Rochester Conference Part 5: The Body of Christ: How Believers Grow Together (Ephesians 4)

And then you have another meeting, and the brothers get to speak. And that one will be a total disaster. And actually, it’s about that time I need to come back and start all over again and say, “You didn’t hear a thing I said.” And you work at it. And you work at it for a while. And finally, one night it happens. The phone rings. Everybody’s crying, everybody’s singing, everybody is praising the Lord. The body of Jesus Christ has functioned because she has been equipped. And in my calling and in my sending, and I’ve got both, and they’re real, and I can tell you about, I am to equip you and get out of the way. And if you are equipped, you do not equip the soldier and then preach to him about military tactics and war for the rest of his life. You say, “You hear that? You hear the sound of gunfire? Go.” I don’t see how it could be more obvious.

So, we Baptists, we read this passage, and twice a year, we Baptists have a three-day workshop in which you can get a star and a certificate by going to this workshop to teach you, I’m not lying, how to fill out the Sunday morning envelope. You put your money in, and it’s, ‘Were you on time?’ Did you get to the attendance? Are you going to church? Did you read your Bible every day? I took a three-day workshop and got a little certificate and a star. And that was the equipping of the saints…Baptist-wise.

Brothers and sisters, this is serious business. The apostle doesn’t stay, and the prophet does not forever prophesy, and we do not live our lives following an evangelist. An evangelist should show us a little bit about how he does what he does. A prophet should teach us how to speak. And a pastor should care for us. And then he should teach us how to care for one another. Why don’t you come up here, really close to me, and repeat that?

Audience: Well it just seems that this is a little bit, this kind of reflects where He says He gives gifts to men, this basically these men that are given these gifts are swallowed up within the framework of the church, they’re not unique brothers He’s simply saying that in the church some are this some are that and some have this and those that particularly do these things just equip people, but He removes that hierarchal stigma that because these men are just lost within the church.

I’ve told this story before when I was in Taiwan trying to find some of the scraps of Watchmen’s Nee’s work. There was a brother there who was a healer. I wanted to meet him because I was young and dumb. I wanted to see a healer in the church, and we were leaving a particular conference and going to another city and we were going in buses and they told me he was in bus number three or something like that, and I ran over to the bus and I called out his name and nobody moved and of course they didn’t understand what I was saying too well, but I finally got his attention, he was sitting in the back of the bus, and he stood up and he looked at me, pointed this way at himself, “me?” and he came forward. We got out of the bus, and I took his picture. He was so confused. What was this all about? And got back on the bus, and I thank God for that. Well, I really thank God for that. And if you have the gift of healing, then brother, heal. And if you have the real gift of healing, you will continue caring for those whom God did not miraculously heal. And you will continually remind the church how to take care of those who are sick, because those of you who are well are some of the most arrogant, stuck-up people on the face of the earth. And you think you’re healthy because…no, you don’t think you’re healthy, you think we’re psychotic, and you’re so proud of being healthy and strong, and all we ought to do is eat cheese three times a day like you do. Well, you just wait, brother. We sickly ones are going to outlive you. And we’re going to bury you for your coronaries and your strokes.

All of these people equip the holy ones. Now, who does the work of service? The holy ones, for the building up. Who does the building up? The holy ones. The only thing these people do is equip us. We work and we do the building up of the body of Christ. If I help brothers and sisters know how to meet, they will build up; each part will build up the church. If I show them how to pray, each one of the pieces of the body will build up the body. Who builds up the body? The pieces build up the body. And then the body works. And praise the Lord, my inabilities are met by the body. This is a beautiful thing if you can understand it. I’m here with a bunch of Christians, and we’re just getting started. And each of us supplies a body. We build a body. We work together. A body is built up. She comes into being. And suddenly we are getting bread on the water. We are receiving from the very body we help build up. And the body, the greater, not the pieces, but the whole, flows back to me and supplies me. This couldn’t be any clearer, folks.

For the equipping of the saints, for the work of the service, for the building up of the body of Christ. And there is nothing more holy than that passage, the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith. If you just take out the word ‘faith’ for a minute and realize that there comes a moment when that body gets joined together and there’s unity. That’s not unity of doctrine. The faith is the faith I had in Christ, the faith you had in Christ, and that we finally come into unity because we had faith. I see so much in this of a man who cannot comprehend the Christian life outside the church, that we gather, we gather, we’ve all had faith, we get equipped, and we build up the body until finally there is a unity in the fact that we have each individually had faith. You may have some other interpretation; I can only tell you that this one works.

Okay, what verse am I in? 13. Until we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God. That word knowledge there means experiential knowledge. And what does that mean? That means that whatever unity comes from these pieces as they supply one another, because they have been equipped for others by others, it means that the outcome will be Jesus Christ. You may measure a body by whether or not the flowing out is centered on the Lord Jesus Christ. I don’t know how much you can experience scripture, but I know that the scripture has an end of its experience and turns to legalism and turns to head knowledge, but if there is in the church of Jesus Christ an equipping and then a mutual building up by the saints themselves, there will come a unity because we have had faith. And that unity will flow out to an experiential knowledge and an experiential expression of Jesus Christ. And I would say to God that some way in heaven there could be a counting of the number of times somebody says Jesus, and someone says Lord, and someone says Christ in a body of believers, and then let us fall back and see where Christ dwells and how much He is flowing among His people. And I hate to say this, but I honestly believe that most churches would get somewhere close to zero. I’m not talking about prayers, and I’m not talking about rituals; I’m talking about the daily conversation of God’s people. How many times have people talked about their experience in Jesus Christ? And brothers and sisters, you may measure where you are in the body of Christ, if you are a great group, as to how much you’re reporting on Jesus Christ. And if you’re reporting on scripture, I can only tell you this. If you’re outside the organized church, if you listen to a sound in the far distance, you can hear the death knell of your group.

Scripture simply cannot take you very far. The only place scripture can take you is to Christ. How much experiential sharing is there? And you can also…it flows the other direction; you can know how much unity there is. To a mature…David, are you ready? Man, Gene, that’s singular. No, it’s not. That’s the new species until that new species has become mature. And if you walk it back, the apostles and these others equip the body of the building, the parts do the building, and out of it comes a unity and an experience of Jesus Christ. And out of that comes maturity. And the only maturity there is in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ is the maturity based upon an entire body of people having an experiential relationship with Jesus Christ.

And in Galatians, it says Let those who are mature help those who are weak. And that is speaking within a functioning body of people. That is not talking about a trained Christian marriage counselor. It’s not talking about all these other things, like the elders should take care of this, or so on and so forth. And the question was asked the other day: What do you do when so many new people come in and they don’t know zip? Then let the church of the Lord Jesus Christ show forth her maturity to a mature humus, to a mature species, to the measure of the statute which belongs to the fullness of Christ.

Paul, why did you make it difficult for me to understand, for any of us to understand, what you’re talking about? He’s packing so much into such a small space. And there are times I just have to stop and gasp for breath. Oh, I wish you’d been a little kinder and taken a few more pages to give us a little bit more of the process, but some brother is sitting down there, and Paul is just, and the apostles are given the first word, and he is giving superlatives, and I gasp for breath. I sit here and tell you I can’t keep up with all this. I know that you understand this passage clearly, and I know that your pastor has explained it to you.

Well, I’m going to try my best to keep up with you, Paul. What on earth are you telling us now? A mature man, a mature body, a mature church to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. I don’t know. I’m going to take it backwards. That’s the best way for me to understand it. There is a fullness of Christ. There is something that belongs to the fullness of Christ. Are you following me? I’m going backwards. There is a fullness of Christ; there’s something which belongs to the fullness of Christ, and you can measure whatever it is that belongs to Christ. I’ll do it again. There is a fullness of Christ; there is something that belongs to Christ, and that which belongs to Christ can be measured, and you measure whatever it is that belongs to Christ according to the fullness of Christ.