According to the New Testament revelation, four crucial matters are needed to build up the church as the organic Body of Christ. As we have pointed out, these four crucial matters are begetting, nourishing, perfecting, and prophesying.
God’s intention, His heart’s desire, is to have a Body to be the enlargement and expression of Christ. This is God’s good pleasure based upon His plan. In eternity past before the foundation of the world, God had a plan, and this plan is His economy. God’s economy is His arrangement to gain a Body for Christ, built up with human beings mingled with the divinity of the Triune God. God desires to have such a Body. For this purpose He created the heavens and the earth. The heavens are for the earth and the earth is for man. The plant life and the animal life on the earth are for the human life. We partake of these forms of life to maintain our existence. We need to consider, however, what the purpose of our existence is on the earth. Many philosophers and scholars have not found the purpose of man’s existence.
Three great matters in our human life on this earth are birth, marriage, and death. Without the church, without God, and without Christ, human life is a continuous cycle of birth, marriage, and death from generation to generation. Is man’s purpose merely to be born, to get married, and to die? Many young people study hard and diligently so that they can make a living. After such hard labor, they must face the responsibilities of a job and a family life that are full of troubles and problems. In the course of our human life, we eat, drink, and sleep. Is all of this the purpose of human life? Without the purpose of God to have the church, human life is vanity. The purpose of human life is the Body of Christ. This is the purpose for which God created the universe. Today we are in the center of God’s purpose to build up the church as the organic, living Body of Christ.
I am encouraged and happy to see that the churches are grounded in truth, in life, and in the experiences of Christ, but we need the increase. To build up this organic Body, we surely need people—the more the better. The Body of Christ is the fullness of the One who fills all in all. Surely such a Body must be universally vast and great. Consider the size of the universe. We cannot tell how long, how broad, how high, and how deep the universe is, but Christ fills all, and He is in all. This One needs a Body. Now we can see how big, how vast, the Body of Christ should be. To build such a great Body of Christ, there is the need of millions upon millions of persons. In Genesis 1 God blessed man and told him to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth (v. 28). This has been fulfilled today. The earth is full of men. God likes to see the earth full of people. God needs people. He needs you and He needs me. God needs millions and millions of people for His corporate expression. God has chosen these people, but how can God’s chosen ones come to Him? They can come to Him through our going to them to contact them with God and bring God, Christ, the Bible, the gospel, and justification to them. The angels are not blessed to preach the gospel of grace. Only we human beings who have been chosen and regenerated by God have this privilege.
We need to eat Jesus and speak Jesus to people. Whatever we eat is what we will become. If we eat fish every day, we will even smell like fish. We are what we eat. This is why we need to eat Jesus. When we eat Jesus, we live by Jesus. When we eat Jesus, we have the inward feeling that we need to go to reach people. The happiest times of our Christian life are when we go to visit people. When we impart Christ into someone and baptize him into the Triune God, we are excited. Some who baptized three people in one evening were so excited that they had difficulty sleeping that night.
Recently in Orange County, IBM made the decision to send out two thousand of their sales personnel to knock on doors. They were not satisfied with the amount of their sales, so they sent out their sales personnel to visit people in their homes. We need to visit people with the gospel in the same way. It is best to go out in teams of three with at least one sister in each team. To build up the Body of Christ, we first need to have people. We need to “go fishing.” The Lord Jesus used fishing as an illustration of gospel preaching. He told the disciples, “Come, follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matt. 4:19). Fishermen do not invite the fish to come to them, but this is what we mostly did in the past. We need to go where the fish are.
If we endeavor to preach the gospel by visiting people where they are, the church can be doubled within a year. If a church of two hundred saints doubles every year, there will be over two hundred thousand saints in ten years. What an encouragement that would be! There is the strong possibility that this could happen, if we all endeavor. We have to do business for the Lord (Luke 19:13). Big businesses are never satisfied or contented with what they have done. Their ambition for making profit is unlimited. It is easy, however, for us Christians to be contented with what we have done. If we endeavor, each of us can gain two remaining fruit in a year, and the church can double yearly. If we have a will to bear remaining fruit, God will give us the way. To preach the gospel by visiting people where they are is the real and practical preaching of the gospel. It is not practical to invite the fish to come to us.
One day we will all have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ (2 Cor. 5:10), and we will have to give an account to the Lord. The Lord desires that we would be fishers of men, so we must go fishing. We must go to gain people practically in an organic way for the building up of Christ’s Body. We should not go in a light way but with much prayer, even fasting, to have a thorough dealing with the Lord. We have to go in a desperate way to beget people, to bear fruit. If we go in a desperate way, people will be begotten through us with the gospel, with God, with Christ, and with His divine, marvelous salvation.