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 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 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 nations, ministering as a priest the gospel of God, that the offering of the nations 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 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.