Good evening, brothers and sisters. It is a wonderful blessing to be here and to share together with you in this family conference. I have received so much help myself here at this conference over the years, and I feel that it is a privilege to be able to share this year as well.
As you see tonight, we have changed things around. We are hitting the ground running here. Usually, you have an evening to sort of snooze and catch up from the day. My wife and I drove down here; it took seven hours, and we relaxed along the way as best we could. So, I am wearing my wake-up shirt.
Actually, this polo is a Lance Lambert line. It is a special, special wake-up shirt. Lance has one on tonight as well, as you can see. His is in green. Lance will be sharing most of the evenings during the week, but they decided not to go with him tonight because, you know, with the unstable weather, in the past we have had electric outages, tremendous thunderstorms, and perhaps even earthquakes just when Lance gets up to speak.
They have asked me to sort of more gently begin the whole process.
Let us turn to the Scripture in which we find these words regarding the summing up of all things in Christ. Of course, we know that is in Ephesians 1. Let us read the first fourteen verses together. Grammatically, they are all together in one great sentence.
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,
To the saints who are at Ephesus and who are faithful in Christ Jesus:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ,
just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him.
In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will,
to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us.
In all wisdom and insight He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him,
with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth.In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose Who works all things after the counsel of His will,
to the end that we who were the first to hope in Christ would be to the praise of His glory.In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed—you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise,
Who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.
Let us just have a word of prayer.
Our Father, we gather together tonight in the name of Your precious Son, our Lord Jesus. We thank You for all the events of our history that have gathered us to this moment, and we realize that Your ongoing purpose has called for this meeting together.
So we lift our hearts to You, O Lord, perhaps even in tiredness and with minds that are tired as well, and ask that by Your Spirit You would quicken our mortal bodies. Give us a hunger for Christ that would overcome our physical fatigue, and give us to recount together the fullness and the summing up that is found in Him.
Lord, we ask for the help of the Holy Spirit, without which all we can do is share words tonight. But You can move us beyond words into a realm of reality, by Your Spirit, into the very presence of our Lord. We thank You for His presence here tonight. We pray that in everybody’s life it would be known as we are together in this place.
We thank You for this time. We set it apart for Your purposes. In the precious name of our Lord Jesus, we pray. Amen.
Now tonight, I realize it is the first of the messages, and people have been travelling—perhaps some of you. So we will not take a full time, I hope. I hope to be a little more brief. I actually have some audio visuals to perhaps help the drooping eyes, and this shirt, I am hoping, will be useful. Anything we can do.
Because we come into something that is described as a mystery revealed—something having to do with the fullness of time, a summing up of all things in Christ, both things in heaven and things on earth.
Paul is speaking from a mature heart. He is speaking from great spiritual experience. As most of you know, when he wrote this letter to the Ephesians, he was at a mature age, having had several years of preparation and then a number of years of ministry, and now in jail, in prison—the bondservant of the Lord.
I am sure, without realizing it, he was in the process of fulfilling his most fruitful time of ministry. Even though he was in prison, his prayers and wrestling for the Ephesians, the Colossians, the Corinthians, and the others were greatly affecting the life of the Lord in the midst of those dear saints. He carried these saints on his heart. He prayed for them often.
There, as he languished in jail, I am not sure how much he realized the value of those letters he was writing. But they have become our treasure and a way for us to come to know something of Christ in all His size, wonder, and fullness. How magnificent a Christ Paul was apprehending.
Talking about the fullness of Christ: I do not know if you are aware of this, but until he wrote these two sister letters, Ephesians and Colossians, Paul had not used this word fullness before.
It is possible—and I believe true, because it is true with all of us as Christians—that as we go on with the Lord and grow in the Lord, we grow in our understanding of His greatness. Paul was in this mature time in his life, finding spiritual words to interpret spiritual intuition that he had had for a long time.
I do not know when he first began to use this word fullness, nor do I know when he began to use this term, “summing up of all things in Christ.” But here is the first time we have it on record. As you know, he also mentions fullness in Colossians.
Yet, even though he is just using these words now, late in his ministry if you want to say that, the wonderful thing about the reality in Christ is that from the very first Paul experienced the fullness of Christ.
From the very first—from the very moment on the road to Damascus when he met the Lord—he saw in a flash something that, for the rest of his life, he was finding words to express: those matters of fullness.
Why, there in that blazing light on the road, he saw something of the dimensions of Christ. Can you imagine the Shekinah glory of heaven hitting you there on the road? He had a sense in his spirit of the immense Person he was dealing with, this divine Person. Then, of course, when he heard His name was Jesus, Jesus exploded from that human being he was persecuting into this tremendous Lord who was speaking with a voice from heaven. The largeness of it—you can just imagine.
Even from that moment of his arrest on the road to Damascus, he himself was already in the process of being gathered up in Christ, summed up into Christ.
I often tell the young people that from the moment you get saved, the Lord puts a big funnel over your head. Now, that big funnel comes down, and you think you have a lot of room to move. “I can move to the left. I can move to the right. I can go here. I can go there.” But as you move up in Christ, it gets narrower that way, and it gets narrower that way, and you find yourself being drawn up under the lordship of Christ.
You see, this is in part what this word summing up means.
This is the second time Paul uses this word, “summing up all things in Christ.” Let us look at the first time, just so you can see another context. It is in Romans 13, where he uses this word. You see it in Romans 13:9, and it makes sense as soon as you hear it. He is speaking about the law.
For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
There it is used in a very simple way. He is saying that all those commandments given in the Ten Commandments could be summed up with this one word: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
But we know from the Greek that this word summing up actually means heading up. Some translations put it that way: “the heading up of all things in Christ.” Immediately that gives you some sense of the intent of Paul, because, as you see, he carries on with this idea of headship at the end of Ephesians 1 and speaks about Christ being Head of His church.
You see this implied also in Ephesians 4, when he talks about the church coming to maturity, growing up in all things into the Head. This is this very same process that we have used here in the term summing up.
There is a tremendous process going on. Yet here is the amazing thing: a believer can be a Christian only six months and still be very much a partaker of this gathering process. It is a matter of your heart. It is a matter of your will. It is a matter of your yieldedness.
Even though you may be a brand-new Christian, not very far along, you can yet fully partake, to the degree that you are able, of fullness. So we have a strange paradox in the Christian life, do we not?
We have some old Christians, who have been Christians for a long time—like me—who may not be full at all, nor really be in the gathering process. Then you find some brand-new Christians, hardly still wet behind the ears. They have just been baptized and are growing, and yet they are in the gathering process. You can see the Lord drawing them. You can see them experiencing the fullness to the degree that they are able to understand.
These are very dynamic things. Although Paul is using these phrases to express something he is seeing at the most mature time in his Christian experience, he has finally found the words. I can almost see him in that jail saying, “Ah, that is the word. That is how I describe what God is doing. It is a summing up of all things in Christ. Ah, I got the word!”
Paul had to find those words. Have you ever had an experience with the Lord that you just could not quite explain for a while? But He gives you the words with time. He gives you the understanding.
Yet, right from the very beginning of Paul’s life, there was a fullness in Paul. I do not have to argue the case; I know you would agree. Right from the moment Paul was captured and made a bondslave of Jesus, he was full of Him.
He was full of himself too, you know, at the beginning, but he was full of the Lord. Oh, he gossiped the gospel, and preached and witnessed to everybody, and got in trouble everywhere he went. He was experiencing a fullness, and we want to look at that a little bit in these days—what that means.
There he was, feeling like he was far behind his brethren because of his late capture. Yet we can see the Lord funneling him up under His headship, giving him to understand things which eyes had never seen, ears had never heard, and which had never entered into the heart of man. Yet the Spirit was revealing them to Paul, and Paul was in a process of being gathered.
I hope you can see that simple picture of being gathered—body, soul, and spirit—gathered under the Lord.
This gathering has many dimensions to it, and so I am just going to try to present a gathering Christ tonight, really. Then our brother Stephen is going to share on the need for this recovery, because that which is of fullness and that which is being gathered can lose its way.
Saints lose their way. They get distracted with things. Assemblies get distracted with things. We will look at an example in the most simple way tonight in this introduction, but we can get distracted from fullness, though we think we are experiencing fullness. We can find ourselves resisting being gathered up, even though we are living busy lives as Christians.
Paul, for certain, was experiencing this fullness. He was experiencing this summing-up process, which he says will come “in the fullness of times.”
Now, that is where our brother Lance will be sharing, because this verse is talking about something that will happen in the fullness of times, when all things are summed up under Christ.
Since the cross, the cross was the great moment when the electromagnet was turned on, and everything is now being sucked up under the headship of Christ. That is another example I use with young people at home. You have been magnetized. You are an iron filing, and you are being drawn. You are being irresistibly drawn.
In the end, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord—things in heaven, things on earth, and things under the earth. There is going to be a heading up that is complete in the fullness of times.
Is that not wonderful? I just ask you at the start: are you part of that gathering process going on? Do you feel yourself being gathered into something?
As you go up in that funnel, you also get squeezed together with other brothers and sisters. This matter of fullness does not have to do merely with me being filled up: “Thank you, preacher, very much. You filled up my gas tank, and I go on my way a full Christian.”
You cannot have corporate fullness without individual fullness. But this fullness that is talked about here in Ephesians is a corporate fullness. Something has to happen not just with you, but with you and me together. That is a fullness the Lord is looking for.
People can gather together in a new way and be assembled together—just eleven people—and sense fullness. Yet, on the other hand, you can have two thousand people and the church not be full at all of His presence and of all that this fullness means.
We are dealing with two very dynamic words here: fullness and the summing up. It should lead us to ask ourselves: are we being gathered by the Lord?
Part of this matter of things being summed up is this whole process of being gathered up. You remember how the Lord said, “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.”
We know from the record—and we will look at this the next time I share, Lord willing—that from the very beginning of time, God has been gathering together a people: gathering together history, gathering together a revelation of Himself, gathering people into this revelation, gathering people into covenants with Himself, gathering up judgments.
He has been gathering and gathering, but at the cross this gathering was intensified. The electromagnet was turned on. There was a gathering not only of Jews, but there was a gathering of Gentiles as well.
The far-reaching range of this drawing and gathering could be seen to the ends of the earth by the gospel. This gathering is going on today, but it is a spiritual gathering as well.
When we look at this first sentence—and mind you, that which we read there, those first fourteen verses, in Greek is just one sentence, just about the longest sentence in the whole Bible. I do not think there is a longer sentence. Paul just could not stop.
In Greek, you did not have commas, so he just went on and on and on because he was expressing a full thought, with Christ at the very center of the thought.
Can you almost feel yourself getting drawn by the Lord Jesus as you see these wonderful aspects, these wonderful dimensions of the Christian life that are mentioned in passing in these verses? The point is that we are to be drawn to Christ.
The thing that I think we probably do not see at first, but need to see, is that when we are talking about things being gathered unto Christ, the first and most simple vision I see of it is this: Christ is the stackpole around which everything is collected.
Now, a stackpole—what is a stackpole? I wish I could say, “Well, being a farmer,” but I am not a farmer. A stackpole was used in the old days of farming.
Before they had combines that could make a bale of hay, tie it up, and throw it out, people used to have to make bales of hay. If you cut down the hay in the field with a nice scythe and cut it all down, it is just lying out in the field. How are you going to gather it up?
You say, “I know, let us make a pile.” So you take pitchforks and start making a pile. You throw it over here and throw it over there, but you never make a pile. It just spreads out bigger and bigger and bigger. It never piles up.
Then one day, perhaps somebody by accident—I do not know, but I suppose necessity was the mother of invention—somebody came up with it. Maybe somebody by mistake started throwing hay up against a pitchfork that was already stabbed in the ground, but they said, “Hey, looky here.”
Why, when you throw hay up against that pole, it starts to stack up. So they started throwing the hay up on the pole, and the thing would stack up. When they got a whole bunch, they tied it up and took the pole out of the middle.
But without that pole, it never stacks. It just lays flat; it is all kind of horizontal, and it is hard to make a bale like that. Christ is the stackpole of our whole Christian life.
With that in mind, let us go back into Ephesians 1, and I will try to explain what I mean. Our temptation sometimes is to make the aspects of our Christian life the stackpole instead of Christ as the stackpole around which everything coheres.
In Ephesians 1:3, we have blessings. Oh, blessings! We are so thankful for blessings. We should make a stackpole of blessings, do you not think? “This is the church of the stackpole of blessings. If you come here, you are going to be blessed.”
Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. You see, it is all blessings in Christ. You have to throw the blessings up against the stackpole if they are going to be all together in your life.
Or, in Ephesians 1:4, you have been elected. You have been chosen in Him before the foundation of the world. Now, talk about being gathered: you were gathered before you were saved. Think about that.
Here is a God who chose you before you were born. Maybe we should stand right here for a while and think about this whole matter of our election and predestination and all. No, no, no, no, no. We are chosen to be before Him. Ah, you see? That is when election really makes all the sense in the world.
Or verse 5: we have been predestined to the adoption of sons. “Oh, it is sonship. That is what we need to talk about—sonship. Let us stack it up around sonship. That is where we are going. We are going for the sonship thing.”
No, no, no, no, no, no. It is not sonship; it is sonship together with Him.
Or how about verse 7—our redemption? Brothers and sisters, many centuries ago, when I was a young minister, I worked as a pastor in a church, and this was our stackpole: the redemption stackpole.
We preached the gospel, people got saved, and we did not know what to do. Then we said, “Throw them up against the redemption pole and talk about redemption.” It is a wonderful thing, is it not? Our redemption is wonderful.
But if we stay with any one of these aspects, we do not come to fullness. What Paul is seeing in the middle of this whole thing is Christ. It is redemption through Christ. It is our sonship with Christ. It is our being chosen in Him. It is everything. It is Christ. He is the center.
All these things become marvelous in the light of that. Or how about verse 9, “making known to us the mystery of His will”? Maybe you like a good mystery. Maybe you like this mysterious wisdom, the thoughts of revelation, and all of these marvelous things talked about in verse 9, including this matter of the summing up.
“It is all a marvelous revelation. Let us study more revelation. Let us get revelation. Let us sit around in a room until we receive revelation.” But if you get too revelation-conscious and not Christ-conscious, you are going to get a crazy revelation eventually.
Oh, and in verse 11, we have obtained an inheritance. Now, we should definitely talk about that. Or how about verse 13: we were sealed with the Holy Spirit. Oh no, there is a stackpole.
But no, no, no, no. All of these things take on their proportion when they are thrown against Christ, as it were. This is what it talks about: the summing up in Christ. Look at all these dimensions. Look how all these things point to Christ. All these things reveal the kind intention of our God’s purpose and will for us.
When we come to look at fullness, and when we come to look at summing up, we need to see Christ in His fullness and what He is doing with the cross.
The Lord is gathering in these days. He has gathered us together for this time. He is doing a great work of gathering in these days. Are you aware of it?
I cheat, I have to confess. I cheat because, actually not of my own will almost, I got talked into going to Russia a couple of years ago. Ever since then, I have been cheating, because I get to go to Russia and see some amazing things, and then I come back like a spy and report on them.
Our God is doing a great work of gathering. What I would like to do tonight, in a very simple way, is share a little bit of good news. The Spirit is sent out now. He is out in the highways and hedges, compelling people to come in. The Spirit right now is gathering people unto Christ in an amazing proportion—perhaps more than you realize.
I went to some very stodgy technical books to discover this good news, but it is about our God, the Lord of the harvest. He is gathering in a mighty, mighty way. We should glorify our God. He has never stopped sending out faithful servants of the gospel and gathering people to Himself. There is a great work going on.
Do you know what evangelicals at the theological level are talking about today? I am talking about at their schools: Gordon-Conwell Seminary up in Boston, Dallas Theological Seminary, Fuller Seminary, and the wonderful seminary outside Chicago.
Surprisingly, they are not talking about the megachurch, which has caught the fancy of a lot of pastors. Nor are they talking about the role of women in ministry and those kinds of things. There is a buzz about one thing: what God is doing in this gathering process.
Now, just so when I give you the statistics you do not think I made them up or got them from some sort of Christian comic book, I want to give you the sources.
I used two major sources to gather the information. The first is called the World Christian Encyclopedia. It is a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar book. It is this thick. It is a very technical, expertly done collation of figures, facts, and statistics of global evangelism around the world.
It has not only Christian statistics, but statistics of other world religions and how fast they are growing—people groups, countries. It is an amazing, amazing book. By the way, it is being used by missiologists all over the country today as a basis for understanding what is going on. It has thrown everybody into confusion.
When this book came out in 2001, it threw people off. The other source is the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, which comes out of Gordon-Conwell Seminary, where they have a special division concerned with global evangelization. I got statistics from these sources.
I hope this encourages you, or perhaps even amazes you. Something has been going on since 1970: the Lord of the Harvest, mega-gathering, from 1970 to 2000.
Most of you have been alive since 1970, right? We have junior high kids—now, you were not—but many of you have been around that long. Do you know what has been going on while you have been sleeping in Sleepy Hollow? Let us take a look.
The world population grew from 3.6 billion in 1970 to 6 billion in 2000: a 64 percent increase in thirty years, or 2 percent per annum. This is the growth rate of the world population.
Catholics and Orthodox grew from 804 million to 1.26 billion, a 56 percent increase. They had not kept up with the birth rate. That is not good. Usually, in evangelism, you count your own kids.
Protestants and Anglicans together grew from some 258 million to 422 million, a 63 percent increase—just about at the birth rate.
Evangelicals and independents grew from 98 million in 1970 to 225 million in 2000: a 130 percent increase, or 4 percent per annum.
Pentecostals and charismatics grew from 72 million to 527 million: a 631 percent increase in those thirty years.
The missiologists felt it was hard to categorize somebody. Are they evangelical and charismatic? Neo-charismatic, which is only a phrase? Or old-line Pentecostal? A lot of the old Pentecostals are actually out of the big growth curve. But the neo-Pentecostals, neo-charismatics, and charismatics—it is a long story.
So they have come up with a catchphrase: Great Commission Christians—people who take seriously this matter of going out with the gospel and gathering people in with the gospel of salvation. That includes the evangelicals and independents, and the Pentecostal-charismatics.
There were 170 million in 1970 and 752 million in the year 2000: a 342 percent increase. The world is becoming more and more Christian, percentage-wise, because of this global mega-gathering by our faithful God.
Now, that is an amazing thing. Let us look at some other interesting statistics that come out in this study. All we are trying to see is the dimensions of what God is doing that have been tabulated. The half has not been told.
In 1970, Western evangelicals outnumbered non-Western evangelicals two to one. In the year 2000, non-Western evangelicals outnumbered Western evangelicals four to one.
When they have an evangelical convention, as they had in Lausanne to discuss global evangelism, it is filled with people from India, Asia, Africa, and South America. The bishops of denominations are from Africa and other places, because that is where God is doing an amazing, amazing thing.
Since 2000, more missionaries have been sent out from non-Western nations than from Western nations. Did you know that?
Western nations spend the most—by twenty times—for missions work, and their results do not touch what the mission work going out from other countries is doing. That is why they are so concerned. That is why missiologists are concerned by all these statistics.
Six thousand Christians will be added to the kingdom of God by the time I finish this message. At Pentecost, three thousand people were saved. Three thousand are saved every half hour right now in this world. There is a harvest going on of mega proportions.
The five nations with the highest per-capita growth, counted by baptisms, are Bhutan, Mali, Mongolia, Nepal, and Saudi Arabia. This does not mean these are the fastest growing, nor does it mean these are the ones with the most baptisms. It is more an indication of where the present harvest is beginning to be seen.
If you have a per capita of twenty-six Saudi Arabians and twelve get baptized, per capita you have had an amazing thing. This statistic is making them wonder in amazement at what God is doing even in Muslim countries.
More evangelicals now attend church in Latin America than Catholics. Can you believe that? We are talking Mexico and South America. Of course, the population of Catholics combined with the population of Great Commission Christians is more than the population of the countries, because Catholics do not take you off the rolls.
But on any given Sunday throughout Latin America, there has been such a defection and such a moving, and so many people saved, that evangelicals have more attenders than Catholics.
Last year, 171,000 Christians were martyred. It started in the 1970s, when 340,000 were martyred. We know that is all about China, Nepal, and some places. Now it is down to 171,000 Christians a year being martyred for their faith.
The last little page has to do with how these evangelical seminaries are trying to interpret what is going on in these days. This mega-gathering is just throwing everybody off. “We do not know what to do. What is going on?”
Here are some things they are noticing. The most rapid-growth segment is in non-established churches. That is throwing them off.
That means unaffiliated indigenous assemblies with non-professional ministries, meeting in houses or rented buildings. This is what the evangelical missiologists have found out by counting beans.
This is not a whacko study. They are saying, “Wait a minute, we are pouring all this money into missions, and what God has done in the last thirty years is raise up a rapidly growing gathering of people that are not aligned with any denomination. We do not get it. What are we doing wrong?”
Great Commission Christians now outnumber traditional and denominational Christians. The continued defections from the older churches into these new frameworks are redefining twenty-first-century Christianity. Twentieth-century Christianity was all about what denomination you were in. Twenty-first-century Christianity is not about that anymore.
This has also caused a tremendous shakeup within denominations. Some churches are really examining themselves, repenting, and getting down to the business of being part of the gathering. Others are slowly melting away and will not be around with much significance much longer.
The figures of global evangelism for this period are conservative because of the unofficial and isolated nature of the groups involved. The half has not been told of how many.
For example, some of you know about Chinese figures. Their figure is 71 million as of the year 2000. Some people say it is 135 million. But this is only those that they could count—the beans.
It does not even include evangelistic crusades. Billy Graham’s crusades involved over 120 million, just as an example—not to mention other crusades that have been going on, and are going on right now, throughout the third world.
Neither did they count radio and television, which are claimed to reach over 40 million. I put the internet in there because that is not even a category yet, and yet it is one of the most significant means of outreach across the world right now.
Neither does it include the Jesus film, through which 15 million people have reportedly confessed Christ after seeing the movie.
Now, brothers and sisters, what can we glean from all these things? Let me just tell you what I think.
Number one: I do not know about these statistics. I am sure they are not as accurate as they could be, but they weigh on the conservative side. If we use these statistics as statistics are used in the book of Acts, I am sure it was not exactly three thousand people who were saved on the day of Pentecost—it was about three thousand, maybe 2,012.
Statistics were used in the book of Acts to show the mighty working of a resurrected Lord who was gathering people through the gospel. If we have eyes to see and ears to hear what has been going on, as recorded in a feeble manner, this is a sign to us that God is moving in amazing ways.
He is a miracle-working God. He is a gathering-gospel God. He is the God of Jesus Christ, who is bringing people to Himself. People we do not even know about are being gathered right now, at this hour. Six thousand people—praise God—this hour. I believe that.
It is hard to get hold of, especially if you live in a dead zone like I do. I live in Manhattan. I live in Greenwich Village. It is a dead zone. But around the world, God is moving faithfully.
That is the first thing: do you believe it, or do you just want to argue about statistics? Whatever the statistics are, God is doing an amazing thing. He is gathering something up toward an end. We need to praise God for it and worship Him for being a mega-gathering God. He is the Lord of the harvest, and He is gathering in people for Himself.
Number two: I can only imagine how many problems there are among those being gathered—how many conflicting problems, conflicting elements, and much that is unknown. But all of that aside, if the Lord is gathering multitudes even now into His kingdom, cannot we believe He is also gathering them into fullness?
Do we only have the word on that? As I said at the start, there is a sense in which, intuitively, you can live in a fullness even though you do not understand what the word means. Paul had been living in it long before he put the word in one of his letters.
Do we think that our God, the God of the harvest, is going to gather people and then put them in some kind of Guantanamo Bay? Surely He has greater purposes and desires: to gather people in a fullness.
Looking at the church around the world, we also have to acknowledge that the Lord is recovering some of these aspects within the church: redemption, the Holy Spirit, and other things. Do you believe that?
In 1964, when I was saved, I was saved in a Southern Baptist church. If they saw what is going on today that is called worship in present Southern Baptist churches, they would not have believed it. We sang nothing but hymns. Nothing. Scripture choruses were unheard of.
But now in New York City, the Southern Baptists have snuck in, calling themselves under some other name—I forget what it is, Horizons or something like that. And you know what? They are worshiping God. I mean real worship.
I know that I am not talking about worship as a pep rally. But there is real worship being recovered around the world. There is real evangelism and burdened evangelism being recovered around the world. There is a real recovery of spiritual power, the gifts of the Spirit—not used merely in exhibitionism, but used under the control of the Lord.
There is a recovery of intercessory prayer out beyond us, brothers and sisters. There are people learning how to pray and lay hold of things that are dramatic, real, and coming from God. It is a tremendous recovery going on now—not to mention aspects of body life. Oh, how wonderful our God is working.
But now I come to number four. Our God is not gathering people toward no end. It is true that the need for recovery in the church is grave, because many people do not know what they are being gathered to. They do not know the Who to whom they are being gathered.
If we read these statistics rightly, have a heart willing to be gathered by God Himself, and are exercised about what God is doing today, then I tell you, brothers and sisters, we have a great responsibility as those who have seen something of fullness and something of Christ as the sum of all things.
We have a very important part to play in God’s summing up of everything in the fullness of time.
When I get the chance to go to Russia, preach the gospel, and see a whole mess of people saved, it is a wonderful thing. But I come back with my heart burning for the United States, because I see what needs to happen here. We need to be recovered in this kind of thing.
We need to be those who are being gathered as well as gathering people. We understand some things that people need. I go over to Russia and talk to people, and they say, “Wow. Oh, wow. Oh, it sounds almost like hippies—heavy, man. Oh.”
Just talking about such things as fullness and this summing up of all things. My Russian brethren see this summing-up process: God gathering in multitudes and getting them saved. So when I say to them, “You know, there is another step in this thing,” they say, “What is that?”
I say, “It is not just seeing Christ summing up all things. It is seeing Christ as the sum of all things.” They say, “Well, what do you mean by that?”
I say, “You know the righteousness that we are preaching? Did you ever realize that it is Christ who is our righteousness? It is not a thing we have. Nor is our power a thing that we have. Nor is our wisdom a thing that we have gained. Christ is our wisdom. Christ is our righteousness. Christ is our power. Christ is our gospel.”
To understand that Christ is the sum of all things puts the capstone on this summing-up process. Their ears are bugging out; their ears are burning. They say, “Oh, this is wonderful. We never knew that.” Then they immediately start taking Christ as their life and Christ as their provision.
We sit around sometimes and sing, “Once it was a blessing, now it is the Lord.” Oh man, I wish I could sing that in Russian. They would be stomping their feet. “What? It was a blessing; now it is the Lord?” That is a discovery.
I am going to be bold and say that perhaps eighty percent of the Christians in this world today do not know Christ as their life. They know the Christian life—that way of life where you live, behave, and do what one is supposed to do as a Christian. But to know Christ as our life—how many know that?
You and I know this. How we need to share the gospel. How can things come to a fullness if people do not understand that they are being summed up right into the life of Christ—not just into a pole that they bump up against?
That is where the stackpole analogy dies. It is not a pole you are being knocked up against; it is a Person you are being united with.
When we talk about fullness, these brothers I work with in Russia are all bigger than me. Can you believe it? Here, I am the big man, you know. Those guys are big guys.
I talk about fullness, and I say, “Ah, fullness of Spirit.” Well, they are full of the Spirit, praise God. They manifest it by boldness of preaching in difficult situations, by standing for the Lord against the government itself, by doing all kinds of things and seeing miracles happen. They are full of the Spirit.
But when I share with them about the fullness of the church, they say, “Ah, yeah, yeah. We tell all people they should come to church.” No, there is something more. There is something more.
God is wanting to draw us in until we become a living, contributing, exercising member of an anointed, living, organic, earthly expression of Christ. They say, “Wow.”
Nobody ever told them the church was a living organism, and that fullness is realized when we are part of this organism—vibrant and organic, sensing a mutuality, sensing a fullness in everyone’s contribution, and all of these kinds of things.
You cannot just do that by throwing people together in a place and saying, “That is it. Fullness is when everybody goes to church.” No, it is when we enter into something that Paul calls fullness.
Can you believe that he calls the church “the fullness of Him who fills all in all”? We are going to have to look at that one some more: the fullness of Him. This is a wonderful statement.
Even today, in these last days, we do not know how much longer things are going, but the gathering process is moving apace. These last thirty years have been amazing years.
It has been since 1970. I do not know why 1970 was the starting point, because if you took this back into the 1960s, you would not see much change in those first ten years. But in the 1970s, something happened, and the Lord has been gathering like crazy—millions.
Can you handle it? You have over 600 million new brothers and sisters, some of whom have gone on to be with the Lord, gained in these last thirty years.
Yet I tell you, brothers and sisters, with all my heart: God is looking for those who can evangelize with the end in view. Oh, that that is who you are.
God is looking for people with prophetic ministry who can explain the mysteries of Christ—exactly what we are talking about. The mysteries of Christ. This takes prophetic understanding.
If I say, “Oh, we need a prophetic understanding of the Word,” the Russian brethren say, “Ah, we love prophecy: ‘Saith the Lord.’” I stereotype how they speak. But prophetic ministry is to understand these mysteries. You understand the mysteries.
We need shepherds and teachers who can lead God’s children to the heart—the heart of the Lord. Is this not a wonderful opportunity? Imagine the fullness if such numbers of God’s people could be led to the heart of God through shepherding love, brothers and sisters.
The world is looking for assemblies that are living in the reality of these things we are talking about. Oh, for assemblies that really live in the fullness, where the dynamic is really there, where they are being gathered up and are not merely talking, squabbling, and caught in divisiveness.
We know the enemy has set himself against fullness. We know he has set himself against the summing up of all things. He is trying to grab every piece of our fallen nature to cause divisions, schisms, and irritation with one another—to prevent that wonderful fullness that can only be experienced when we have come from the unity of the Spirit to the unity of the faith, and have grown into a mature man, into the measure of the stature pertaining to the fullness of Christ.
Oh, this is our life. This is what we need to be before the Lord about. Oh, how saints would respond if they saw a testimony. Maybe they would malign you because of the life we have, but I believe the hungry ones could only respond.
I want to end with this simple challenge: are we in the drawing process, or are we over on the side?
Are we experiencing fullness together as God’s people, or, when we come together, is it less than the sum of our parts individually? Oh, the Lord wants to do an amazing work.
I have a feeling that, as far as we are concerned, it is not a question of how many people you bring to the Lord. It is a question of being part of the gathering.
I believe, just as I believe the Lord is gathering many people together, that His desire is to gather them unto Himself into a fullness and to sum up all things in Christ. This wonderful mega-gatherer wants to gather children to Himself.
I believe God is doing it today. I also believe that among us God must shake us up. He has to get us out of the backwater. There is a flood tide over there, and sometimes we are in a backwater over here. We need to be in the flood.
I do not know how God gets us there, but it is by being part of the fullness, by being part of this gathering process, by being gathered ourselves into the Lord’s fuller purpose for our lives.
I will end with this little example from the Bible. This spring I have been studying the book of Genesis, and it has been a real blessing to me. I remembered that in the story of Isaac, we do not know that much about Isaac. I have been studying it, and we do not know much about him.
But I have a feeling he was a bit of a mystic—or let us put it this way: he was not an initiator. He was a little bit passive, you might say. So his dad had to send the servant out to find him a wife.
I think some of the brothers here are also that chicken. They cannot find a wife; they have to send somebody out, you know. But whatever.
Of course, Rebekah came back, and Isaac was very happy. Isaac met her at Beer-lahai-roi, the place where Hagar had a revelation of God. This well—a beer, this well of revelation, of seeing God—was the place Isaac loved.
He loved to live by the well of revelation. So he married Rebekah and had his kids, and most of the time he lived around there, just living around the well of revelation. It was a wonderful place.
But God wanted to bring him into fullness, and Isaac was just in a backwater. Do you know where Beer-lahai-roi is? It is so far down in the desert that it is beyond the desert. It is just way down—places even Lance does not go. It is way down.
The Lord had to get Isaac out of there. So you know what He did? He caused a great famine. The great famine led him finally toward Egypt, and he got as far as Gerar, in Philistine territory.
The Lord said, “No, no, no, no, no. Just sojourn here, and I will be with you.” It was there, in the midst of opposition and having to dig his own wells, that he came into a fullness of all the blessings he had.
He had all the blessings. Abraham gave him everything—squindillion dollars, sheep, camels. He was already rich. You would think, “Blessing—blessed.” But until he dug wells for himself, he did not live in the fullness of it.
He finally got to Beersheba and dug the well again, and then the water spurted up. The water must have been good in Beersheba in those days. It was a place of blessing. It was a place of fullness. It was a place where God really showed Himself again to Isaac, and he came into a fullness.
I have a feeling sometimes, in our life, it is easy for us to sort of dam up the situation and get into a little backwater where it is all nice.
Well, may the Lord knock those dams out. Send in the beavers, whatever it takes, to get us to where we can be part of this gathering. We can be part of this summing up.
I tell you, it is an awesome responsibility. It is an awesome stewardship. To whom much has been given, much is required. We cannot just sit passively. Neither is it our role to judge what is going on.
You do not have to look far, whether you go to Russia or wherever you go, and the Lord seems to be moving in an amazing way. You do not have to look far to find many things to find fault with. But after all, is that our role?
Rather, we can bring in something of the Lord and let them see more of His size, more of His dimensions, more of His greatness, more of His fullness, and more of His gathering power.
I have to believe that saints, having seen the greater, will put away the lesser. But we begin with ourselves.
You are part of those statistics, probably—one of those numbers, somebody who got saved between 1970 and 2000. Praise God. Is the Lord still gathering you? Oh, may the Lord gather us.
We need such recovery from our passivity. In light of the end times coming, in the fullness of times He has designed an administration that is the summing up of all things in Christ—things in heaven and things on earth—even in Him.
May the Lord help us be part of this living process. Let us pray.
O Lord, statistics do not change our lives, but we know the conviction of the Holy Spirit can change us in a moment.
When we know God moveth, none can stay His hand. When the Father draws people, they cannot be held back.
Lord, we believe in the great power, and we give You praise and thanks—praise and humble thanks—that it is being seen upon this earth today. Oh, praise God. We give glory to You.
O Lord, You are our stackpole. O Lord, You are the One who is magnetizing us all irresistibly toward Yourself. Father, You have an immutable purpose that all things be summed up in Christ, and it will not be denied. Every enemy will be a footstool under His feet.
Lord, we come to You. O Lord, grant us in these days to be part of the fullness and part of the gathering—all that which we experienced even early in our Christian life.
Lord, if we need to recover that first love, find that new gathering, and find that new ground—O Lord, we do not want to just rot away until we die.
Surely there is a purpose for all these things that You have placed in our hearts: all these mysteries that You have unveiled, all the beauties we have seen of our Lord.
Forgive us, Lord, when we have taken some lesser aspect and gone and circled around it, while all the time Your Spirit has been drawing us unto Yourself.
Oh, gather us, Lord. Gather us. Gather us unto Thyself, that we may be part of a heavenly statistic that cannot be known by men: people under the Headship, gathered up, summed up in Christ, where Christ is our sum and our all.
Teach us, Lord. May the youngest Christian here enter into that fullness, into that grand summation, even in Him. We pray for Christ’s sake. Amen.