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The Coming Increase of Christ in His House
It is a tragedy that those who do not presently know Christ stand condemned before Him without even knowing they are spiritually lost. And the Christian Church stands right in their midst with the presence of God in our hearts. What should we do? What should be our priority? First of all, our call is to love the Lord with all of our hearts and to submit to Him as He reveals himself by His Spirit, through His Word, and through other people in our lives.
Sometimes I think God’s program for the nations would be further along if He spoke only through divine encounters, or through angels. But amazingly, God has chosen to also reveal himself through imperfect people.
Perhaps it would be easier for us in the Church to submit to His Word if the believers around us were just a little more humble, kind, gentle, etc. But sometimes He chooses to speak to us through one of the more obviously (to us, anyway) flawed brethren. How well do we respond at such times?
And here is the question we must face if we desire to impact the world around us. How can we expect unbelievers to gladly receive the Lord’s Word through us if we ourselves do not receive His spokesmen to us? We must face this question squarely. For too long the Church has believed that all we need for successful ministry is the truth that can save men’s souls. But God has determined to reveal more through us about himself than mere factual information. He wants to confront the Earth with His righteousness. And His righteousness is a Person, even Christ himself (1 Corinthians 1:30).
Granted, we often appear just as flawed in the eyes of the lost as do those in the Church who address us, but the difference is this: we already know the Lord and His Word. We should recognize when He is speaking to us through someone. When such an event occurs, we must submit to the righteousness of God. We must bend our knee to His lordship. His will and not ours must carry the day in our decisions. Then when He sends us to others, whether they are believers or not, we will not promote mere facts; we will reveal the truth, the person of Christ. He is our message, our agenda.
The New Testament has much to say about apostolic ministry. The word “apostle” means one sent on a mission. For the Church to again be an apostolic people, we must recover the truth that God himself is actively building His own house. He has not called us to work separately from Him; He was quite clear—Jesus would build His Church (Matthew 16:18). Whatever ministry we have among His people, it is only valid to the degree that it is in submission to His initiative and in cooperation with His enabling grace. It is only in this context that the idea of spiritual authority makes any sense.
The word “authority” has to do with the right to speak or to act. Who has the right to speak or act in any given circumstance? Very simply, it is those whom God has sent. An apostolic people will spend time with the Lord, they will learn His voice and His heart. They will sense His orchestration in the various daily/weekly etc. events of their lives. Faith will arise in their hearts to act and speak accordingly as they recognize God’s sovereignty in sending them into various circumstances
But there is a problem. Some Christians seem to align themselves more with Deism than with biblical Christianity. This philosophy teaches that God is not actively involved with His creation. Rather, He has set it up to run pretty much without His help according to scientific principles. Obviously, this is not good theology in any application, but when it is applied to God’s house, it is quite destructive. The idea is that after God started the Church, He basically set it up to run according to good organizational principles. As long as people know their places within the organization and do their jobs without rocking the boat, the local church will do just fine.
The result of such an approach is what we see in much of the Church in Western civilization—a Christianity that is no longer apostolic. No wonder our culture is so aberrant; it reflects the spiritual dysfunction in the Church, the one entity designed to illuminate the nations. The root of the problem is that the Church has lost her spiritual authority; she doesn’t understand her destiny, and she cannot find her prophetic voice.
If God has called us to submit to His righteousness, revealed by His Spirit both in His Word and in those He sends to us, how do we recognize it? For starters, one clear mark of God’s righteousness is that it conveys truth without anyone necessarily saying anything. Paul informs us that it confronts those who insist that someone needs to either go to Heaven to see if Christ really is there or else go down to the pit to prove that He really is not there.
But the righteousness of faith speaks in this way, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ down from above) or, “‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).
In other words, the active increase of the nature of God in His people (i.e., His own righteousness) communicates the reality of the resurrected Christ to those who do not know Him. God has an answer for those who think that before they can yield to Christ, He must personally appear to them. In a word, God has placed before them a people in whom the fruit of His righteousness is growing and increasing.
The growing fruit of righteousness, the increasing expression of God’s nature in those who seek His face and embrace the Cross, will shine like a light confronting the darkened souls of humanity. Let us be clear, the growing confrontation between light and darkness in our nation will be not only between those who preach the gospel and unbelievers. It will also be between those who yield to the righteousness of God and those who do not, whether they be believers or not. The sad fact is that many believers hate the Cross—not as a religious symbol, but as a lifestyle.
For even when Christ came to the Earth two thousand years ago, many spoke from the Scriptures, and many did not. But the confrontation between light and darkness was not primarily around the various rabbinical debates concerning the Law and the prophets, but about the revelation of the person of Christ. He was the Father put into human terms, the Light to illuminate the world. Men either hated that Light or ran to it. It is no different today.
We must love and embrace the Lord when He reveals His beauty and our failures; we must run to Him even when His Word confronts our self-love, pride, and lust, etc. The true nature of spiritual warfare is not primarily about saying prayers against Satan while experiencing high-powered worship. It is about submitting to God’s righteousness. If we do not recognize Him, we will fail to respond to Him appropriately, and like Israel, we will simply go off establishing our own righteousness (Romans 10:3).
For example, many of God’s people today stand confidently before Him because of their seeming success at preaching, their ability to lead a worship service, and prophetic ministry, etc. Yet, if God were to send to them someone with a word of even the slightest adjustment, they would react and reject it. Why? To them, the spoken word undermines their determined basis for standing before the Lord. “God has accepted me. He approves of my lifestyle. Look at how He blesses when I preach, counsel, etc.” Since Christ is God’s righteousness, and they do not want to hear His Word through someone who challenges their confidence, they have established their own basis of acceptance before God.
At this point, they stand upon a flawed foundation. When the inevitable shakings come, they will be vulnerable to satanic suggestions to doubt God’s Word, be divisive toward others, and harbor an unforgiving attitude, etc.
Also at this point, the question becomes just how effective such a one really is in the area of spiritual warfare. Successful kingdom living is about more than having what appears to be an anointed ministry in the Church; it is about standing firmly on Christ the foundation no matter what winds and waves of life we encounter.
Today God is building a house designed according to His own “specs”, according to His own eternal priorities. He intends for it to stand forever and to express what was in His heart before the foundation of the world. Since we do not know what the final product will look like, we must submit to His eternal perspective; His view is better than ours.
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