We are going to read several verses together this morning. We will begin in Psalm 132. These are the only verses in the Old Testament that we will read at the beginning: Psalm 132:13-14. This is really the heart of the burden.
For the Lord hath chosen Zion;
He hath desired it for His dwelling.
This is My rest for ever:
Here will I dwell; for I have desired it.
Now turn with me in the New Testament to Romans 12. These will be quite familiar verses. We will look at Romans 12:4-5.
For even as we have many members in one body, and all the members have not the same office:
So we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and severally members one of another.
In 1 Corinthians 12, that famous section on the body of Christ, we will read verses 12, 13, and 27.
For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is the Christ.
For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether bond or free; and were all made to drink of one Spirit.
Now ye are the body of Christ, and severally members thereof.
Then Ephesians 1:22-23:
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 fulness of Him that filleth all in all.
In the same book, Ephesians 4:11-12:
And He gave some to be apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers;
For the perfecting of the saints, unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the body of Christ.
Then verses 15 and 16:
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.
One final verse: Colossians 2:19. It is spoken in a negative way:
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.
Let us pray.
Lord, we thank You for Your Word. We say once again, we cannot live without Your Word. But at the same time, we come in utter dependence and say to You, Lord, just as Peter said on that day, “You alone have the words of eternal life. To whom shall we go?”
Unless You speak, we do not think there is much better. But when You speak, we are moved to follow You all the way. So we ask You, Lord, to pour out Your Spirit upon us, both speaker and hearers, that we would hear the Word of the Lord; that it would be released in a fullness we cannot accomplish; and that we would together know Your words, which are spirit and life.
We ask this in Your precious name and for Your glory. Amen.
Well, some of you may remember—at least, in August 2007. One thing I find out with age is that I do not remember quite as well. Memory, they say, is the first thing to go.
But back in August 2007, we began a basic series dealing with fundamental issues. We titled that series Searching the Scriptures, with the secondary title, To Grow in Christ. I think you may remember that we took the inspiration from Acts 17:11, concerning the Berean believers. We saw how those believers were said to be more noble than those at Thessalonica because they received the Word with all readiness and daily searched the Scriptures to see whether these things were so.
That has been the pattern we have used and the inspiration for this fundamental series we started in August 2007. This is a reminder because some new ones have come in.
What we do is share once a month on a topic. Then, after we share on that topic, we encourage the Berean example. We ask the brothers and sisters to search the Scriptures, to look daily into the Word, to have a readiness to receive the Word of God, and then, in searching the Scriptures, to see and verify whether these things are so.
Then, every other Friday night when we gather in groups, we fellowship about that monthly topic. I think most of you know that, but there are some new ones here who do not know what we are doing.
Since we took off for the summer, some of you may have thought we had stopped doing it. But we have not stopped doing it.
This summer, we began to look at the burden the Lord spoke to us at the 2008 Christian Family Conference: this matter of Toward the Mark. We meditated on that all summer, and we used the Friday-night groups to share with one another this all-important word concerning pursuing Christ with a passion.
As you know, that has come out in many things: through many prayers, in the baptismal testimony, and in the way many have been touched with this word about pursuing Christ with a passion.
So this is what we are doing. We are resuming the basic series now that we are into the fall.
You may have remembered or noticed that, in the first part of the series, before the summer and before this fall, the emphasis seemed to be more on individual life. As our brother King said, what we will do now is begin an emphasis that is a little different: an emphasis on corporate life.
Now, I know just as well as you do that it is very difficult to separate individual life and corporate life. Max said this Wednesday night. It is difficult to separate them, but we can distinguish between the two.
Both are absolutely vital. Both are absolutely essential. Together, they bring us into a complete understanding of God’s work and His purpose.
We need to look at individual life, as we have spent some time doing, and now at corporate life. You may remember some of the topics we considered concerning individual life: the gospel, new birth, consecration, justification, baptism, forgiveness, personal devotion, faith in Christ, and Christ in us. If I forgot one of your topics, forgive me.
Let me make the distinction clear in one simple way. It is a burden on my heart, and I think it is the clearest way I can explain the distinction between individual and corporate life.
Individual life is absolutely life. Unless you, as a person, have come face to face with the living God, have been born of His Spirit, and have been brought into His kingdom—translated from the kingdom and authority of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of His love—you do not have any life in you whatsoever.
Everything begins with individual life. Everything begins with personal life. Everyone who is a true believer in God, a true believer in the Lord Jesus, has come to know Him personally and has an individual relationship with that living Christ. That is individual life.
Without individual life, individual devotion, or however you would put it, the Christian life is impossible—absolutely impossible. There is no beginning apart from it. It is the beginning of everything, and it is the ongoing reality that keeps us face to face with the living Christ: knowing Him, being in union with Him, and being in relationship with Him.
By starting the series on corporate life, we are not minimizing individual life. That would be to our peril.
But the other thing we need to see is this: without corporate life, the Christian life is incomplete.
I know many dear ones who love the Lord with all of their hearts and are wholly devoted to Him, but everything they see is in the perspective of individual life. Every Scripture they read, every book they read, everything they receive as a word of encouragement, has to do with the individual Christian life.
They do not see beyond the individual. Sometimes they never see beyond their own need and how God, in His greatness and mercy, pours out His grace upon us and meets all of our need. Somehow, that is the scope through which they see everything—the lens through which they see everything: individual life.
You know people like that.
I think it is strange that people can read the book of Timothy and not see anything corporate in it, but I know people like that. The whole point of the letters to Timothy is instruction concerning how we ought to behave ourselves in the house of the living God.
If you see only the individual, brothers and sisters, we need to ask the Lord to enlarge our creature. We need to see something beyond ourselves, something greater than ourselves, something fuller than ourselves.
You may be tired of these words, but I believe that fuller thing is the purpose of God. We need the Spirit of wisdom and revelation to open our eyes so that we begin to see something greater than our own needs, something beyond our own selves.
However great it is when the Lord meets us in all His benefits, as we heard about this morning, we need to see into the heart of God. If we see into the heart of God and see what is in His heart, I believe we will come to an understanding of corporate life in a better way.
That is the distinction I would like us to draw.
Now, I know some of you, like me, may have been caught up in the political conventions. I cannot say all of you, because sometimes I say things I am sorry for later.
Some of you, like me, may have been caught up in the political convention. Linda, pray for Linda, because she knows I am a political bug. But this is not an endorsement, so do not take it that way. It is an illustration to help us see something.
One thing caught my eye spiritually as I listened to those conventions. One of the political candidates—and this is not an endorsement, so do not take it as one—was asked, “What is the great fault of America? What is the great thing we have left undone?”
He simply said this, and I believe it is profound and applicable to the subject we are dealing with: “We do not see a purpose greater than our own self-interest.”
This is corporate life.
I believe that was profound. I forgot all about the candidate. I forgot all about the politics. Suddenly, things began to awaken in me concerning the Word of God, and I said, “Lord, this is my prayer: if all I see is all You have done for me, if all I see is all of Your benefits, Lord, be merciful to me. Open my eyes to see a purpose greater than myself, one that will carry me for the rest of my life.”
This, I believe, is corporate life.
This is the thing we want to share on. This is the burden the Lord has laid upon my heart.
Another thing touched me deeply at the Family Conference. Those of you who were in the group with me know this. It was a simple phrase that our brother Stephen used, and that phrase seemed to arrest me and confirm in me how vital these two things are: individual life and corporate life.
He said, “This pursuing Christ with a passion is intensely personal,” and it is. “And it is exceedingly corporate,” which it is.
Brothers and sisters, may the Lord enlarge our vision to see a purpose greater than ourselves. If some politician could coin that and make it the banner of his campaign, how can we, as the people of God, not see that and make it the standard for our lives?
This is corporate life.
Well, the first thing I want us to look at—by the way, this is an introduction. If you thought, just as Glenn said in the beginning, that we were somehow going to cover all of corporate life in these sixty minutes, you are wrong. This is an introduction.
The brothers who follow me have the responsibility of clearing up what I did not clear up. They have the responsibility of bringing in the specifics and making it absolutely clear to us. As we search the Scriptures according to that Berean model, we will come into a better understanding of what corporate life means.
But there are a few things I want to emphasize by way of introduction.
First of all, I think we need to see God’s passion for the corporate expression. You will notice that it was intentional to use that word we have been meditating upon: passion.
We need to see God’s passion for the corporate expression.
I believe that, in the end, that is the problem: we have not seen His passion. We have not seen His desire. We have not seen what is in His heart. Everything we read in the Word of God is viewed through a singular focus rather than through a corporate focus.
So this first burden is that we would understand and see God’s passion—His desire—for the corporate expression.
I believe, as you read the Word of God, that this is the overarching theme from the beginning of Genesis to the close of Revelation. In the beginning, in the opening letters and words of the Book, this theme is there. In the closing record, this theme is there.
You see how God is moving, and has moved, upon creation to find a corporate expression for Himself in a people.
That is the theme throughout the Word. But it is more than a theme. Sometimes we talk about a theme and miss the point. It is the passion of God—this corporate expression. It is the desire of God: that He would have a people who know what is in His heart and not only know what is in His heart, but respond to what is in His heart.
I think this overarching theme throughout the Word of God consists simply of two things. First, Christ, God’s only Son, is the center of everything.
Brothers and sisters, when we gathered some years ago, we had no intention of being anything. We still do not think we are anything. But we had a passion, and we had a desire, and God put something in our hearts: that Christ would be the center of all things.
To some of us, that is the very thing—the trial and difficulty—that has kept us focused upon the goal all these years: the Lord Jesus, the center of all things.
But if I can say this, and if you will not be offended by it, it is more than the Lord Jesus being the center of all things. God, in His wisdom, is after a helpmeet for the Lord Jesus, a companion for the Lord Jesus.
It is His passion and His desire. He loves His Son so much that all He wants, and all He displays throughout the Word of God from beginning to end, is the search for that companion of the Lord Jesus.
This is how the Bible opens. I think you all know the story of creation. It is a wonderful story, and in this introduction I thought we ought to look at it.
Turn to Genesis 1:11. There is a phrase I want you to notice.
And God said, Let the earth put forth grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit-trees bearing fruit after their kind, wherein is the seed thereof, upon the earth: and it was so.
Now I want you to notice that phrase: after their kind.
And the earth brought forth grass, herbs yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit, wherein is the seed thereof, after their kind: and God saw that it was good.
And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.
So, in the opening scene of the Bible, in the creation story, there is a foreshadowing of God’s great purpose. Out of Him is to come life, and that life is to produce something that has life after that life. Do you understand?
It was so in vegetation. As you read later—and I will not read all the verses, because we will run out of time—this phrase, “after its kind,” is repeated over and over again. When it speaks of the things that inhabit the waters, it is after their kind. When it speaks of the winged things that fly in the air, it is after their kind. When it speaks about cattle, creeping things, and the things upon the earth, it is after their kind.
Are you starting to get the point?
God is after something. He is after life that comes out of Himself, reproducing and producing a life-image after Himself. That is the corporate expression.
I do not know if that seems too ethereal to you, but it is laid out in the beginning of the Genesis story.
I do not know how many of you like the legal field, but in a legal argument they have the opening argument, where they state the case—the whole case. They lay it out before the judge, jury, and spectators in the courtroom, and they say, “This is what the whole case is built upon.” Everything that follows is a result of that purpose.
That is what the Word of God does. In the beginning, God wanted a companion for His Son. He illustrated it in everything He produced. In everything that had life in itself, it was to reproduce after its kind.
That phrase began to mean so much to me in my personal study of the Word of God. It opened to me the desire, the passion, of the Lord from the beginning.
Now, you know that the opening story of Genesis—the creation story—ends, in a sense, at the end of Genesis 1:31. Then, in the following verses of Genesis 2, God does an extraordinary thing. He moves upon Moses, the writer of Genesis, by the Holy Spirit, to look again at the creation story in the light of the purpose of God.
I love that. In other words, it was not merely His opening argument. He then says, “Just so you get the point, let Me look again at this creation story in greater detail so that you understand what is in My heart.”
I think all of you know that Genesis 2 is a renewed look at God’s purpose. You know the story: God brought all the animals He had made to Adam. I suppose one at a time, He said, “Adam, name them.” I am glad God did not give me that job. I cannot imagine what I would have named some of the animals.
But He brought every animal to Adam, and the Word of God concludes that Adam could find in none of them his helpmeet, his companion. That is the whole point of the story.
I do not like a lot of things about getting old, but I like one thing: I like being a grandparent. I tell people there are two things great about getting old: empty nesting and grandparenting. No offense, kids.
We took our little two-year-old Lily to the zoo. They had giraffes at the zoo. She was the cutest thing. You know, everybody suffers with grandparents because they think theirs alone is the cutest.
But she could not say “giraffe.” She called them “rats.” “Gee-Dad,” she calls me, because she could not say “Granddad.” She instantly fell in love with the giraffe. She wanted to take a giraffe home. I said, “No, Lily, you cannot take a giraffe home.”
She thought she had found a companion. She did not. Neither did Adam.
Can you see the passion of God to find a helpmeet for His Son, a companion for His Son? Can you see the desire of God foreshadowed in these earliest stories? Can you see?
In what I believe is the greatest typological foreshadowing in the whole Bible, Genesis 2 tells us that God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam. He took a rib from his side, and from that rib He made woman. He brought that woman to man, and Adam finally said:
This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.
“It is like me.”
That is the greatest foreshadowing in the whole Bible, because the Lord Jesus was put to sleep in the death of the cross. We Christians understand that death is not death. When you read the New Testament, we understand that death is sleep for us.
The Lord Jesus slept that great sleep of death. When the spear of that Roman centurion went into His side, blood and water came forth. That blood and water, as we read in Ephesians 5, are for the birth and sanctification of the church of the living God.
God has finally, in the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus, in that sleep of death, in that suffering, found the companion of the Lord Jesus. It is His church. It is the body of Christ.
Well, that is the creation story. We could talk about many things. We could talk about Abraham. The desire and passion of God are not merely illustrated in the creation story.
Let me put it in my own simple way: Abraham is not just about Abraham. Do you understand? Do I need to repeat that? Abraham is not just all about Abraham.
When he was called out of Ur of the Chaldees, God said, “Go out of this place to the land that I will show you.” He said He would make him the father of many nations. He said his seed would inherit the earth. He said, “Look at the sky and count the stars, if you can. Look at the sands on the seashore and count them, if you can. So shall your seed be.”
God was after something bigger than Abraham: something corporate, a nation, a people that would bear His life and bear His name.
I think of Genesis 22, another great foreshadowing. You remember when Abraham was called to offer up Isaac. The Word of God could not be more explicit:
Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest.
Do you think that is a foreshadowing? What a great foreshadowing.
Then, in obedience, Abraham took his son. He had the fire and the wood, and Isaac said, “Father, I see the fire and I see the wood, but where is the lamb for the sacrifice?”
Then came those great words:
God will provide Himself the lamb for a burnt-offering.
This is a great foreshadowing.
As I meditated on it, I saw something. God withheld the knife from Isaac, Abraham’s own son. But God Himself plunged the knife deeply into His own beloved Son.
There is Isaiah 53, with words almost too great for us to comprehend:
Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He hath put Him to grief.
But then, just a few words later, we see:
He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days.
Something shall be born, and that something is the corporate expression. Out of the suffering of the Lord Jesus, God gets His desire. God gets what He is after.
This is Abraham’s story.
Or you can think of Israel. We will not go through the whole Old Testament, or you will be mad at me and bored at the same time.
But when we come to the great feature of the Old Testament, Israel the nation, we see that this people was under incredible bondage. They were saved out of the bondage of Egypt by a great deliverance. The reason they were saved out of that bondage was to be a people of possession for God and a people in whom the testimony of God would be manifest to the whole world.
They were to be a peculiar people. They were to be a corporate expression. They were to be a people who manifested what God was like to the nations. This is what Israel means.
I will read just a few verses. You do not have to turn to them. Exodus 6:7-8 says:
And I will take you to Me for a people, and I will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I am the Lord your God, who bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.
And I will bring you in unto the land concerning which I lifted up My hand to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; and I will give it you for a heritage: I am the Lord.
Deuteronomy 4:20 says:
But you hath the Lord taken, and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be unto Him a people of inheritance, as at this day.
And Deuteronomy 7:6 says:
For thou art a holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a people for His own possession, above all peoples that are upon the face of the earth.
This is the explanation of God’s desire. It was in a people who would manifest His life, His character, and His nature. So it is His desire for the church, the body of Christ, in our day.
Brothers and sisters, are these just Bible stories to you? When you read the Word of God and go through these foreshadowings, when you read the Old Testament, are these merely stories?
They have to be more than stories. They are the manifestation of the desire of God. They are the showing forth of the purpose of God through illustration in the Old Testament, so that when we come into the fullness of the New Testament, we might understand all that we can.
That changed the Old Testament for me.
Some of you may have been like me. You read through those long genealogies, and you almost expired along with the people in them. You skip over that part and go to the more interesting part.
But if these are merely genealogies, we miss God’s desire.
Praise the Lord, He delivered us out of bondage with a great deliverance. But there was a purpose in His view.
Some people only say, “I am saved. I am going to heaven now.” Listen, I do not demean personal salvation for one moment. We absolutely need it. After the Lord Jesus met me in a living way, when I went back to school, all my fellow students thought I was crazy. I had this big orange button that said, “Jesus saves.”
They said, “Putnam, have you lost your mind?” Then they saw the Bible, and they really thought I was done in.
Oh, I believe in salvation. It is absolutely vital. Without it, you can go nowhere. But it is not the end, brothers and sisters. It is not all for us. If that is all we read, if that is all we see, we miss the point of the whole Bible.
So this was the foreshadowing in Israel.
Psalm 132, those verses we read—verses 13 and 14—bring this first point to a close. I think most of you know by now that my first point is always the long one. If you survive that and do not pass out, you should make it the rest of the way.
Psalm 132 says:
For the Lord hath chosen Zion;
He hath desired it for His habitation.
This is My resting-place for ever:
Here will I dwell; for I have desired it.
This corporate dwelling is God’s desire. Here is the question: Is it your desire?
Has the Lord been able to stir something in your heart that is greater than your own self-interest, to cause you to say before the Lord, “Lord, I want Your desire to be the focus of my life. Do not let me live out my days merely enjoying Your blessings. Let me live out my days desiring what You desire.”
God said, “I have desired it.” But that is not the end of the story. If you look at the first part of Psalm 132, we discover David. Let me read a few verses because this is the point I want us to see:
Lord, remember for David
All his affliction;
How he sware unto the Lord,
And vowed unto the Mighty One of Jacob:
Surely I will not come into the tabernacle of my house,
Nor go up into my bed;
I will not give sleep to mine eyes,
Or slumber to mine eyelids;
Until I find out a place for the Lord,
A tabernacle for the Mighty One of Jacob.
I think this is extraordinary, and I think this is the message. God has the desire, but He is looking for some who have that same desire. He found it in David.
Do you wonder why God Himself said of David, “He is a man after My own heart”? It is because David had God’s desired heart. God’s passion was David’s passion. That habitation was the same desire in David as it was in God.
I wonder, brothers and sisters, is this true of us? May the Lord make it so.
“For I have desired it.” May it also be our desire.
I think of Ezra, the great recovery of God in the Old Testament, and Nehemiah. You remember that Cyrus, king of Persia, made the decree that all who were willing should go back and build the house of the Lord at Jerusalem. That was the great call.
It says, in effect, that whoever’s spirit God stirred should go back. This is what I am trying to do. I have no power to convince you, but I am hoping, brothers and sisters, that the Spirit of the Lord will stir our hearts.
If the Spirit of the Lord stirs our hearts, and we join ourselves in prayer with the Most High, and we go to Him and say, “Lord, in our lifetime, get what You are after. In our generation, get what You are after. In our gathering, get what You are after,” then we share the desire of God.
That is the first point, the best I can make it. I hope the other brothers can make it clearer, because I believe this is the most important thing.
Unless you have seen a purpose greater than your own self-interest, you will never fully enter into all that is in God’s heart.
The second point is that we need to see the place of the corporate expression.
When you leave the shadows of the Old Testament and come to the New Testament, you begin to see the very place of the corporate expression that God has been after all the way through the Bible. All along, we see shadows and types. But when you come to the New Testament, the shadows go and the types go, and then we see what is in His heart.
We see the church of Christ. He came to seek and save the lost, but not merely to seek and save the lost. He came to find a people who could be His bride, His helpmeet, His eternal companion, so that throughout eternity they would show forth all that He is.
This is the place of the corporate expression.
It is given a special name in the New Testament: the body of Christ.
I do not know if you have thought much about it, but could the Lord Jesus have endowed us with any greater honor than to call us His body? Can you imagine?
Now, I do not know about you, but with all my flaws, my body is a pretty important thing to me. Nothing that a little plastic surgery would not help here and there, but nevertheless, it is the closest thing to me.
God, in His wisdom, shows His desire so clearly. He says, “Ye are the body of Christ.”
I hear people say it all the time: “We are like the body of Christ.” The Word of God does not say we are like the body of Christ. It says in 1 Corinthians 12, “Ye are the body of Christ.”
Brothers and sisters, that is the greatest privilege. That is the highest honor. That is the closest relationship you can have. It is closer—even than a bride, if you follow me. Do not get offended. I am speaking on the Song of Solomon; you will get over it.
But it is closer: your own body. That is the place of the corporate expression—the body of Christ.
Ephesians 1:22-23 says:
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 fulness of Him that filleth all in all.
Ephesians 3:10, the only place where we see the phrase the eternal purpose of God, speaks of how “now unto the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the church the manifold wisdom of God.”
This church is His body.
I remember years ago, in 1972, when I first came to meet among you, dear saints. Yes, I am that old. Some children say, “Are you really that old?” They do not believe anyone lived that long. Well, look at Stephen. I have many years left, if the Lord tarry.
I am telling you, dear brothers and sisters, we need to see that we are His body.
There is a phrase I would like to use: we need a body consciousness.
Do you understand that word? I do not mean being conscious of your own body. I think that is part of the problem. Too many people are so self-conscious of their own body that they are all bound up.
I am talking about something corporate, something larger. What we need, dear brothers and sisters, is a body consciousness. We need to see that we are the body of Christ.
I think a lot of people have a concept, but do we have a consciousness? If we had a consciousness, it would change everything in our life. It would deal with our independence. It would deal with always looking out for our own needs. It would cause us to look upon something bigger, something greater—and that is for Him.
We do not merely need a concept. We need a consciousness of the body of Christ.
This body—Head and body joined into one—is a marvelous truth.
I was speaking earlier about Acts, when I first came here in 1972. I remember our brother Stephen giving a message that seared upon my spiritual consciousness what the Lord was after. I have never forgotten it.
He began a series in the book of Acts. I do not know whether I ever told him this, so I will confess publicly: I was a little offended by his teaching, being a good charismatic at that moment. You see, my emphasis was on power. That was the emphasis of all good charismatics: power.
His emphasis was upon the Lord Jesus and His purpose. What a difference.
He took that opening statement of Luke, where he says, “The former treatise I made, O Theophilus, concerning all that Jesus began both to do and to teach.” He is speaking of the book of Luke.
Throughout that series, our dear brother impressed upon us that phrase: “began both to do and to teach.” What began to open to our eyes was that the Lord Jesus continues to do and teach through His body.
Formerly, it was through His personal body as He walked upon the earth. But now it is through His body, the church—the body of Christ.
That is the thing I will never forget. Let me tell you this: it changed my course. It turned me upside down and inside out. The book of Acts no longer became a collection of stories. It became Christ manifesting Himself through His corporate body.
There is a marvelous phrase in 1 Corinthians 12:12:
For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is the Christ.
It is a strange way to put it. If I were writing it, I would say, “So also is Christ.” But that definite article has been inserted: “So also is the Christ.”
That began to open to us when the book of Acts was opened to us. We began to see that this body, in God’s purpose and in the corporate expression, is Christ the Head and Christ the body joined together: the Christ.
I never thought one little article could mean so much, but it began to mean everything to me.
I will tell you an urban legend. I am German, in case you did not know—blond-haired, blue-eyed German. They will blame me for the wars, but I was born here.
There is a story about John F. Kennedy. It is actually an urban legend, but it makes a point. When he went to speak in 1963, he gave the speech of his lifetime and tried to show solidarity with the Berliners because they were under the oppression of the Iron Curtain and communist darkness.
In his speech, he said, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” My relatives would be ashamed of my German. “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
In other words, he was trying to say, “I am a Berliner. We are all Berliners. We stand with you. We are all citizens of Berlin,” like the old ancient saying, “I am a Roman.”
But many people—and it is a legend that has gone on, written in many books—say that what he actually said by inserting the indefinite article, ein, was, “I am a jelly doughnut.”
I like doughnuts. But one word, according to this legend, can change the whole thing.
That definite article: “So also is the Christ.” Christ the Head, Christ the body, joined—the place of God’s corporate expression.
I would like to say more, but I think others will say more about that. That is the place. We need a consciousness.
Let me mention a few things concerning the headship of the Lord Jesus. So often we are independent. We do whatever we think is right, put a spiritual label on it, and live by a spirit of independence.
If you have a consciousness of the headship of Jesus, you would not do that.
I think, for many people, the church is kind of like the legend of Sleepy Hollow, the Headless Horseman by Washington Irving. There is no head. Or, even worse, there is a head, but whatever they say goes.
But if you have body consciousness, you will see that there is a Head. We hold fast the Head, the Lord Jesus, and then the whole body, as Colossians 2:19 says, increases with the increase of God.
This is the consciousness we need to have.
There is one final matter of consciousness I want to mention. It is a warning that touched me when I read it. We need a consciousness that the enemy will do everything he can to destroy the body of Christ.
We need to be aware of it. I do not mean to make anyone fearful, because greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world. But I want us to be conscious and awake, knowing that this thing is so close to the heart of God that it is the focus of the enemy’s assault.
I will read what Brother Nee said in The Body of Christ: The Reality:
The vessel God will use is the church, not an individual. The life and power of Christ find their richest manifestation through the body of Christ. For this reason, Satan takes great pains to effect disintegration in the body of Christ. This becomes his number one task.
If we take note of this, we readily realize how severe is the satanic work of disintegration. Suspicion arises among brothers and sisters. Misunderstanding is created. This is Satan’s disintegrating work.
One is blaming a brother, and another is murmuring against a sister. Yet if it is investigated, there is nothing—only shadows, nothing serious about it at all.
This is Satan performing his work of tearing down the body. Satan induces God’s children to division. He causes them to disintegrate as a body. The work of God is to make us one body, but the work of Satan is to tear us apart.
Does that sound familiar?
Well, you have been kind to let me go so long. Let me say a few things on the last point. I think this is very important, and our brothers will get into it, I am sure.
We need to see the practice of the corporate expression.
If you ask me what is the one thing wrong in the body of Christ today, I would tell you this: so few do so much, and so few function as they should.
Do not despise your gift. Do not bury your talent. We are not one member. The body is not made up of one member, but many members.
We are not all ears. You know, that is an expression: when you want to listen to something, you say, “I am all ears.” With the Pittman family, it is true—we are all ears. That is a joke. I know it went right over your head.
But where is the head? Where is the arm? Where is the toe? Where are the hidden members that God gives more honor to? Where are they? Why do they not function? Why is it that one or two members do everything?
It is because we do not value our gift. Grace has been poured down upon every member to function, and each has been given a gift to function.
Do not despise your gift, and do not bury your talent.
Do you want the body of Christ to increase with the increase of God, as we read in Ephesians 4 and Colossians 2:19? Then every member of His body must be functioning.
Young people, I want to encourage you. Let me tell you quickly my own story. When I came here, I did not know anything. Some of you may still think I do not know anything, by the way.
But I knew the Spirit of God had moved upon my heart, and I saw that I could not be silent. I could not fail to function. As clumsy as it was, and as wrong as the things I said and prayed may have been, I could not not function.
Young people, older saints who have been here for so long, learn to be functioning members in the body of Christ.
That is how we increase with the increase that is of God. Ephesians 4:15-16 says it is by every joint of supply. Are you a joint of supply? Then bring it into the corporate expression.
Colossians 2 says, are you a joint and a band? Then bring it into the corporate expression. There we will discover a greater increase than we could ever imagine, and something that speaks to the heart of God.
This is the burden the Lord has laid on my heart.
Have you seen God’s passion, His desire? Is it yours? Ask the Lord to make it yours. It may turn you upside down. It may send you in a different direction. But it will be for the good of eternity.
Have you seen how important the body of Christ is? It is the place of that corporate expression. Have you seen it?
Do you have a real consciousness of the body of Christ, or do you only have a concept? Do you know how to tell if you only have a concept? You can live without the body of Christ. You can walk independently. You can work independently. You can speak independently.
If you have only a concept, you can do those things. But if you have a real consciousness, it changes everything you do and say.
Finally, have you seen the practical manifestation of this corporate expression? We will never see it if only a hand functions, only an ear functions, or only a foot functions.
We cannot say, “I have no need of you.” Every member is needed for the full expression of the body of Christ.
Shall we pray?
Lord, we leave these words with You, and we ask You: open our eyes to that thing which is greater than ourselves.
Lord, I say with my brethren here, and I say to You, take all of me—not just part, but all. You say, “I am willing to go all the way,” but I am willing to be made willing.
I want Your desire to be my desire. We want Your passion to be our passion. Would You do that, Lord? Open our eyes, Lord.
For we ask this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.