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Scripture Reading: John 14:6a; 1 Cor. 15:45b; 2:2; Gal. 2:20; Phil. 3:10; John 11:25a; 14:19b; Acts 1:14; 2:1-4, 16-17a; 4:24-31; 6:4; 10:9-16; 12:4-14; 13:1-4; 16:23-26; 22:17-21
In the previous chapters we have seen that according to God’s ordained way for the building up of the Body of Christ organically, we all have to do four main things. First, we have to gain the new ones so that the Lord can regenerate them and make them the living members of the Body of Christ. Second, we have to continue to have meetings with them in their homes to cherish them, to nourish them, and to take care of them in every way so that they may be established. Third, we have to do our best to perfect them in the small group meetings. If we take care of these three things properly, the new ones will be established and perfected, and they will be able to carry out the church life in many ways. They will be enabled to repeat all the work that they have seen. This will enable the church to have a rich, refreshing, living, uplifting, edifying, and building-up meeting. This brings us to the fourth point that we need to take care of. Through being perfected, every saint needs to prophesy, to speak the Lord forth into others in the larger meetings of the church.
This view of the scriptural way to build up the Body of Christ organically is wonderful. By taking this way, every saint in the church will be occupied. Everyone will serve God in order to participate in the universal priesthood. In Romans 15:16 Paul said that he was “a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles, a laboring priest of the gospel of God, in order that the offering of the Gentiles might be acceptable, having been sanctified in the Holy Spirit.” According to this verse, the main thing that the priest offers to God is the sacrifice of persons who have been saved by God’s salvation. We all need to be the priests of the gospel like Paul, who offered the Gentiles as sacrifices to God. This is our priestly service. All the believers in the church should be priests offering saved sinners to God as acceptable sacrifices. Regardless of how much we claim that we have practiced the universal priesthood, we actually had the clergy-laity system among us to some extent. There may be only a small number of saints in the church life who serve the Lord as priests. Others may only exercise to clean the hall or arrange the chairs. Our priestly service is to contact people, to spend all our time with living persons. All of us must have a change.
In this concluding chapter we want to see the life and prayer needed for the organic building up of the Body of Christ. To carry out anything, there is the need of life. Our life is not adequate to practice the scriptural way to build up the Body of Christ. Our life is not adequate to get sinners saved and make them living members of the Body of Christ. Our life is not adequate to go to the home meetings regularly week after week. Our life is not adequate to take care of the new ones, to have fellowship with them, to pray with them, to take care of them mutually, to build them up in teaching them the truth, and to stir them up to seek after the divine life so that they may grow in this life. Our life is not adequate to prophesy, to speak the Lord. We should not be self-confident that we can carry out these matters. If I told you that you are altogether unable to do anything in God’s economy, you might not feel happy about this. In our natural man we like to be highly appraised by others, but we need to realize that we cannot do anything apart from the Lord. In Luke 17 the Lord Jesus told us that even though we may serve Him in many things, we still have to say that we are unprofitable slaves (vv. 7-10).
Whatever is revealed in the New Testament concerning our service to the Lord requires another life, the divine life, not our life. Our life needs to be buried. Whatever is revealed in the New Testament needs a super life, a higher life, the divine life, the eternal life, not our life. Even if our life could do something, this doing could never be acceptable to God. God does not want anything done by us, but He wants everything done by Him, by His life, not by our life. We need another life, and praise the Lord, we have another life. We received our natural life by our first birth, but what we are charged to do for God should not be carried out by that life. That life is not qualified. The qualified life is the life we received by our second birth. By our regeneration, we received the divine life, the eternal life. This life is eternal in time and quality. Anything that is temporary is low in quality. Something that is eternal is the highest in quality. Our life is temporary, but there is another life in the universe that lasts for eternity. Anything temporary will be exhausted, but whatever is eternal can never be exhausted. We have a life that is unlimited in its qualifications and in its supply. This life can never be exhausted. To change from our old, traditional, and unscriptural way of serving to the New Testament way demands us to change our life. This is why we need to live by the Lord as our life.
If we are going to carry out the organic building up of the Body of Christ, we must have our life changed from our natural life to the divine life, from our temporal life to the eternal life. Our human life is good for our existence, but it is altogether not qualified and not able to do the things to accomplish God’s New Testament economy. This divine New Testament economy is altogether accomplished, completed, and consummated by the divine life, but not by the divine life alone. God’s New Testament economy is accomplished by the divine life living in the human life. Our human life is good for our existence, but it is also good as a container of the divine life. The divine life does everything, but the divine life does not do everything by itself and in itself. The divine life does everything through our human life and in our human life.
To say that we need the divine life does not mean that we take away our life and replace it with the divine life. This does not work. Our human life has been grafted together with the divine life. This is according to the truth of Romans 11:24, which says that the wild olive tree was grafted into the cultivated olive tree. Our human life has not been put away to be replaced by the divine life. Our human life has been grafted into the divine life so that this divine life can live through it. This is the mingling of two lives. Our human life is only good for the divine life to live through it. We cannot do anything for God by our human life. Whatever we do in our human life will not be accepted by God. Therefore, we need to let the divine life live through us and do everything through us. This is grafting. We are the branches who have been grafted into Christ.
Galatians 2:20 says, “I am crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith.” This verse says that it is no more I who live but that Christ lives in me, but the second part of the verse says, “And the life which I now live.” We are crucified, yet we still live. How can we explain this? We still live, but we live by someone else, not by ourselves. We live by this One’s faith. We may not fully understand this verse, but we just need to say Amen to it. We have been crucified with Christ, and we no longer live. Instead, Christ lives in us, and we live by Christ as our faith. Christ has to live within us and through us. He has to do everything, not by Himself alone but through us in a mingled way. We need to be mingled with Him.
The divine life of Christ is the life that can accomplish everything that we have fellowshipped in the previous chapters. All of us have to admit that we ourselves are not qualified to carry out God’s New Testament economy. We need to be mingled with Christ as life. Our life needs to be mingled with His life. Then His life can work and move in our life, through our life, and with our life. This is really wonderful. While we work, He works within us. While He works within us, we live so that He may live to do whatever He wants to do through us. If we preach the gospel by ourselves, this will not work. We have to carry out the gospel preaching work by a mingled life. The life of God is the life that works, and the life of man matches God’s work to do the work. By the life of God we can accomplish what God wants us to do in the New Testament.
The life that we need for the organic building up of the Body of Christ is the divine life of Christ—Christ Himself as the life-giving Spirit within us (John 14:6a; 1 Cor. 15:45b). God became a man. By becoming a man, God was mingled with man. Today the life of Christ is a mingled life. It is the human life mingled with the divine life. We have such a life, and this life is Christ Himself as the life-giving Spirit. We do not need to try to analyze this life. We may not understand the food that we eat every day, but we enjoy it and are nourished by it. Christ as the embodiment of God is the mingling of the human life with the divine life, and this life today is the life-giving Spirit. This Spirit is within us for us to partake of and enjoy.
This life is also the crucified life (2:2; Gal. 2:20a). This is a life under the subjective death of Christ, a life conformed to His death (Phil. 3:10b). Every day we need to take up the cross (Matt. 16:24), and the life that we live should be a crucified life. To be crucified means to get rid of our natural life, our old man, and our flesh. We all need to be crossed out. We should not think that we are so useful. We are qualified only to be crossed out. When Jesus lived on the earth, He always lived under the killing of the cross. He did not speak His own word, do His own will, or seek His own glory. He spoke the Father’s word (John 14:24), did the Father’s will (6:38), and sought the Father’s glory (7:18). This indicates that He was living a life under the killing of the cross to give the Father the opportunity to work through Him. Today we need to live such a life, a life that is under the killing of the cross. This is a life that is conformed to the death of Christ. When we stay under the killing of the cross, we will be conformed to Christ’s death. The life of Christ has become a mold into which our life can be conformed. We are being conformed into the form of Christ’s death.
The life that we need is also the resurrection life, which is the pneumatic Christ in resurrection (11:25a) with the resurrection power (Phil. 3:10a). When we live on the cross, being conformed to the death of the cross, the resurrection life rises up from within us. The human life is crossed out, and the divine life rises up to live. Every time we go out to visit people with the gospel, we must go with our natural life on the cross and under the death of the cross so that the resurrection life of God can have a chance to rise up within us to talk to people. Then when we talk to people, it is God in His resurrection who talks through us. We all have to practice this, and we have to make such a practice our habit. Whenever we go out to knock on doors for the preaching of the gospel, we need to go on the cross in the mold of Christ’s death. This gives the very God who is within us as the resurrection life the way to rise up to do His work. On the one hand, this is the crucified life, but on the other hand, this is the resurrection life. This resurrection life is the pneumatic Christ. Christ is the pneuma, the breath, the air, the Spirit. Such a Christ has the resurrection power.
The divine life of Christ, the crucified life, the resurrection life, is the life which we live (Gal. 2:20b; John 14:19b). This is the life in which we walk, work, and have our being. This is the life in which and with which we carry out the work of the New Testament ministry.
For the organic building up of the Body of Christ, we need the divine life, and we also need prayer. We realize that we need another life, that we have been made by God as vessels as the means through which God can work. Still we need prayer. To pray means that we realize that by ourselves, with ourselves, and in ourselves, we are nothing. Therefore, we do not want to do anything by ourselves. Instead, we want to do everything in God, with God, and through God. There are two significances of prayer. First, when we pray, we pray ourselves into God. Second, when we pray, we pray God into us. We are not that much in God, nor is God that much in us. Because we are distracted, we get outside of God. If we are going to do God’s work, we need to get into God. Furthermore, God is not that much in us. Therefore, we need to pray God into us. Then we can do the work in a way in which we are mingled with God. In other words, we are in God, and God is in us. We can arrive at this situation and condition by prayer. When we pray, we do not need to pray too much for affairs or for the work. We need to pray ourselves into God, and we need to pray God into us. This is the principle of prayer.
When we want to preach the gospel, we have to stop a while to pray. To pray means to stop ourselves from doing anything. If we can do something on our own, we do not need to stop and pray. We can just go ahead and do it ourselves. Many times we carry out the service in this way. We do it by ourselves. This is wrong. We have to stop ourselves. If we look into the New Testament, we can see that the Lord Jesus always prayed first. His prayer was to stop Himself from doing anything apart from the Father. His prayer afforded Him the opportunity to be fully one with the Father. Then the work done by God the Father was through Jesus, the Man. It was the same with the early apostles. The book of Acts shows us that whenever there was some activity, the apostles first prayed. They never initiated work without prayer. Whenever they wanted to do something, they stopped themselves by their prayer. Their prayer gave God a way to come into them, to fill them up, and to saturate their very being. Then the apostles began to work. That work was not something done by the apostles independent from God. Instead, the work done by the apostles was done only in full dependence on God.
In the book of Acts we can see the prayer of the early saints for the organic building up of the Body of Christ. The prayer that we need is the prayer that brought in the outpouring of the Spirit (1:14; 2:1-4, 16-17a). One hundred twenty saints praying with one accord for ten days brought in the outpouring of the Spirit. The outpouring of the Spirit is the outpouring of God Himself. God poured out His entire being, the Spirit, upon the disciples. Immediately, the disciples became one with God. Here is the principle of praying ourselves into God and of praying God into us. Their prayer brought God from the heavens to the earth and upon themselves. Prayer is like our breathing. When we breathe, the air gets into us, and we get into the air. The result is that air is poured upon us. When we experience the outpoured Spirit through our prayer, we are refreshed to the uttermost.
We also need the prayer that shook the earth and empowered the disciples with the Holy Spirit for the speaking of the word of God with boldness (4:24-31). The disciples prayed with one accord (v. 24) according to the word of God (vv. 25-28), claiming the divine power through the name of Jesus (vv. 29-30). We have to pray to shake the environment. Many times the environment is a lie. When we go out to visit people for the preaching of the gospel, there may be something within us saying that people will not open the door to us. This is a lie. Another lie is that people will not open their heart and their spirit to receive the Lord. If this is the case, our going is in vain. Therefore, we have to pray to shake the environment. We need to open the doors by our prayer. To pray is to shake the environment, to change the environment. When we pray in such a way, we will be filled with the economical Spirit, and we will have the boldness to speak the word of God. We should not believe in the environment. Instead, we have to believe in our prayer to change the environment.
In Acts 6:4 we see the prayer of the apostles to match the ministry of the word. This prayer was continuous and steadfast. Preaching the gospel, having home meetings, having small group meetings, and prophesying in the big meetings are all for ministering the word. We must remember that the ministry of the word should be matched by our prayer. Our prayer will make the word living and powerful. Peter said that he and the other apostles would give themselves to prayer and the ministry of the word. We also need to continue steadfastly in prayer and in the ministry of the word.
Acts 10:9-16 shows us the prayer that brought Peter into a trance and brought a heavenly vision to him. This prayer at the appointed time (v. 9) brought Peter into a conversation with the Lord (vv. 13-16). This is another principle of prayer. To pray is to pray ourselves into a trance. A trance means that we have gotten out of our self. We may be imprisoned in our self, but we need to pray out of that imprisonment. In a trance, in a situation in which we are out of our self, we can receive visions of God. We all need a trance because we remain in our self too long. We are in our self too much. Our self is a strong prison that we need to get out of, so we need to pray ourselves into a trance. Many times in morning watch, while we are reading the Bible and pray-reading, we have the sensation that we are out of our self and that we are in a situation of being so close to God. We cannot tell where we are. We just know that we are out of our self. That is a trance, and in that trance we receive visions from God. Peter prayed this way at the appointed time, which was at noon. I believe that Peter used to pray at that time every day, and he prayed himself into a conversation with the Lord. When we get into a trance, we are in a conversation with the Lord in which we talk to the Lord and the Lord talks to us. Peter and the Lord conversed together. We all need the kind of prayer that brings us into such a trance.
We also need the kind of prayer that opened the prison gate for Peter (12:4-14). This shows the fervent prayer of the church (v. 5) in small groups (v. 12). To preach the gospel by visiting people, we surely have to pray to open the doors. Actually, the doors are opened to us, not by our knocking on them but through our prayer. We need the fervent prayer of the church in small groups. Peter went to the home of Mary after he was released from prison, and there was a group of saints praying in that home. Acts 12 also indicates that there were many small groups praying for Peter at that time in the homes of the saints.
For the organic building up of the Body of Christ, we need the prayer that brought the five prophets and teachers into the Lord’s commission in Acts 13:1-4. These five prophets and teachers in Acts 13 served the Lord by praying and fasting, and that prayer brought them into the Lord’s commission, the Lord’s sending. They were commissioned and sent by the Lord through prayer, not through any kind of appointment. Their prayer was with ministering to the Lord and fasting (v. 2a). Ministering to the Lord means serving the Lord, waiting on the Lord in the service to the Lord. Eventually, they prayed themselves into the speaking of the Holy Spirit (v. 2b). The Holy Spirit will not speak to us unless we pray ourselves into that situation. Then the Holy Spirit will speak for sending the sent ones (v. 3).
We also need the kind of prayer that brought in a great earthquake and shook the foundation of the prison (16:23-26). Whether the earth will “quake” or not is up to our prayer. While Paul and Silas were praying in Acts 16, they were singing hymns of praise to God (v. 25). They were in chains in the stocks in the inner prison, but instead of worrying, they sang hymns of praise to God. Their prayer shook the foundation of the prison. When we go out to preach the gospel, we should pray that the “foundation” of the doors that we are knocking on will be shaken and will be opened to us.
In Acts 22:17-21 is the prayer that brought Paul into a trance and into the Lord’s speaking to him. Both Peter and Paul prayed themselves into a trance. Again, we all need to pray ourselves into a trance, into the Lord’s speaking to us. Paul did this in the temple, in a holy and quiet place (v. 17). In his prayer he received the Lord’s commission (vv. 18-21).
The book of Acts is a record of the activities of the apostles, and the apostles’ activities were always matched by their prayers. All the kinds of prayers that we have fellowshipped about in the book of Acts show the kind of prayer that we need to pray. We need to learn to pray the way the disciples in Acts prayed. This kind of prayer can shake the environment, shake the foundation of the prison, shake the earth, shake off all the chains, and open the doors. This prayer will also bring us into a trance, bring us into God, and bring God into us. Then we can converse with God, receive His commission, and receive His sending. We have to learn to pray in all these ways. We need the divine life, and we need prayer for us to accomplish all the crucial steps for the Body of Christ to be built up organically through our work.
I would like to add a further word to our fellowship in this book. In principle, a healthy local church should not always be depending on others to help them. If we always depend on gifted persons or on people from other churches to help us in our local church, this can spoil us. The daughter of a mother who is a very capable cook may be a very poor cook. This is because the mother can cook so well that she never allows her daughter to learn to cook. We need to learn to trust in the Lord, in His life, and in our prayer. The scriptural way is now clear to us, and all of us can participate. It may seem like a heavy burden to visit people in their homes for the preaching of the gospel, but when we do this work and get into it, it is not a burden but an enjoyment. We can go out once a week for a month, and within a month we will get at least one baptized. Then we can go back to visit this one and raise him up to get him established. If we cooperate with the Lord in His present move, each of us can have two remaining fruit yearly. In ten years each of us can have twenty remaining fruit. How marvelous this would be for the increase of the church! If all of us rise up to practice the fellowship in this book, we will be in the universal priesthood. Each of us will have a part in the universal priesthood. As we all function organically in the priesthood, we will see the practical and organic building up of the church.
