The
Church is to be the Full Expression of Christ
According
to Ephesians 4:12 who builds the church? "His intention - (In other words God's
intention by giving to you the apostle, the prophet, the pastor, the evangelist
and teacher, His intention for doing that was "for the perfecting and the
full equipping of the saints, (His consecrated people), that they should do the
work of ministering toward building up Christ's body (the church), That it
might develop until we all attain oneness in the faith and in the comprehension
of the full and accurate knowledge of the Son of God; that we might arrive at
really mature manhood the completeness
of personality which is nothing less than the standard height of Christ's own
perfection".
Some
may say "impossible", then throw the Bible
away. The church is to be the full
expression of Him Who fills everything, everywhere with Himself, the church as
Colossians says "is full of the God-Head, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and
we are complete in Him" the completeness of personality which is nothing
less than the standard height of Christ's own perfection, the measure of the
stature of the fullness of Christ, and the completeness found in Him. Now that's what the church is to be built up
to. The church is to be built up so that
it becomes the perfect and complete expression of the fullness of God.
That's why I say, it doesn't happen through
teaching, it doesn't happen through preaching, all of these things are
helps. It doesn't happen by the apostle,
the prophet, the evangelist, the pastor and the teacher. The church will only be built up when we as
individual believers begin to accept our priestly and our kingly office, and
begin to feed on the Bread of Life and allow Him to grow up on the inside of
us, and then we will corporately build the church.
The
scriptures tell the saints how to build the church. Yet today, you go to most churches and
there's no building. There are no saints
building up one another. Most come for
the "pastor" to build them up.
Remember we are still acting like we are under the old order of the
Aaronic priesthood. We're still looking
for Aaron to go into the presence of God for us. We're still looking for the high priest to do
the work. When we all become the proper
priests and kings when the church comes together we’ll partake of the Bread and
the Wine, and we'll be the authority to put to death the deed of darkness.
You
can take a born again believer and teach him all you want to about their
authority in Christ, and they don't have any as long as "self" is
ruling on the throne of their hearts.
The only authority we have is in the priestly office and that is one who
has been spirit filled and saturated with the spirit.
If
we were Spirit Filled, we would be the New Testament Priesthood, and we would
be the expression of God on the earth.
We wouldn’t express our own ideas.
We wouldn’t express our own concepts, and our own theological
discourses. We wouldn’t argue over
doctrines and opinions and differences.
But we’d come together and just flow in the Spirit of God. We would flow in praise and adoration. We’d flow in the love of God. To be Spirit Filled means that you’re filled,
and you are controlled, and you’re motivated by the Spirit of God. On the day of Pentecost, they didn’t just
speak in tongues, but they were filled, they were constituted, they were the first
beginnings of the New Testament Priesthood.