now you need to maintain the unity of the Spirit until you can come to a unity of the faith in this matter. Do not you dare split up and say, ‘That settles it. We will have a Jewish meal in the right fellowship hall and a Gentile meal over in the left fellowship hall.’”
That is why, even with young people, the Lord is not satisfied just to have a young people’s group completely detached from assembly life. Young people can get together and have fellowship; it encourages them. But in the end, fullness in the assembly is when young and old all worship.
Then we say, “Oh, this is marvelous. We are a family. We are one.” The age barrier and generation gap are overcome.
We forbear. We wait with one another. The Lord brings this kind of fullness.
There is another matter I would like to bring up in Ephesians 4 because it deals with this particular issue. If we are to come into fullness as the body of Christ, as the testimony of our Lord Jesus, there must be a real spiritual unity between the ministry and the body of Christ.
Paul talks about the ministries given in verse 11: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. But then we notice in verse 16 that the whole body is fitted and held together by that which every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part.
How is the church going to come to fullness and maturity? Two things are essential in this passage.
One is that we need ministry: the ministry of the Word, and the ministry of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers, in order to come to this kind of fullness. These gifts are given to us because, when Christ ascended on high, He poured these gifts out upon us that He might fill all things. This is part of His provision for fullness.
We need this.
But at the same time, we also need everybody in the body of Christ to be faithful to minister the supply that they have. We cannot come to fullness if we merely have a ministry-laden situation.
We cannot lean over on one side or the other. We have to maintain a real unity and combination of ministry and body life if we want to come to fullness.
Historically, this has been a real problem. I must say that perhaps the ones most at fault are the workers or those in ministry. Men in ministry love to minister. If you give them room, they will minister all the time.
Every meeting, they will minister. They will go to the small-area group, and they will minister. The next thing you know, people are ministering and teaching and everything, and the church becomes ministry-centered.
They put the rostrum in the middle. The church sings fewer and fewer songs, takes up an offering for the minister, and the minister preaches all the time. You even have a prayer meeting, and what that really means is forty-five minutes of the minister carrying on and fifteen minutes of prayer.
The more the ministry overwhelms the church, the more the body recedes into the background. Next thing you know, the body is just people warming chairs and giving offerings. But where is the body life?
Many times in many churches, it is almost all run from the front. Even what they call worship is led entirely from the front. You go to some assemblies, and the minister calls out the song numbers and leads the singing. You say, “Is there anybody else here?”
Then he sings, gets up, turns around, brings his wife up, and they do a special number. They take up the offering plate, and he takes it down the aisle and back to make sure you are putting in enough. Then he preaches.
Well, you get the picture.
We cannot come to fullness if all we have is a mouth in the body.
But, on the other hand, brothers and sisters who gather together as the body of Christ need to minister. Here is where faith comes in. We need living faith to offer this joint of supply.
Which problem came first: the takeover by the ministers, or the abdication by the body? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
We find that this problem developed simultaneously. Sometimes you had aggressive workers who overwhelmed the situation, so the saints backed off. Sometimes the workers did not overwhelm, but they kept waiting and waiting, and nothing happened. The saints became more passive and more passive, until the workers finally said, “For the sake of God, I have to fill in the gap.”
When the servants are always filling in the gap, we run into problems.
It even happens when we have worship. The tendency is for the mature saints to overwhelm the younger or newer ones. We really cannot let that happen.
But at the same time, what are you supposed to do? Have a brother stand up and say, “Okay, no mature saints pray. Only young ones right now. Come on.” We cannot do that, because we do not have to do that. The Spirit is doing that.
The Spirit is trying to restrain some of us who are blimps with hot air, and trying to encourage those who are younger in the Lord: “Come on now.”
Many of you who sit there and worship every Sunday get heart palpitations. You are taking nitroglycerin tablets, and it is just because you are not obeying.
Almost every year up in New York, I can tell you what happens. The young people come home from Pennsylvania or the Richmond conference, on fire. They get into the meeting and are the first ones up, worshiping: “Oh, thank You. Praise You.”
By September, three of them are carrying on. By November, they are in the last row. By December, they are almost asleep. They backed up, you see, and they should not.
They need to be part of the oneness of the body of Christ. You cannot ask the mature ones to stop, because many times all that would do is produce a great vacuum.
Which came first, the overwhelming or the abdication? I say that just as the problem is simultaneous, the solution is simultaneous.
We need to be sensitive to the Spirit. Especially those young in the Lord, in order for us to have fullness, need to ask the Lord, “Lord, I do not have much to give, but is there something I can say to glorify Your name?”
When young people come in and offer a short prayer, it touches the life of our worship so much because it is usually so honest and sincere. There is none of the great language of heaven thrown in. It is just really real.
It even makes the language of heaven from the mature ones sound all the better. We need this kind of fullness, and so everyone needs to be faithful.
For the sake of teaching, sometimes we talk about the work and the church. You have heard this: the work and the church. But actually, that has to be absolutely one. Our attitude needs to be one.
The workers need to see that the goal is for the church to grow in maturity to where it can build up itself in love. They should not be so self-involved in ministry that they do not give opportunity for the body to grow. This is self-defeating.
The old saying is that workers in ministry need to work themselves out of a job—able to take up and minister and worship and pray in such a way that there does not have to be so much ministry in the front.
This is what we call a safe worker. He is not trying to grab hold of something. He really wants to see the body of God built up.
Usually that is the heart of all workers. You could survey all the servants of God and ministers, and they would all say that is what they want in their heart. But many times they do not realize how much they intervene when the Lord is trying to encourage the body of Christ.
At the same time, the body of Christ needs to recognize that fullness cannot be attained unless there is the ministry of the Word and ministry in our midst.
We need to pray about this. I really feel we need to pray. We need to pray for laborers in this matter of evangelism. Part of our burden should not simply be, “How can we reach out?” We should pray, “Lord, raise up some laborers, even from among us.”
We probably need some evangelists to help us. The same is true with prophetic ministry.
It is quite wonderful that every year at the Richmond conference it is almost decided beforehand that Brother Stephen and Brother Lance are going to share. I think that is good. But sometimes I am burdened that we have the same list of six men to choose from. May the Lord raise up more men with prophetic vision who have the same burden to see the body of Christ built and the testimony of Jesus come to fullness.
We need more. If we had more, we would have greater fullness.
God has provided for you in a wonderful way here in Richmond. You have many brothers apt to teach and workers in your midst. Brother Ernie Heil is up in Central Jersey, and Brother Matt Graham is over in Pennsylvania, in Beaver Falls. This is wonderful.
Maybe this group will become like the Moravians. I will come here some Sunday a year from now, and there will only be fifty people in the assembly. I will say, “Where is everybody?” And you will say, “Well, we have a hundred and fifty people teaching and sharing here and there.”
Three-quarters of the Moravians became missionaries at one point. Well, may it be. But the Lord needs to raise up these kinds of ministries—not only here, but in many places.
There are many fellowships and assemblies of God’s people where they do not have ministry of the Word, per se. They have brothers who teach devotionally, but they need this kind of building work. We should pray about that.
The body needs to pray for that. It does not just happen, because what the Lord wants to do is raise up these brothers and sisters through the body. That is the only way they can possibly ever hope to be safe.
A safe brother understands body life. The cross has worked on him because, when he was just a member of the body of Christ, he also had to suffer long with everybody else. He had to have his ideas drained down on the ground when the assembly went another way. He has to learn the cross.
We cannot simply invite people in from anywhere, especially brothers who have not seen some of these things that are precious to us. A ministry that does not understand the cross can damage the vision without even understanding it, simply by preaching emphases in certain ways.
But we do need brothers. We need prophetic ministry. We need shepherds. We really need to pray about shepherds more and more. Many people need help. They need to learn how to hear the Lord’s voice, and we need shepherds raised up.
This is a mutual respect, one for another: the body praying for ministry to be raised up, and always eager to hear what the Lord has to say.
I commend you on that. When I hear who has been through here in the last couple of months, it seems everybody comes through here and speaks. It is amazing. You have a precious connection.
That is part of the fullness too: to have connection with other assemblies and other people through ministry, through hearing what is going on, and through praying for one another.
It is a shame, but occasionally some fellowships say, “No, no, no. We just want to be on our own.” Sometimes they even close the door to ministry from the outside. Inevitably, they isolate themselves, become inward, and in the end become weak.
We need this fellowship with one another. This matter of having brothers in—even like myself—to share is wonderful. I pray that within the body of Christ people could understand the fullness that comes when we have this kind of connection.
But when we have this kind of connection and fullness, it takes more grace on your part. Every other worker you have involved and come through takes more grace for you to put up with us.
It also takes more meetings. You have more meetings than anywhere else that I know. Last night, I saw people dragging into the Saturday-night meeting. There we go. We just had one Friday. I think we had a Thursday meeting. What happened Wednesday night?
But if you want more life and more fullness, you have to gather together more times. Sure.
Do we want fullness? Maybe we have enough fullness, huh? No, no, no. To come to the fullness of the testimony, we need to see this unity of the faith worked out: ministry together, body life together, expressing the love and the life of the Lord.
So I make these simple exhortations: whatever you do, pray that the Lord will bring some fullness out of it.
I will mention a few things once again, even things I touched on last night. Your small-group meetings—why do you have those? Let us cancel them out so you can stay home and watch television. But no, you have them. Why do you have them?
There is a purpose behind them. I imagine the purpose, although I have not actually checked with the brothers, is so that the body can exercise itself in gifting and ministry.
If you take that lightly, you are not going to come to fullness. If we gather together in our small group—say I am in group number eight—and we just have a gab fest for an hour and a half, we have missed something.
Or if everybody comes in and says, “Oh, I did not have time to read the Bible this week, and I have nothing to say,” then in the vacuum, guess who preaches?
For an hour and a half, one person says, “Now I am leading the Bible today. What do you think about this?” Well, you did not study it, so he gives you the answer. “What do you think about this?” How the body really exercised there, did it not? Just a few changes of position and a few falling asleep.
The reason you have those small groups is to come into fullness. But brothers and sisters who have only one gift, or who are just beginning to grow in the Lord, say, “Well, I have nothing to offer.” That just is not true. We need you to offer that supply to us.
Imagine if we took the Richmond conference and said, “You know what? We are getting too tired. Let us have the main ministry, and perhaps an afternoon ministry, but let us cut out the fellowship time. It is unnecessary.”
Some people are actually cutting it out of their own volition. But the conference has a certain amount of fullness because of the various things that happen.
I was talking to my sister-in-law a few days ago. She lives in North Carolina. I asked her, “How did you enjoy the conference?” She said, “Oh, I loved the conference.”
I asked, “How come?” She said, “The thing that really blessed me this year was helping the children with the crafts.”
That is how she got blessed: because she got to give her little joint of supply there with the children. Isn’t that amazing?
Then I thought of my brother Fred, one of the brothers in our fellowship back home. I said, “How did you like the conference?” He said, “Man, those fellowship groups afterward—I learned so much. I found out that a lot of people’s fellowships have the same problems we do.”
He was really blessed by that. When you find out how much fullness there is at the conference, it is quite amazing. It involves much more than just the ministry time, as wonderful as that is.
Can we continue to allow the conference to have fullness? The body needs exercise, of course. I did not have to tell you that. I think everybody here in Richmond is doing something—working in the nursery, wheeling things all over the campus, driving somebody somewhere.
I think that is wonderful. Have you suffered because of the conference? Have you come to exhaustion and smallness? No, because the Lord has given you a living way.
You have to pray through things. Maybe we modify things this year. We are meeting with pews and pipe organs and all kinds of different things. But the Lord will find the living way, and through it we gain a fullness.
I feel like you have been wonderfully blessed because you have given yourselves to this simple ministry in the summertime. The Lord uses it in a wonderful way and brings fullness to so many people through teaching, scholarship, and things which many saints do not have, but which you have by God’s provision here.
Whether it is a small group or whether it is the young people, what I am really trying to say is this: not only do we need to come to fullness through receiving ministry of the Word, but every brother and sister needs to minister their supply.
I want to speak to everybody here who is not ministering a word, perhaps not even leading a small group somewhere, and to sisters who do not even go to the Tuesday meeting of the sisters.
We need to exhort one another while it is called today, and find ways of stimulating and stirring one another up for love and good works. We need to see that every brother and sister in the body of Christ is exercising according to their supply and giving that little supply.
Otherwise, we will not come to fullness.
We may have a hundred men apt to teach, and they may be able to teach all the great mysteries of the second coming and the rapture. But if the least brother or sister is not expressing their part, we have not yet come to fullness.
It is important that we find it together. It is important that we fellowship over matters.
Take up this matter of evangelism. I hope you do not just put it in bin thirteen, but that you will exercise and pray about it. See where the Lord needs you in it. See what door He opens. Fellowship together.
If you have a strong feeling about something, by all means share. It is perfectly all right. Thank God for our diversity. It is really a marvelous thing how different we all are.
It is a wonderful thing when the body of Christ can be diverse, not just homogeneous—everybody the same. That is uniformity: “We are going to do it this way, and if you do not like the way I say to do it, you can go somewhere else.”
No, no, no. We need diversity, where we can share our burdens and our feelings about how to proceed in a particular matter, then pray together and see which way the Lord wants us to go.
We maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, working toward the unity of the faith and a mature man—the fullness of the measure of the stature of Christ.
Thank God for the unity that He has given to all of us since we have been born again. Pray that your testimony here in Richmond will always be Psalm 133:
Behold, how good and how pleasant it is
For brethren to dwell together in unity!
Let the business of the church have its priority as you do the church business, and maintain that unity. I think perhaps as small an issue as it may seem to be to you and me, in the end, if we maintain together and keep applying to our Head and holding to our Head, He will bring us to that full stature and fullness that we all desire.
Oh, I long more and more to see the fullness of this testimony among us fully established. When we worship, we can sense Him in the midst. When we pray, we can sense His throne loosing and binding. When we evangelize, there is our great Gospel—Jesus standing and drawing people to Himself.
We need this fullness of testimony and presence in our midst.
It comes as we stand together, find His living way, hammer it out, work it out, and allow Him to forge it in us and express His wonderful life. Given all the diversity we have, still we stand together.
This is God’s purpose and God’s way for us. May we be faithful and walk worthy of the calling to which we have been called.
We worship You, Lord, for the testimony we find in the Word of God: the unity of the saints as they dwelt together under the Head of our Lord Jesus there in Jerusalem.
Jews from many different places—Greek-speaking Jews, Aramaic-speaking Jews—all gathered together, all one, all being supplied, all sharing in an amazing unity.
Then we go to Antioch and see the oneness there. Though there were people from this place and that place, though there were Gentiles and Jews, and then in Ephesus and in all of these places, they understood the importance of declaring the oneness that we have in Jesus Christ.
Oh Lord, in this day of easy choice, in this day where we always get our way, in this day where personal preference seems to be the note that everybody sounds, we yield our personal preference to You in order that we could have the fullness of the very expression of Your life in our assembly.
Lord, we pray that we could stand together in that unity of the Spirit that will not allow us to part with one another over some difference of minor importance. Standing together, may we find Your living way and be called, as in the book of Acts, people of the Way, because we are walking in a living way and expressing Your life in our midst.
Oh Lord, grant that we could bear that kind of testimony as we work, as we live, as You hammer us out together in a oneness that will glorify Your name.
Lord, we respond to Your prayer, where You prayed that we could be one even as You and the Father are one. We say, “Amen, Lord Jesus.”
We know only You can hold us together. We know that only Your life is that which we can hold on to—not even hold on to one another, as it were, but truly hold on to Your life as we go through these issues of life together.
Grant us maturity. Grant that we could be one man in Christ Jesus.
We pray these things with hope of Christ in us and Christ among us, the hope of glory. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.