The local church is not an organization. No one is here exercising anything to organize. The pastoring of many pastors is not the real feeding, but a kind of organizing just to get a proper link with people. We never do this. In the local church there is no organizational linking. If I go to you I must have a burden in life for you. If I go to visit you for a kind of link, that is organization.
We all have to see that what the Lord is going to recover is a Body, not a local organization. If the saints do not grow, what is the need to have a link? The need is to grow. You need the real supply of life. You need the real ministry of the life supply. It is not a matter of pastoring to establish some links. It is a matter of growing and ministering a life supply. If you have been an elder in the local churches for at least five years, you will realize that among your brothers and sisters some have come to a certain stage that you cannot do anything to help them. You have prayed for them; you have done this for them and that for them, but now you can’t do anything else. Why can’t you do anything? It is because you do not have the skill of a surgeon to operate on the peculiarity. A surgeon may know how to cut on your leg or your nose, but he may have no way to deal with a particular part of your heart. He may have no way to touch it or even to reach it. Spiritually speaking, something is in your heart, and that is your peculiarity. It is there, and yet no one can touch it, and even no one can reach it. This is why I prayed at the beginning that only the Lord can solve our problems. I don’t have the skill to touch our peculiarity. I know the disease; I know the problems, but I don’t have the skill to reach your peculiarity. This is the very thing which holds us back from experiencing Christ and from being built up. So under this kind of situation, the more days you go on in the church life, the more you feel you are jobless. On the one hand you have nothing to do; on the other hand you are not useful. On another hand you have no interest in the church life. And on yet another hand you may be thinking either to drop the church life or to stay home for some time. Although you may not drop the church life and you may not stay home, you come to the meeting without any kind of meaning. Coming to the meeting becomes meaningless to you. It was not like that ten years ago. Ten years ago every meeting was meaningful to you. You might have missed your meal, but you would not have missed the meeting because it was so meaningful to you. You are jobless; you are not useful; everything in the church life has become meaningless. Why? Because your peculiarity holds you back and eats you up from further experience of Christ. Thank the Lord that in His mercy and grace through the church you have been edified, so it’s hard for you to go back to sin. It may be a little bit easier for you to go back to the world. But although you would not go back to sin, and you would not go back to the world, to stay in the church life becomes tasteless to you. Why? Because your peculiarity eats you up. The eating by this germ holds you back from the building up of the Body.
What shall we do? You and I need a desperate prayer to the Lord. Don’t pray for anything else—just pray for your peculiarity. Day and night, three times, ten times, even twenty times a day, pray for this one thing. This is the germ in your heart that eats you up and holds you back. Many of the brothers are really good, but they have become useless. As leading brothers we don’t know how to help them, and we have no way to help them. We really need the Lord’s mercy. You have to pray that the Lord would have mercy upon you, that you would have a clear vision of the stronghold within you. Whether you label it peculiarity or you label it the self, there is such a stronghold within you that all the time keeps you from Christ and from the building up of the Body.