Rochester Conference Part 2: What Is the Body of Christ? (One New Humanity Explained)

You bet your life I want that one. Okay, here we go. New man. What was the other one? One body, citizens, household. Look at it. One new species that’s plural. One body that is plural. A body that is plural. A citizenship that is plural. It gives us a country of which we are citizens, and a household with many, many people in it. A household does not have a person in it. Here are four figures within a matter of two or three sentences, every one of them telling you that you belong to something corporate. You are a piece of a new man. You are a piece of citizenship, a nation. You’re a piece of a household, and you are one part of a body.  Now, brothers and sisters, will you please get impressed? And I am not speaking here ethereally of, “I belong to the body of Christ,” and Christians today and the church today are hidden in this ectoplasm. We’re all one body. Yes, we are. And we’re all of one spirit. Yes, we are, but this was the church in Hierapolis; this is not some theoretical mumbo jumbo of the 21st century. This is referring to a group of brothers and sisters of whom Paul is saying, You are a Jew and a Greek, and you’re not a Jew and a Greek. You are a new species. You are not a Jew and a Greek. You are one body, many parts to that body. You were aliens, and now you are no longer aliens; you have become citizens. You have said I pledge allegiance to, and you got a new country, you belong to a new nation, and you have also been brought into a house and there’s nobody in that house but those who are kin to one another and everybody kin to one another in that house is a son or a daughter of God the Father and a brother to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Hold on to that hot tub, brother, because these are things that are your heritage to experience. Deny yourself the body, deny yourself the household, deny yourself that species, and be apart from, and you have cut down 90% of your Christian life, and there’s nothing you do to add to it. Oh, but Gene, I’ll just meet with a group of wonderful Christians, and we’ll just have a wonderful time. We’ll love one another, care for one another, and have a fight four years later because you’re fallen and get nothing but anger, hurt, and pain.

Now, I’ve told this story before; I probably need to come up with a new story to illustrate this. And you will hear it again. And if you listen to some of the tapes, you will hear it there. When I got out of bed from having disseminated histoplasmosis, I had very, very little energy and strength, and I had been a wheeler-dealer and a goer, just get out of that bed in the morning, we’re going to save the world. God can die; we’re going to go ahead and save it anyway. We don’t need God; we’re going to bail the Red Sea dry. We’ll go across on dry land with or without the power of God. And I was dragging that carcass around. I weighed about 220 lbs., and I was probably carrying around about 60 lbs. of toxicity. I just barely could shuffle around, and it just totally changed me completely from a doer to a “nothinger”. And this happened in Altadena, California, and I was doing something that I rarely ever did, just to get out of the house a little bit.

I actually went to the grocery store with my wife, something I did not do. And I was walking around that place. It was all kind of new to me. I’ve been in grocery stores before, but I was taking a new look. We were in this supermarket, and I was walking past the meat section. And this is one of those things that I didn’t think. On rare occasions, I said something, and the words came out before the thought got there. I know you’ve had this experience. And you think and then speak, but here’s one of those times when you speak before the thought comes. And I was walking past that meat counter, and I saw a great big ox tongue. And I had never seen a great big, huge ox tongue before. And I stepped back, and it just came out of me so much that it startled me. I said, “There’s a Baptist preacher” and I said it in the context of a totally new life as I was becoming, searching for and becoming, part of the body of Christ, that there are many, many parts, but here was one part hanging out there all by itself, doing 90% of everything, the tongue, and I have often thought, I’d thought before and I think now whether you just drive me past the church building and there an image will come to my mind frequently, and all I can see is one gigantic tongue and two great big huge ears, and that’s all there is to the body of Christ among those people, a great big tongue and two huge ears and that is all.

I got a point, brother. Sit in your hot tub that you won’t give up, and that $50,000-a-year job that you’re so attached to, even though you’re following the Lord with all your heart, and you just sit there all alone, and be a thumb severed from the hand. Oh, I’m not severed from the body, and in one respect, you’re absolutely correct, but in another, you are in that you are not, that there’s not a flowing of all the energy of God through the whole body, part of it passing through you, to and from the head. I hope you enjoy that job, brother. I hope you enjoy that great big house you got and that excuse you got. I got to take care of my mother; she’s really not interested in you, brother, but she’s getting up in her years. She can still outrun you. She’s still a better woman than you are a man. We need to really save some money right now. We fell into a lot of debt. Well, don’t we all need to save some money? And what good will it do? The government, if they don’t get it by taxes, will get it by inflation. I can’t think of very many good excuses. There are probably a few to keep any of us out of the body of Christ. I’m just going to pray, and the Lord will bring back to us here in our town.

I have no idea how many towns and cities there are in America, but I would say that there are many above 5,000, all the way up to New York City. Is that still the largest city in America? I’m talking about one incorporated city. LA is just made up of a bunch of little towns. Now, the greater Los Angeles, no question is bigger than New York, but the incorporated city of New York, I think, is still number one. Start with New York, come all the way down to 5,000, a town of 5,000, I believe you’ll come up with over 100,000 towns and cities, and you think God loves you so much that He’s going to come to your town. Well, He just may do it, but I’m not.

If God blessed you with enormous strength and gifted you more than any other man and made you deeply spiritual, what do you figure would be the maximum number of churches you could work with at any one given time? And 10 or 12, and you’ll be 10 or 12. How many in a lifetime? 40? Let’s say you’re going to die over 70. Well, that’s what the Lord gave us. Maybe 20, maybe 20 in one lifetime. And I 100% agree with that.  Paul Tarsus has raised somewhere around 13 to 20 churches in his entire lifetime. And he, by the way, was a better man than I am. With a jet airplane and with roads and all of that, I can’t shine his sandals. That’s 20 in a young man’s lifetime. I’d be tickled pink if, between now and the time I reach whatever it is I’m going to reach, there would be 50. I choose, and I’m picky. One body, one new species, one household, one citizenship of a nation; all of them are metaphors of Christ and the church.

Brothers and sisters, and those of you listening on tape, you ought to be part of the church of Jesus Christ in a daily living experiential reality. All right, here we go. Have I got a right to talk this way to you? Do I? Not the churches. Those of you who are sweet guests came in here innocently. Do I have a right to talk to you this way? Am I not supposed to preach the word of God? Thank you. Okay.

And so, we’re in verse…we are. Have I come to verse 20? Yes. And what is our count, brother? 7. Okay. Having been built upon…I haven’t done number 20 yet…of the saints and are God’s household.  Now he’s speaking about the household. The household has been built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And one of those apostles is Jesus Christ. And one of those prophets is Jesus Christ. And He is the Chief foundation stone upon which that house is built. And brothers and sisters, you don’t have an apostle, and you don’t have a prophet if He is not holding up the Lord Jesus Christ and nothing else. Here’s a house sitting on a foundation, and the apostles and the prophets are building on Christ, and they are part of the foundation in their declaration of Christ. To me, that’s what they are. Now, if you want to say Alright, but they’re ministering to the church and they’re ministering many things, I will agree to that, but their main ministry is the main stone. Brothers and sisters, the foundation is Christ, apostles, and prophets, and the church of Jesus Christ is built on those.

Well, Gene, can’t we get a prophet to come to our town? Good, what’s he going to do? Is he burning and blazing for the church or for the second coming? Is he burning and blazing for Christ or the Bible? Is he burning and blazing for the Lord Jesus Christ or the latest fad? If he is burning and blazing for Jesus Christ, then I would only say to Him, “God be with you, brother. Be careful and don’t reintroduce the laws of Moses.” It is upon Christ and the apostles and the prophets that the church in Hierapolis is built. Now, do we have any plurals in that at all? Having been built upon the foundation, we don’t, do we? Okay. Verse 21. In Him, in whom I know, but I’m trying to, in Christ. In Christ. And this begins to get very mysterious. In Christ, the whole building, the whole house, He has slipped now, brothers, from a household to the building that the people live in. And He has made the house and the household one. He is seeing the house as plural here. He spoke of a household, and He said the house is built on Christ, and now He has turned the house into people. Now that’s not the only time that happens in scripture. Can you think of another one? Okay. You got another one? I’m thinking of the New Jerusalem, saints. The new Jerusalem is both a city and a people. And here you have both a house that is a people. It is an early reference to the great new Jerusalem.

So, he’s introduced something new to us here. He now has a house that is people, and this house is alive because it is growing.

Let me clarify Revelation, or my relationship to it. I don’t understand the book of Revelation. I leave that book alone as much as possible. When I get to the end of chapter 7, I flip over to 17. 10 chapters that I don’t understand. It’s just exactly like this passage. Here is a household; it becomes a building. The building’s people. The building is fit together. The building grows. And here we have God’s people. They’ve been brought up out of the earth, the second coming has arrived, and suddenly, you have a city; it’s not a woman by any stretch of the imagination; it’s Jerusalem. And this Jerusalem is now suddenly made up of people that are stones in it. That this is a living city. And yet I see a city, and I get confused and I say, “How can this city have pearls, it has gold, and it’s got this and that?” And yet then I discover the whole city is me and you and us. And then suddenly it’s no longer a city and it’s no longer people who are a city; it suddenly turned into a bride, and I’m going bonkers. But God doesn’t have any problem with this at all. And this is a perfect passage where He’s moving from race to body to citizenship to household to a building. It’s people and it’s growing, and he’s just doing that just like this, but I’ll tell you in all of it is one point: that it’s corporate, and the girl is corporate. She’s corporate. And brothers and sisters, oh that God through His Holy Spirit might give you revelation and understanding that you are part of that girl. And I am a localist. I’m sorry, I look forward to the universal church, but I’m not out here in the ectoplasm enjoying the great body of Christ.