Morning.
It is a joy and a pleasure to be back here again. Once again, as we speak every year to you, we thank you guys in Richmond for your faithfulness to the Lord and to the saints of God throughout the earth. You pour yourselves out so that we could come together for a planning meeting for a conference that has been such a blessing, that has been so much the very lifeblood of the Lord Jesus to so many of us from the outside.
And we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your kindness, your love, and for providing us the opportunity to touch the life of our Lord Jesus.
Let us pray for a moment.
Father, we are so very grateful that You are not dependent upon great men to do Your work, for it is Your great Holy Spirit that teaches us.
Lord, I thank You that You can take a humble servant with a simple word and let it be life, if it comes from You. So we just pray this morning that that which we share together will be life from You, that it will encourage our hearts, and press us forward as we walk together in Your great love.
We thank You, Father, in Christ’s name. Amen.
Well, I am sure you are all prompted, and you remember exactly where I left off last year when I was here. So I just kind of want to pick up from there and go on.
So, if you will quickly rehearse in your mind—oh, that was the week the power was out. You did not have any power. I saw most of you sleeping, so I guess we will start over.
For those of you that are aged like I am, and memories are not what they used to be, last time I spoke with you, I spoke about the tremendous value that each of us has to the church.
The church is not an organization with great CEOs, great CFOs, tremendous trained teachers, who run the show and are the life of it. The church is a living body of the Lord Jesus Christ, and He is the only Head.
And He chooses each of us in some peculiar way to provide some portion of His life to the whole. And when you choose not to function, the rest of us are left without that portion.
Now, God is merciful. If the whole lot of us just decide to be lousy and lazy this week, those few who seek the Lord will be blessed by the Lord.
But how much more wonderful it is when we faithfully give that portion we have; when we do not despise it because it seems small next to some other brother or sister’s portion, but treasure it because it is the life of the Lord Jesus given to us to share together. Then the whole of the assembly is richly blessed.
There is no single individual in a local gathering, or in the church universal, that is more valuable than any other. For value is an expression of the price paid for something, and we were all purchased for the same price: the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.
You are as valuable as the apostle Paul. And in the flesh, you are as useless as some redneck from Alabama.
Thanks be to God that none of us are disqualified because of our educational status, because of our eloquence or lack thereof, or because of our circumstances in life. We are all qualified by the life of the Lord Jesus within us.
So do not hold back that which you have. Do not despise it as small and insignificant, for it is provided to the whole of the church by you, through you, by the Lord Jesus. By the shedding of His blood and the giving of His Spirit, it is no small thing.
That portion you have is a treasure to be shared with your brothers and sisters.
So this week, I want to flip that over and talk some about the value of the whole—the church—to the individual, because it goes both ways.
You are immeasurably valuable as an individual to the whole, but the whole has immeasurable value to you as an individual. And we need to know both sides of that. We need to know how the body of Christ truly is built together and functions as a living organism.
Always remember that the Lord has structured His church so that it needs all of us to actively function by the grace, gifting, and measure that He gives us, in order for there to be a living, healthy expression of His church.
But in order for you to function properly, you need what the whole has to give you. You need to receive as well as give the life of Jesus Christ.
The apostle Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus in Acts—or Luke did in Acts, whoever did. Pardon me, old man.
Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which He purchased with His own blood.
—Acts 20:28
In Ephesians 5:25, in that long passage about the church, he says:
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave Himself up for it.
—Ephesians 5:25
And then he goes on later in that passage and says, “I am really talking about Christ and the church as much as I am about marriage between a man and a woman.”
Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it.
How easy it is for us as human beings to take for granted what occurred this morning: coming together at the Lord’s table, coming together to worship our Redeemer.
How easy it is for us to come to a prayer meeting or a fellowship meal and just see those same old people. You know, that guy who is kind of pleasant, and I really like talking to him, and that other one that I just really wish had sat at a different table for lunch.
It is easy to take for granted and fail to treasure, to value, the assembly in which God has placed us.
When you travel around a little bit, it is real easy to get googly-eyed at some other assembly. You know, because they are all different. They are all so strange.
I mean, I gather in a group of three families. We are not going to need this many chairs any given Sunday. Kit Mays, with a loud and vibrant group of folk—it is different everywhere.
And it is easy to go somewhere else and think, “Oh, if only our Sundays were like this. If only I were in something like this every day.” How many people have you all had come and leave Richmond over the years because they came with googly eyes and left with broken hearts and disappointed minds?
It is a difficult thing for the human being to hold precious relationships with others for any period of time.
My wife and I are celebrating our fortieth anniversary this weekend. Today, actually, is our fortieth anniversary. And we do not feel like we have been married so terribly long. But then when we look around at the people we know at home and we look around in our day and age, forty years is a pretty big mark.
A lot of couples here have already surpassed that by far. But your younger families, your generations, do not seem to endure that far—usually will not endure. It is just real easy to fall out of love with one another, real easy to set our eye on something else.
Let it sink into you that the Lord so values His church that He gave Himself for it.
Oh, let the Lord work a love in you for the church, for the body of Christ. Let it be precious, and hold it precious every day of your life, for He does so.
Not a day goes by that He checks out on the church and says, “Oh, I have got other things. I am going to go see about this Pluto thing and see if we cannot get it big enough to count.”
We are always at the center of Who He is. He gave Himself for the church: the church universal and the church local.
He shed His blood that you could sit next to that person you are sitting next to.
Love so richly poured out.
How simple it ought to be—and really is for many of us I see here—to worship at the Lord’s table. I mean, how can it be difficult when you consider the price He paid for us?
How can it be difficult to set aside your human nature and let the Spirit of God set you free before the table to praise Him and to express your love and gratitude to Him?
Such a price He paid for you and for us.
The value is so wonderful when we let ourselves love one another, love the house of God, and love the saints. We are bound together in those cords of His love.
We begin to see a more complete revelation of our Lord Jesus.
Here is the value of the whole: that in loving you and being loved by you, I come to understand the depth and the breadth of the love of Jesus Christ.
We are but flesh in this time. We cannot soar in the heavenlies physically. We are bound to this earth and to the tribulations and trials that we face, to the frustrations that visit upon us.
But when we have that cord of love binding us together with our brothers and sisters, we begin to understand far more fully how greatly we are loved by our Redeemer.
You can go off to Timbuktu. You can find a little Pacific island, go live on it, enjoy the fish, enjoy the sun, forget the world exists, and not feel any threat from any outside aggressor. And love the Lord, and be loved of the Lord.
But if you do that, the depth and breadth of God’s love will escape you. For it is knowing that my brother, who sees my every weakness, loves me, that I begin to understand what it is that I, who am without any redeeming value, became the object of the love of the Son of God in such a way that He shed His blood for me.
That is a big, big picture to comprehend, and it is best learned in small frames.
Me and Glenn together. Glenn loving me, me loving Glenn—that is a picture size I can comprehend. And as I comprehend that, I begin to comprehend how big that true picture is of God’s love for me.
Why does the church as a whole matter in your life? One reason is that it shows you, it reveals to you, the overwhelming love of our Savior.
Beloved, let us love one another. Not idle talk. And it is not because the Lord Jesus is real concerned that we might have a little tiff, that you and I might not get along well enough, and, you know, it is just going to derail His whole plan.
That is not what it is about. It is because in loving one another, we experience the love of Almighty God, and we learn to love Him fully and wholly.
It is a wonderful thing to be built together with saints of every possible description, attitude, and look, and to learn to love one another.
So there is a value that the whole holds for you. You will not get that from your social club, your fraternity, your sorority, your tennis club, your rowing club, whatever it is, wherever your social connections are.
They are not going to provide you with that deep, anchoring, securing, keeping love of Jesus Christ. But in the body of Christ, you find that.
On your worst day, when you have just really messed up, and your brothers and sisters know that you really messed up, they put their arm around you.
They do not turn their back and say, “You are an embarrassment, boy. Move away.” But instead, they shed tears over you, and they hug you. They encourage you. They challenge you to press on.
The world cannot give you that.
Oh, what value this little gathering has for each one of you. For it is the life of Christ, shared together, that we experience.
Now, some of you northerners, I find frequently, are just not very well educated. I mean, who of you can speak with the timbre and tone of a Kit Mays?
You know, there was one brother—I remember one brother—that could: Thornton Stern. Yeah, what a voice. You guys, you northerners, you need to go back to school.
And the church is your school. The church, the local gathering, the local assembly, is our spiritual university.
So no, we do not have to start up—whoever mentioned starting Bible schools—we do not need to start Bible schools. The Lord has put us in school together.
He gave us a staff. Pretty good faculty. We will read now from Ephesians 4, starting at verse 11.
Verse 11 informs us that He gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers.
And He gave some to be apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers.
—Ephesians 4:11
That is a pretty well-structured staff there for a university.
You have the school president, the Lord Jesus Himself, and under Him you have the apostles, who are the public face. They are the ones that go out and gather in the new, help those that are there understand the grand scheme of things.
You have prophets that speak living words. You go into the classroom, and this brother or sister, with no thought of you at all in their mind, stands up and reads a Scripture on Sunday morning. And that Scripture just lifts you out of whatever struggle you are in and places you on that magic-carpet ride with the Lord Jesus.
You are just up in the air with Him, and nothing is touching you. Nothing is holding you down. You are free—free indeed.
There are evangelists. Many of us of my generation and older are here today because of an evangelist. You know, back when we were young, people actually held meetings and preached the gospel.
And they spoke of the Lord Jesus Christ and the price He paid. And we heard the gospel, and the Holy Spirit quickened it to us, and we repented and trusted in the Lord Jesus.
Good, good staff to have: prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. How blessed we are to have so many brothers and sisters who can share the Word of God with us.
We are blessed to have some that are exceptional, a blessing in their ministry of the Word.
But we also have those other brothers and sisters that are just everyday brothers and sisters, who stand up one Sunday, twist up all the courage they can get, open the Bible, and share something with us.
And out of their mouth come words that impact our lives. Good faculty at this university, guys. The Lord has done a good job. He has equipped His faculty so that they are able to function in their role.
But it is more than just a faculty that we have; we have a course of study. Verse 12:
For the perfecting of the saints, unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the body of Christ.
—Ephesians 4:12
There is a purpose to this university. There is a reason this staff exists. It is so that you and I, in our everyday lives, become functioning, healthy expressions of the life and power of Jesus Christ, so that we learn how to impact one another and the world we live in.
The Lord has not left it up to you to figure it all out. He has put together a faculty and a course of study that we might eventually come to the point He is bringing us to: to be ambassadors for Christ in a strange and foreign world.
Verse 13 is the—what is the word they use in schools? I cannot remember; it has been so long since I have been to college. But it is the review of what we will become.
Till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.
—Ephesians 4:13
That is where we are headed, brothers and sisters. And it is not just those elite among us that are headed there. The course of study is built in such a way that the most challenged has the same possibility of achieving that stature as the most brilliant among us.
This course of study is set up in such a way that it will reach down and bring each and every one of God’s children to that full stature, if they will allow themselves to participate in His university: the church.
It is personalized study in a group setting. It is a wonderful thing, this university that the Lord has put us in.
Now, most of us come to this university like most freshmen go to college: stupid, ill-tempered, full of self-interest.
You know, when I got to my freshman year of college, it was a little two-year local junior college. You would think it would just be a bunch of us local kids that did not have a clue, but, you know, we were just good Southern boys and girls. We would go and be nice, and things would be easy and smooth, and teachers would find a way to catch our attention.
Nah. Every possible expression of the flesh was found.
And I suspect, having gone through junior college and a four-year university, having put two children through college, having watched many of you young people moving forward in your lives, that it is just as true wherever you are.
You get out there and you get in school, and you think you have got it figured out. “I will build my schedule so that all my classes are on Wednesday and Thursday from one till three. The rest of the week, I have got it made. And even on these days, I can sleep late and get out to party early.”
We all come to the house of God as a mess, because we all come into this school the first day we receive the life of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And most of us, if not all of us, upon receiving that life, do not have this instantaneous, wonderful, glorious work of sanctification that just wipes away the flesh, wipes away all the stupidity, all the bad habits, all the fears, all the hurts. We bring all of that with us.
So we have a freshman year, and we need to leave it behind.
How sad it is that so many saints today are in their fourth year of school, fifth year, twentieth year, thirtieth year, and you are still playing around with all that baggage. You are still toting that around.
You are still hiding from your brothers and sisters because you do not really want them to know what you are like in the middle of your heart. You are still trying to see, as was shared yesterday, just how much I have to say before I get myself in trouble. How much can I get away with?
You know, brothers and sisters, we need to leave our freshman year behind us.
We need to come to that point where we have said, “Yes, I am here to learn and be changed, and I will give my life to this process. I will give my life to the work of the Holy Spirit, by His Word and by my brothers and sisters, to change me and reveal to me the fullness of Christ Jesus.”
There is this wonderful thing at the end of the course of study called a degree. I have a degree. I know that may be hard to believe. I have a piece of paper that says that I did manage to get enough Cs to get a president of a college to sign off on it.
There is a degree at this school.
But speaking truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him, who is the head, even Christ.
—Ephesians 4:15
Someday, some sweet day, I will get my degree in this university. I have to be honest with you: as I understand the Scriptures, I will get that degree when I see Him face to face.
When I know Him as He knows me, I will be utterly and completely changed. I will not have to wonder, because I will know. I will not have to be fearful, because I will see Him as He truly is.
But until I get to that point, until I gain that degree, I need to be a faithful classmate and student.
Now, of course, we are all on work-study program.
I went to two fairly small schools: a small junior college, a small four-year school, and paid for most of it by working in a soda shop, in the library, and different little jobs around. Many of you have done the same thing.
But we are all on a work-study program here, because the whole body is joined and knit together by what every joint supplies.
While you are learning how to know the Lord Jesus in one another, to be touched by Him in one another, and to see a fuller blessing and a fuller revelation, you are also required to be giving that same lifeblood to your classmates.
We are joints of supply. It is our job. It is our responsibility. You are not opting out of it.
The Lord Jesus does not say, “Well now, you know, it would be wonderful if you wanted to be a joint of supply. I could actually put you someplace where you could pour out My life into others if you wanted to.”
Ah, it is par for the course. It is standard. It is in the syllabus. You are to be a joint of supply on campus. You are to give the life of Christ that is in you.
But you are also to be the recipient of that supply. You are to receive.
This is pretty cool, this part. I mean, is it not neat that your Father God says, “Hey, I have built it so that you are going to get great things from your brothers and your sisters. I am going to pump out this stuff to you through them. They are going to be My cash conduit.”
We receive that life from one another.
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.
—Ephesians 4:16
You do not get it just so you can be big man on campus and be cool. That life is given to you so you build up the next brother until we are all built up in love.
So that is a benefit. That is a value that, for those of you that meet here, this meeting group, this fellowship, has for your life. Do you treasure it?
Do you weep for one another and laugh with one another? Do you encourage one another? Do you, at times, share your hurt feelings so that the blood can wash away those hindrances?
I mean, I know I can answer, by and large, in the affirmative for you guys from outside. I see that. But do you see it? Do you experience it in one another?
And then, kind of the culmination of all this school and all this work is this fact: we are, and will be until the Lord returns, creatures of the flesh—the physical flesh.
We will be in this body, and we will have to deal with dying to our old nature. We will fail to die to our old nature at times, and we are always going to be working through that.
And we are always going to find that when we go before the Lord and see some great revelation in Scripture of His righteousness—come on, you see something of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, and it does not make you understand how unrighteous you are in yourself?
And you hear a Scripture say—you know, you read a Scripture that says—“Be holy, even as I am holy.” It does not make you think, “How in the world could I ever, ever be holy as He is holy?”
We are all creatures of the flesh. We all are trying to overcome the limitations of humanity, that we must die daily to this flesh in us and live unto Christ.
And here is the really cool thing: I am going to share a few aspects of the character of Christ. And I try not to be personal as I share, but these few things are shared out of my experience.
Forgive me, I have something on my chest. Got to get it off.
So I want to share these things and just take advantage of your good grace not to be too upset that they come from my own personal background. But there are some things about the Lord Jesus that I need to know more fully, that I need to have worked out in me more fully.
One of those is righteousness.
Philippians 3:9 is a wonderful, challenging verse:
And be found in Him, not having a righteousness of mine own, even that which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith.
—Philippians 3:9
Now, that is a fairly simple verse. I mean, it is not complex. I need to be in such a situation that it is found in me that I am righteous by faith; that I have embraced by faith the righteousness of Jesus, and by embracing that by faith, somehow it has been worked out in my life, that my life expresses the righteousness of Christ.
Not hard to understand. But doggone it, it sure is hard to experience. It just is difficult to experience.
But there was a brother when I was a young man—actually, I knew him before I knew the Lord. He was the guy in church that the teenagers did not want to cross.
He was an old farmer, fairly rugged-looking, had those big shoulders, that sun-weathered face.
And when he was smiling at you and just looking at you with tenderness in his heart, it looked like he was about to pull out a bullwhip and turn it loose on you.
You know those guys that you are just scared to death of, because you know they broached—or put up with—no foolishness.
Now, those of you that know me know that I have a very warped sense of humor. And at some point in life, I finally gave up on trying to sophisticate it and control it, and I just let it roll sometimes.
Not with Jacks. Not with him. I did my best to act like a good Christian boy when I was around this brother.
I ended up knowing his daughter and son real well. His son went off with the athletes that play ball, Athletes in Action, went off with them to China. He is a pastor in Hawaii, I think, now.
I got to know the family. Amazingly, after I came to Christ, they decided that they would spend some time with me and try to help me understand what a family was, and how you work together and live together and respect one another.
And I learned that that stern face, that man that I knew without question would stand for what was right, would also love me.
And he would teach me. And being around him, I saw and began to realize that God was not this scary person that was too good for me to know.
But this righteous God whom I feared was a God who loved me. I learned a lot of that from this brother, from him loving me when I knew that he knew what an idiot I was.
And I knew that his nature was to put me out of my pain, but he chose not to. He allowed his children to be my friends, even though that might not have been the safest move for him at that time in my life.
He was a righteous man, and in him, I began to understand that God can both be righteous and merciful; that He can be my Judge and my Redeemer.
I touched that part of our Lord Jesus Christ in this brother in a way I have not touched it in any other brother. Probably not because he was so much more righteous than all of you, but because I was so much more in need at that point in my life to see that.
I needed to straighten up, but I did not respond well to being told so. And this brother set the standard by his simple life and encouraged me by his great love and mercy.
Humility.
Humility is not the easiest thing for any of us.
Oh, I can remember clearly the first time I preached the gospel when someone got saved. You know how it brings you to your knees in thankfulness and in amazement that God could have done—no, no, no. It made my head swell.
It was a feeling like I had scored a touchdown in a big game. Now, how stupid is that? How wrong is that response and reaction?
But I came to know a brother who would freely embrace Romans 7:18:
For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me, but to do that which is good is not.
—Romans 7:18
This brother was—you know, he was just one of those saints that you would not find fault with. You just looked at him and thought, “Man, if I could be like that.”
But he would be the first to tell you, “There is no good thing in me but the Lord Jesus. If there is good in my life, it is Christ; it is not me.”
And it was not in a theological way. It was not in a false humility. It was just his own assessment of knowing who he was and realizing that, but for the grace of God, he had nothing to offer.
That was a good man for me to come to know early on, because I had the potential, like most young men, to get the big head and go on and then suddenly find out I was not as hot as I thought I was.
And be crushed and stomped down and so disappointed that I would abandon the house of God.
But to see a man that I knew had such a testimony, who had no interest whatsoever in anybody knowing who he was— all he wanted to do was let people see Jesus.
Such humility I was able to touch in him.
Now, when you come from the great state of Alabama, it is still hard to be humble. The Lord is doing some work.
I grew up in a family with no mercy. My family had no concept of being merciful to one another. We had no understanding of how to love one another. My father was a very difficult man, and home life was best avoided.
I did not understand mercy. I was big on accountability, as long as it was not me held accountable. I mean, I did not mind holding you accountable. I expected you to live up to whatever you were supposed to be doing. I had the exclusion, understand? That is the right of every man, to exclude himself.
But I did not know mercy. I had a soft heart in many ways. I mean, I cared about people, but I did not understand mercy at all. It is not just mushy feelings. It is not just being able to cry because someone is hurt.
But on our early trip down to Haiti, we were sharing in a little village. In the evenings, we would teach Bible studies to the adults, but in the mornings we would do youth work. We would bring in the kids from around.
And one of the things we did—because this was out in northwest Haiti, where there was hardly any food, where children really did die from a lack of food, or they did then—was feed the kids every day.
And we had the good old American staples that work well: bread, peanut butter, and jelly. And you just made peanut butter sandwiches, cut them up, and gave them to the kids.
But there was one girl, about thirteen, who, after the first day or so, we began to notice never ate her sandwich. She just tucked it away and put it in a pocket. She never ate it.
Well, we are good Americans, you know. We understand these things. We understand the difficulties of life. So we go to her and talk to her about it. I said, “You know, is it that you are allergic to peanuts? Could we possibly give you butter and jam?”
“Oh, no, no.” She was very hesitant to say anything about it, but, “No, no, that is very good, what you give. Thank you.”
It took us about three days. Excuse me.
It took about three days to get to the root of the problem. We got to the root because one of the young ladies in the group went home with her after lunch.
When she got home, she took her sandwich out and gave it to a neighbor kid who did not have as much as she had—which was virtually nothing.
This girl was malnourished, but she was giving the one good meal she was going to have that day to the neighbor kid.
That is mercy. I am sorry, but that is mercy. That is what the Lord did for us. He gave His Son that we might live.
Oh, I saw the mercy of God that day. How I was touched, to this very day, by His mercy expressed in that history.
She turned out an exceptional young lady. We kept up with her a little bit, as long as we could, and she eventually went to nursing school there and became a nurse so she could take care of others.
How mercy was woven into her by the Lord Jesus at a very early age.
Oh, that we could learn mercy like that, that we could daily understand how merciful our Lord has been to us, and we could give one another that kind of mercy.
You do not need mercy? You are dumb as a rock. You need mercy. You need brothers and sisters who are kind and tender-hearted toward you if you are going to learn the depth and breadth of the love of Jesus Christ and become an expression of that to the local fellowship, to the church universal, and to a lost and dying world.
You know, the Scripture gives this wonderful description of the best feast we could ever enjoy, found in Galatians 5:22-23:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law.
—Galatians 5:22-23
Now, that is the fruit of the Spirit upon which we feast. But as we understand the Scriptures, that also should be the fruit of the Spirit that is borne out in our life.
Now, why would such fruit be borne out in our lives except to feed others? Do you think that the Lord is giving you peace so you can have it on your arm, you can go around and chomp on peace all day? “Eat my peace, and I feel better now—calm.”
The fruit of the peace of God in you is for your brothers and sisters. That is that joint of supply. You are supplying the peace of God in their life so that they come to understand that He has made all the enmity go away, that we are at peace with Him by His work, not by ours.
The peace of God, the fruit of the Spirit.
When you are in a healthy, living relationship with one another in the local assembly, you will find that whatever you come with a hunger for spiritually, you can taste it from a brother or a sister locally.
You do not need the great evangelist from the far West Coast to know these things. Thank God for those men He raises up to bring us deeper revelation, to teach us in a clearer and more poignant way the truth of Christ.
But brothers and sisters, we do not live daily off those brothers’ teaching. We live daily off the life of Christ in one another. That is our sustenance.
That we learn to give and receive the life of Christ.
It would be a glorious thing if I were just so capable, and you were so capable, that we could just gather all that He is in our own selves and never need to be touched by it in someone else. But it would be so contrary to His purpose and will.
He is building us together. We are called so many interesting things in Scripture. We are a house of God. We are a city set on a hill. We are a city coming down out of heaven. We are a bride.
All of those things in which we are described are corporate entities: blocks built together, stones—living stones—placed one on top of the other and beside the other. All of them speak of a life shared, not an independent life.
Treasure what the Lord is doing in building you together with your brothers and your sisters. Do not look afar. Do not look over your shoulder and wish that you could go back to some other land or that you could go forward to some other land.
For you, God has all that is necessary where He places you.
That may not be to your taste. You may have to learn to eat Chinese instead of hot dogs, or hot dogs instead of Chinese. But that is God’s choice. It is His wisdom that does this. It is His university we are in.
So, brothers and sisters, as important as it is that you faithfully function to give the life of Christ that is in you, it is equally important that you faithfully receive the life of Christ in your brothers and sisters.
See the treasure that the local assembly is for your life.
Now, it is much more than that. This is not intended to be, “This is the ultimate of all that the Lord is doing with the church.” Oh, it is far grander than that, because it is for His purpose and His sake.
But we are talking today about the value it has for us in our earthly life. It has great value for you. You will not make it on your own.
God has so planned it all out that we need the life of Christ in one another. So give the life of Christ faithfully, and accept the life of Christ faithfully, and you will be far the richer for it.
Father, how grateful we are for Your great provision, Your great wisdom in putting all this into motion. We could have never thought of such a thing, Lord God.
And yet You, in Your wisdom, understand exactly how to get what Your will is accomplished among men, and how to include us and bring us all into it.
Fill us, Lord Jesus, with revelation of Your love and of Your purpose for us.
And help us, Lord Jesus, to give our lives to being built together in love. We ask in Christ’s name. Amen.