For this cause I also, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which is among you, and the love which ye show toward all the saints,
cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers;
that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him;
having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope of His calling, what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,
and what the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of the strength of His might
which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead,
and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenly places,
far above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come;
and He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church,
which is His body, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.
This morning, I would like to take another principle of fellowship. The principle I want to deal with, by the enabling grace of God, is the principle of authority.
Can you still hear me, everybody? Good.
The principle of authority.
I have no doubt in my own heart that it is over this principle that the enemy is working so very strongly. Either we find that there is no authority at all, and everybody does that which is right in his own eyes. It is a kind of free-for-all.
Our gatherings, especially what we call house fellowships, become a kind of place where we are released from all responsibilities, from all limitations, from all discipline. They are just places where we sort of enjoy the Lord, and where, in many ways, we find that we are living in a fool’s paradise.
For instance, you can go into one of these house fellowships. No one has to do any tidying up. No one from the general company does anything about putting out any books or sheets. No one helps you at all in any way. You just come in, you just sit down, you just enjoy yourself. There is no responsibility that you have to take. You are not necessarily punctual. You can come at any time, just drift in and drift out.
It is a kind of free-for-all. In some quarters, it seems that it has been almost reduced to a doctrine of freedom. This is what it means not to be under law, but under grace.
Then, of course, you have the other end of the line, where we have such a recognition of authority, and such an enforcement of authority, that the whole thing becomes a hierarchy. We are bound to obey, and whatever the brother says, whoever it is, we have to do what he says. If we do not do what he says, we are ostracised and finally excluded from that company of believers.
In between, there are a number of other varieties. Therefore, I believe that this principle of authority in the matter of fellowship is vital.
The first thing I would like to underline is the absolute headship of our Lord Jesus Christ. God has made the Lord Jesus absolute Head for the church.
Ephesians 1:22 says:
He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church,
which is His body, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.
Or again, Colossians 1:18:
And He is the head of the body, the church; who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things He might have the preeminence.
No matter what the situation, no matter what the problems, no matter what the circumstances in which we find ourselves as the people of God, Christ has been made Head over all things for the church.
God recognises no other head. All substitutes for Christ’s headship are a terrible evil.
Now let me be quite clear here. We are not just talking about papacy, or an episcopacy, or some committee, council, or board. Most of us would probably feel that those are the kinds of things which get in the way of the headship of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But you can have a New Testament pattern. You can have a group of elders which appears to be as New Testament as you can get. Yet, if those men substitute their heads, their will, their brains, or their intelligence for the headship of the Lord Jesus Christ, it is a pernicious evil.
That is why you sometimes find in New Testament companies that appear ostensibly and apparently to be returning to New Testament principles, yet you find that the thing is dead—as formal and as dead as anything institutional.
Younger ones ask themselves, “Why can we have a New Testament pattern and it be so dead? I go somewhere else which has not got a New Testament pattern, and I find life.” They therefore come to the conclusion that God is not in the least interested in any kind of pattern.
This is wrong. There is a pattern in one sense. It is within the life of our Lord. But there is a pattern.
Eldership, as such, is a principle, because it is, as it were, the expression of the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ. But if those men put their heads in the place of the Lord Jesus Christ, that becomes a pernicious evil. It will effectively paralyse the work of God. It will make the company of believers lifeless. It will formalise them.
It is a strange fact that you could have a committee of men who have been so dealt with by the Holy Spirit that they are dependent upon the Lord. They are thus so dependent upon the Lord that the headship of Jesus Christ can come right through them.
You can also have a New Testament pattern where men have put their heads in the place of our Lord, collectively or individually, and destroy the flow of divine life.
Christ is not a democratic monarch. I shall have to explain this, seeing that we are here in a republic. But Christ is not a democratic monarch. He is not some kind of national figurehead.
You see, I come from a kingdom. I am a subject of the United Kingdom, and in one sense I suppose I am quite proud of that. I think you folks have done very well since you have succeeded, but I think you might have done a good deal better if you had stayed with us.
However, having said that in your bicentennial year, I have to tell you that I live in a constitutional monarchy. That is a kingdom which has a constitutional monarchy.
What do we mean? We mean that the Queen does not, in actual fact, rule the country. The country is ruled by Parliament. But the Queen signs everything, and in that sense legalises everything.
At the opening of Parliament, the Queen makes a speech to both the House of Lords and the House of Commons. She may say, “I am going to nationalise the steel industry,” and so on. She may be very much against the nationalisation of the steel industry, but she has to say it because her speech has been written by the party which has the majority.
She is reading a speech written by, for instance, the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, or somebody else, and she has to read it as if it were her speech. Then the laws are passed and taken to the palace for the Queen’s signature. When she has placed her signet on them, they become law.
She is a national figurehead. She unites the whole country above politics. I think that is a very good thing, but still, that is not Christ’s position in the church.
What we have done with the Lord Jesus is to make Him a democratic monarch. We have made Him a constitutional monarch. We have made Him a kind of national figurehead.
We write His speeches and give them in His name. I should think about ninety per cent of the sermons preached have nothing whatsoever to do with our Lord Jesus Christ in the sense that they originated with Him, but they are spoken in His name. We write His speeches for Him. We put ideas into His head. We use His name for all kinds of teaching, and so on. We pass laws in His name.
We get together as a committee to discuss what we are going to do in the coming autumn, the coming fall and winter. We say, “Now then, we are going to have a word of prayer. So-and-so, will you lead us in prayer? We are going to seek the Lord now about the coming programme.”
So we all bow our heads. “O Lord,” we say—all twelve of us—“do show us and reveal to us what is Thy programme for this coming fall and winter. Give us to know Thy will and Thy mind.”
Sometimes it is not quite as clear as that, but never mind. We ask Him, and then we say, “Amen.” Then whoever is chairing the meeting says, “So-and-so, I believe you have got the programme for this coming fall and winter. Could we hear the bookings you have?”
Then there is a little discussion as to whether we should modify this or that. At the end of it we say, “Well then, let us bow our heads,” and we say, “Thank You, Lord, for revealing Your will to us.”
Then, for the rest of the fall and winter, we wonder why there is no blessing, why there is no abundant life, and why the Lord does not seem to be committed to us. The fact is, we are passing the laws which need His signature.
We do not expect Him to be an absolute Monarch. We do not expect Him to direct us. We do not expect Him to govern us. We simply assume that we do all that in His name.
We have made Him a constitutional monarch, but our Lord Jesus Christ is the practical and absolute Head of the church.
We have made every mistake, I suppose, that it is possible to make in Richmond. But if we have got anywhere by the grace of God, it has simply been this: we were stupid enough and dumb enough to believe that what God says in His Book is absolute truth.
If He says that Jesus has been made Head over all things to the church, then Jesus is Head over all things to the church. In the head is the mind, in the head is the will, and in the head is the intelligence.
Therefore we recognise this one simple fact: if we were to get on our knees and really ask, on every level of our life together, “Lord, what would You have us do? How would You have us do it? Shall we go this way, or shall we go that way?” He would make known to us what is His mind.
We have found in our little experience that the Lord, if I may put it almost irreverently, has fallen over Himself to let us know what His will and His mind are. It is as if it is such a rare thing for people to get on their knees and actually say, “Lord, You are our Leader. You are our Director. You are our Lord. You are our Head.”
Just because people cannot see Him, they seem to think, “Well, we cannot see Him, so we had better make this brother the head, or that brother the head, or these brethren the head. Let them put their heads together.”
We have this democratic idea that if you have got a few heads put together, you are bound to be safe. But you can have five heads put together. You can have twenty heads put together. You can have over a hundred heads put together. You can have, God forbid, a thousand heads put together, and the whole lot can go off the rails.
The majority has rarely been right. Again and again, you find that the minority has got the mind of the Lord.
I remember some of those church meetings I used to be in. Again and again, what the will of the Lord was in that company was outvoted by a vast majority. The idea was that if you have got all those saved people, the majority must be right—but they were not right.
One thing after another was brought in by a majority. I am talking about real believers, not merely nominal Christians.
The fact of the matter is this: in some very real way, we have to recognise that Jesus Christ has been made Head over all things to the church.
Our problem is that, because we cannot see our Lord, because we cannot see, as it were, the Holy Spirit, we cannot put this into practice. We feel that it is being mystical.
But on every single level of church life—whether it is children’s work, young people, the whole church, the practical side, the material side, or spiritual policy, for want of a better word—if we will only get on our knees and ask the Lord for His mind, He will give it.
There are times when we have to wait for the Lord’s mind, and that is what we find so difficult. If we felt that we could say, “Now, Lord, what should we do about this?” and He immediately said, “Yes, do this and this,” we would find that easy.
But there are other times when the Lord says nothing, and we have to wait. Every time we have had to wait, we have found that it has been abundantly justified in the end. There have also been times when we have not waited, but have gone ahead on things, and we have fallen into tragedy.
When the Word of God says that our Lord Jesus Christ is Head of the church, it means precisely what it says. He is Head of the church.
Last night we tried to say something about that principle of continuity: the fact that we are in something which God has been doing from the beginning of this age; that we all belong together; and that all God has recovered is our heritage.
We must not despise it, devalue it, or reject it—not any single part of it. If God is going to do anything in our dead generation, all the features that have been recovered in the history of the church will be found amongst us.
All revival and renewal has flowed from a recognition of the simple fact that the Lord Jesus is Head over His people. It is as simple as that.
Every single movement of the Spirit of God in the history of the church has stemmed from the recognition, on the part of a man, a few men, or a company of people, of the absolute headship of Jesus Christ. Every departure has stemmed from the rejection of the Lord Jesus as practical and absolute Head of the church, and from the substitution of the Lord Jesus’ headship with other bodies or other forms.
It seems such a simple thing. I was speaking to someone the other day who told me that, before he was saved, he found the hardest thing in the world was to kneel. He simply could not kneel before the Lord.
I think this finds an echo in many of our hearts. It is so hard to bow before the Lord. Yet, when we are saved, we still seem to have this resistance when it comes to government—the government of the Lord.
It is much easier to spend an hour discussing: opinions here, opinions there; this conception, that conception; this idea, that idea. It is much easier than getting on our knees and saying, “Now, Lord, we are putting aside all our opinions and conceptions, and we want You to direct us.”
Do not get me wrong: there may be a place for fellowship. But if only we began with a recognition of the headship of Jesus Christ, instead of bringing in the headship of Jesus Christ after we have done all the talking.
I wish all our gatherings could begin that way. I think there comes a clarity into our gatherings of God’s people when, at the beginning of them, there is a simple recognition of the headship of Jesus Christ.
I go into some places where the brethren do not even pray before a gathering. Everyone just drifts into it. No one gets into the secret place of the Lord beforehand and recognises Jesus Christ as Head and Lord over that gathering.
Do you not understand that we are not wrestling against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers?
If we drift into these things, we shall find that the enemy gets a foothold from the very beginning. Often the meeting begins in a hard, heavy way, and only when we are just about to part do we get through. You know those meetings: just about a quarter of an hour before we go home, the sun comes out from the clouds and we feel as though the Lord is shining on us.
That should be done at the beginning. Brethren should get together before the gathering and establish the fact that we are not subject to Satan, nor to principalities and powers, rulers of darkness, or hosts of wickedness. We are under the headship of Jesus Christ.
We want to show the flag. In the old days, they used to send a gunboat up the river and show the flag. That was all that was needed.
At the beginning of our time together, we want to show the flag. We want to say, “Jesus Christ is Lord of this company. We are His people, under His headship. We declare it. We confess it.”
It is a simple recognition by which, at the beginning of our time, we bow the knee and recognise Jesus as Lord and Head. Then the Holy Spirit says, “Now I can commit Myself. You have made a simple recognition.”
It is so childlike, but because you have made that recognition, all the anointing is yours, all the resources are yours, all the fullness is yours, all the covering is yours, and all the protection is yours.
If you do not make this recognition, then it is as if the Lord must leave it, because you think you can get through without Him.
The reality of fellowship and the practice of fellowship flow from our connection to the Head.
I cannot make a statement more important than that in this matter of fellowship. The reality of our fellowship and the practice of real fellowship flow from our direct connection to the Head.
We all know situations where we meet together, but there is nothing between us. We are all believers, redeemed and saved. Some of us really know the Lord, and yet there is no connection.
We keep asking, “What is wrong? Here we are, all sitting here, and yet somehow we do not flow together. We are not being built together. We are not being fitly joined together. We are not somehow knit together. What is wrong?”
Some people make the great mistake of thinking that we have got to get closer to each other. So they say, “We must have meals together,” or, “We must live together,” or, “We must pool our resources.”
I am not saying that these things are necessarily wrong. The early church in Jerusalem did exactly that. They lived together in a community, pooled their money, and ate together. The whole life was completely shared.
Nevertheless, Antioch evidently did not do that. As far as we can tell, they had their own homes, but there was real fellowship. The elders met together and fasted before the Lord, and it was during that time that the Lord said:
Separate Me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them.
My point is this: we have to be, in some way, very livingly connected to the Head—not to one another first. Primarily, it is not one another to whom we need connection; primarily, it is the Head to whom we need connection.
Colossians 2:19 says:
And not holding fast the Head, from whom all the body, being supplied and knit together through the joints and bands, increaseth with the increase of God.
Increasing with the increase of God is directly connected with holding fast the Head. Being supplied and knit together is directly connected with holding fast the Head.
Do we not need a supply? Sometimes our fellowship gets into heavy weather. Clouds come, and we make very heavy weather indeed. What we need is to hold fast the Head and be supplied—with grace, with power, with divine resources, and with divine wisdom.
You make sure that your relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ as Head and Lord is absolutely clear, and you will find the body.
Do not first try to get the horizontal relationship. First get the vertical relationship. Then you will find the horizontal relationship.
Ephesians 4:15–16 says:
But speaking truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him, who is the head, even Christ;
from whom all the body fitly framed and knit together through that which every joint supplieth, according to the working in due measure of each several part, maketh the increase of the body unto the building up of itself in love.
Grow up in all things into Him who is the Head, even Christ, from whom the whole body receives life.
I wish that this principle could be seen on every level of church life. I wish all leadership could see that holding fast the Head is what is so essential.
What problem have you got? Do not try to meet it with your own conceptions, even with your biblical knowledge. Meet it by holding fast the Head.
Are there problems between leaders? Meet those problems by holding fast the Head. If I hold fast the Head and you hold fast the Head, we shall surely come together somehow.
Whatever the problems are, whatever the difference of opinion, we shall surely come together if you hold fast the Head and I hold fast to Him.
You may be the youngest person in the church, the youngest person in the company of believers. You may only just have been saved. Yet, if you learn from the very beginning to hold fast the Head and grow up in all things into Him as the Head, you will find your place in the body.
People often come to me and say they feel out of things. The devil is the past master at telling us that we are not really in: “You are just nothing. You are not really in.”
The only answer is to resist the enemy by holding fast the Head and growing up into Him as Head in all things.
What does it mean to grow up into Him as Head in all things? It means holding fast, apprehending the Head. It is a very strong word: really taking hold of the Head.
You do not just drift into it. You have to hold fast the Head, apprehend the Head, and take a firm hold on the Head. Then you must grow up in all things into Him as the Head.
There are many problems, circumstances, and situations in which we have to learn to grow up into Christ as Head. We have to discover His Lordship, discover His headship, discover His mind, discover His will, and do it.
The body—its oneness, its function, its growth, and its increase—is all dependent upon the relation of members to the Head.
If one member is out of gear with the Head, that is an area of paralysis in the fellowship. We share Christ as every one of us keeps in direct relationship to our Lord as Head.
When this principle is obeyed, you find life and fullness of life. You find development. You find resurrection all the time, because every time you go into death, you find that you come out into resurrection life.
But when it is denied, even unwittingly denied, immediately there is weakness, defeat, fragmentation, heaviness, and inhibition.
I would like to say something about the place of man in this, because this is where we get a lot of our trouble.
I have dwelt quite a lot on what some people would call the mystical side of things. I do not call it mystical at all. To me, it is intensely practical. If our Lord Jesus Christ has been made Head over all things for the church, it is the simplest, most practical, most obvious, most rational, and most logical thing to do to get on our knees and recognise Him.
Then we shall see life flowing through the church such as we have not seen for many years. We shall see the Lord beginning to qualify leadership, beginning to raise up ministries, beginning to gift people, because He is here as practical Head and not merely as a figurehead.
But the other area in which our trouble lies is the place of man in the headship of the Lord Jesus Christ.
There is a place for man in the headship of Jesus Christ. There are those called elders. There are those called deacons. On the widest scale, there is apostolic ministry.
Some people tell us that there is no such thing as apostolic ministry. Yet, when we look at the history of the church, we discover that in every single movement of the Spirit of God—whether they are called apostles or not—there are men who have a unique anointing.
One of our problems is that whenever we begin to get into trouble, we react against the trouble and go the other way. Never, ever build anything on reactions. Reactions are rarely right.
Martin Luther went so far in his early years that it is almost incredible how far he went. For many years, some of his letters were suppressed because they dealt with baptism. In the last thirty or forty years, those letters have been published.
Writing to Philip Melanchthon, Martin Luther said, “We must seriously question the whole matter of infant baptism. We must remain open to the Lord as to whether the New Testament teaches the baptism of believers.”
He was also deeply influenced by what were called the Bohemian Brethren. They had a kind of meeting together that was as near to the New Testament norm as you could get. It was Martin Luther’s vision that this should be the way believers would gather all over Europe.
Then a group of men calling themselves prophets began to make predictions. A whole town and area went over to them. They practised free love, spoke in tongues, prophesied, and got themselves into a terrible mess.
Luther and the other Reformers were so horrified that they reacted so strongly that they went right back and were never again able to face some things in Scripture.
The Reformation ended not with what the devil did through the false prophets, but through the reactions of Martin Luther and the other Reformers to what was wrong.
The devil threw this in so that they withdrew back into the Catholic system and would not even think of baptism again.
We are in danger of the same thing. We see things that have truth in them, but truth distorted to such an extent that it becomes false. We are in great danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
We see in many areas this idea of authority which, in my estimation, is not genuine. It is the abuse of authority. Because of that, we become so afraid that we react and react until we can no longer think about it.
We must be very careful here. Truth is true.
Just because the largest number of people who die accidentally die from food poisoning, we do not stop eating. We may be more careful about what we eat, but we do not give up eating. Because divorce is growing and growing, we do not stop marrying people.
The Scripture says that the church is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets. There is such a thing as apostolic authority, and there is such a thing as apostolic ministry.
But nowhere in the whole Bible is it right for apostles to take churches into their hands, rule them with a rod of iron, systematise them, and structure them so that they become dependent upon that apostle. That is wrong. It is absolutely wrong.
Elders also have a place. Hebrews 13:17 says:
Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit to them: for they watch in behalf of your souls, as they that shall give account; that they may do this with joy, and not with grief: for this were unprofitable for you.
When God has raised up men who really are qualified by His Spirit as elders, as elder brethren, we are to obey them. We are to pray for them. We are, as it were, to cover them in the name of the Lord.
The authority of our Lord Jesus Christ is expressed at times through men. That is where we have our problem, is it not? When it comes to men.
There is teaching that this whole matter of authority is like a pyramid. At the top, you have the elders. Beneath them are the responsible ones, and at the bottom you have the church.
In many ways, this is not wrong. There is much in the Word of God about the authority of elders and of apostolic ministry. But I like to put it another way.
Elders were never meant simply to be an exhibition of authority: “You do what I say. I am an elder. You just do what I say.”
The whole point of eldership is that elders carry the burden and anguish of the church. They stand beneath the weight of the church.
1 Peter 5:2–3 says:
Tend the flock of God which is among you, exercising the oversight, not of constraint, but willingly, according unto God;
nor yet for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind;
neither as lording it over the charge allotted to you, but making yourselves ensamples to the flock.
Our Lord Jesus said in Mark 10:42–45:
Ye know that they who are accounted to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them; and their great ones exercise authority over them.
But it is not so among you: but whosoever would become great among you, shall be your minister;
and whosoever would be first among you, shall be servant of all.
For the Son of man also came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.
What do these words of our Lord Jesus say? Simply this: if you and I would be elders, or have any authority like this, we have got to be the slaves of the whole church.
The Lord used two words here. First, He used the word for a hired servant, and secondly, the word for a slave. A slave, of course, had no rights at all.
Whoever would become great among you must be a servant. Whoever would be first must be the slave of all.
If only this idea of authority had not been warped in our minds. Our idea of authority is of people who can walk around saying, “Do this,” and you do it; “Do that,” and you do it; “You must obey me.”
Real authority was in our Lord Jesus Christ when He laid down His life for us and allowed the very creatures He had created to nail Him to a cross He had created.
Our idea of royalty, kingship, pedigree, position, and the mystique of royalty is so often entirely outward. But our Lord Jesus was not like this.
When the Lord Jesus went from the garden of Gethsemane, they stripped Him of His clothing. They stripped Him naked. They stripped all the mystique of royalty from Him. They spat upon Him. They pulled out the hair of His beard. They lacerated His back by scourging. They dressed Him in a scarlet cloak, put a reed in His hand, jammed a crown of thorns upon His head, bowed before Him, and said, “Hail, King of the Jews.”
Yet it was at that time, when the Lord Jesus was stripped of all the paraphernalia of royalty, that He was more royal than He had ever been before. He revealed that His kingship is not built upon position, title, clothing, or outward things. It is built upon inner character.
There was no crown that ever graced a monarch’s brow more powerful than the crown of thorns, and no sceptre in the hand of some great despot had ever been more powerful than the reed in the hands of the Lord Jesus Christ.
He proved once and for all that He was worthy to be King of kings and Lord of lords. Anyone who can be stripped of all the mystique of royalty and come out as a king is worthy of the throne of God.
This is a kind of kingship you and I know nothing about. Some people seem to think that one day in the kingdom to come we are all going to sit on golden thrones, draped around the halls of heaven, sparkling diamonds upon our hands, generally exhibiting ourselves as kings.
God preserve us if some Christians ever get onto those thrones with the crabby little natures they have got.
Kingship is not in outward things. It is in character. It is in life. It is in nature. Everyone who would come to the throne of God must go the way of the Lord Jesus Christ.
There are times when we shall be stripped of everything, ridiculed, derided, and devalued. It is at those times that real kingship will be found in us.
No man ought to be an elder who is not prepared to lay down his life for the church. No man can be an apostle, or have apostolic work or ministry, who is not prepared to lay down his life for the Lord and for the people of God.
Otherwise, men will come into position who glory in their positions, who are building their own little empires, and who are interested in making a platform for themselves. So many of our companies and house fellowships can become platforms for little dictators.
This principle of authority is not something of outward might or outward paraphernalia, dependent upon position and title. A man is qualified as an elder because he is able to let go of his name, his reputation, and every single thing he has, and is prepared to become the slave of the whole church, that the church might be built up.
That is why I put elders at the bottom. They take the whole weight upon themselves. They carry the whole church in their hearts. Everything weighs upon them.
1 Corinthians 4:1 and 9–13 says:
Let a man so account of us, as of ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God.
For, I think, God hath set forth us the apostles last of all, as men doomed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, both to angels and men.
We are fools for Christ’s sake, but ye are wise in Christ; we are weak, but ye are strong; ye have glory, but we have dishonour.
Even unto this present hour we both hunger, and thirst, and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwelling-place;
and we toil, working with our own hands: being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we endure;
being defamed, we entreat: we are made as the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things, even until now.
My dear friend, that is apostleship. If we were to have that kind of apostolic authority, what a change there would be in the life of God’s people.
There is no empire-building here. There is no structuring of everything according to ourselves. There is no setting forth of our own power, title, and position. Here are men who are prepared to die—doomed to death—so that the church might know resurrection life.
If you want to see this principle of authority, look at our Lord Jesus Christ. If you see in Him anything avaricious, anything selfishly aggressive, or anything self-centred, I would like to know.
The principle of authority is that a man can be nailed to the cross by the very people he came to serve and, in that moment, have supreme authority.
The principle of authority is that the very people you came to save can strip you of every single thing that you have, do you injury, and put you to death—and at that moment you reign supreme.
That is spiritual authority. This is the authority we need. We do not want worldly authority. We do not want that thing which belongs to the world of pomp, show, position, and title.
Jesus said:
Ye shall not be called Rabbi: for one is your Teacher, and all ye are brethren.
And call no man your father on the earth: for one is your Father, even He who is in heaven.
Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even the Christ.
We need this authority. It is not some luxury. It is a principle. Without it, fellowship will break down. Without it, there will be a dissipation of all the values of the finished work of our Lord Jesus Christ.
One last thing: what wonderful consequences there are when the authority of Christ is present, when the headship of Christ is a living, practical reality, and when there is real fellowship among a company of God’s people.
The great result is that the authority of the risen, glorified Head of the church is manifested on earth.
2 Corinthians 10:3–5 says:
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh;
for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the casting down of strongholds;
casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God,
and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.
Oh, to know such authority that we, as the people of God, wherever we are, might know the manifestation of the authority of our risen Head in our midst.
There are strongholds, fortresses, strong points of Satan in our area, and we will never know release until those things are cast down. There are imaginations which hold people in their grip and bondage, high things exalted against the knowledge of God.
Every single thing begins with a thought. Communism and Marxism began with a thought in the head of Karl Marx. Maoism began with a thought in the head of Chairman Mao.
If only the church could take such thoughts at the very beginning into captivity to the obedience of Christ.
God has given the church keys—not an ornament, but keys. Keys are power. Keys are authority.
God has given the church the keys of the kingdom of heaven.
Whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven;
and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
That is the principle of authority. Oh, that God would work such fellowship in the hearts of us all that we might know something of this principle of authority.
Lord, we bow here before Thee. We do pray together that somehow, Lord, Thou wilt reveal to us this matter of authority.
Thou seest, Lord, all the many things that are happening all over the world in connection with the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ. One thing we are clear about, Father: Thou hast made our Lord Jesus Head over all things to us, the church.
We recognise that glorious fact and confess that He is our Head. O beloved Lord, we pray that Thou wilt burn this truth into our hearts by Thy Spirit. Give us clarity over it, Lord. Give us a directness over it that we have never had before.
Help us to hold fast the Head, and thus discover the body. Help us to grow up in all things into Him as the Head, Father, so that we may know the body building itself up in love.
O Father, we pray that Thou wilt clear up all these ideas of man’s place in the headship of the Lord Jesus Christ. Give us men, Lord, who are selfless; men who are crucified; men, Father, who know the power, fullness, and anointing of the Holy Spirit.
Give us such men as leaders, Lord, we pray. O our beloved Head, let the word go out for the raising up of such men, who shall be ensamples to the whole flock of God.
Lord, raise up men with apostolic ministry and authority—men who lay down their lives, Father, that Thy work may go forward in this world.
Father, here we give it over to Thee. Thou knowest, Lord, I have talked about this matter of authority in my childish way. O God, use the words Thou hast enabled me to say by Thy Spirit, to burn this matter into every heart, that we may be those who really do follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.
We ask it in His name. Amen.