After a wonderful weekend at the International Conference in Holland, the response in my being to the rich speaking we received on ‘Knowing the Crystallized Significance of the Body of Christ’ is a huge and resounding Amen. I quote the speaking brother
“Lord, now after a quarter century we are here again”.
Not since Stuttgart 1985, if ever, has Europe seen a gathering of saints in the Lord Recovery like the one this past weekend.
As I gazed around the meeting hall I felt like I was looking at the Lord’s army and that surely the enemy was trembling as the Lord advanced His ultimate move in Europe.
Come, Lord Jesus!
I would like just to share a few crystals of my enjoyment from this glorious time.
- Firstly, I was impressed by the matter of ‘Knowing’. There is a difference between knowing a doctrine and knowing the spiritual reality of that doctrine. Do you want to know the reality of the Body of Christ? Ephesians 1:9 says ‘Making known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Himself’. The Father desires to make His will known to us. But with our knowing comes a responsibility to live according to that knowledge. Therefore, the Father only makes His will known to those who are willing to obey. Our being willing is key, and our obeying is our walking in the view that we have seen. This ‘knowing’ will surely change our entire being. Are you willing?
- This knowing also gives us a consciousness of the Lord’s feeling for the Body – the Lord Himself has an ‘Urgent Need’ to have the Body! The Lord’s need is for a Body and this need is urgent (implying seriousness and a time factor). Don’t you need your physical body? Without your own body, you have no way to carry out your will. Our physical body is the part of our being through which we can freely move and the law of our body is that it responds directly to our head spontaneously, with no delay. It is the same with the Lord. ‘The Lord urgently needs the reality of the Body of Christ to be expressed in the local churches; unless there is a substantial expression of the Body, the Lord Jesus will not return’. If in practicality there are only divisions, how can the Lord freely move? The Body of Christ is an organism through which God can pass through at will. Hence, when the Lord has a group of people through which He can freely flow then the end is really near. This is the Lord’s urgent need.
- Every part of the Body of Christ is Christ. Is not every part of your body you? There cannot be the Body of Christ without Christ, otherwise it is not His Body. This may be a simple revelation but it really shows us that Christ must be our center. Christ is the One who lived a human life that utterly expressed God. This is what the Lord desires in all the members of His Body. We in ourselves cannot be this or do this – therefore Christ must be our everything. Our “being transformed” in 2 Corinthians 3:18 is not just for our own spirituality but for His heart’s desire – His Body. The Body of Christ is Jesus living again in all His members. We must let Christ live again in us. He is the one who knows how to live a God-man living. “Lord, I give You more ground in my being. I’d like to let You into every part of my day”.
- Our God, the true and living God is uniquely one. The nature of God is Oneness and all that He does is according to His nature. In John 17:22b-23a when the Lord Jesus was about to die he prayed for oneness; ‘that they may be one, even as We are one; I in them, and You in Me, that they may be perfected into one’. He prayed that we would be one and that our oneness would match the oneness of the Triune God. The Lord prayed for this oneness but He knew that this prayer required the most costly action. He knew that He would have to die for this oneness. This is the highest gospel. That the Lord Jesus did not die just to redeem us but He died to give us His life that we may be one. And ‘Oneness is not unity’. Unity is many separate entities brought together. What makes us one is that we have the oneness of the Spirit. This conference was a testimony of this. Saints from many different backgrounds, of different nationalities, speaking different languages, but one in Christ. Christ in His death solved all the problems of division. We all have the same goal and that is the growth of the Body of Christ.
[guest post: brother Oliver sharing from his enjoyment in the recent conference in Holland]
