Christ’s Only Way: The Local Church
Pay attention: Your Christian life depends on grasping what this message says.
If we ever hope to let God do all He wants to do in us, and be conformed truly to the image of Jesus Christ in our lifetimes, it is vital we see His model of the local church.
Do you want that Christian? It is the will of God for us!
We need to see it, and desire to fit into Christ’s local body that His Spirit adds us to, and see the priority of this reality of “body life” far above modern vague notions of a universal body composed of all believers everywhere.
Although there is a universal church, if we don’t find our place in a local Spirit-led assembly, we will be handicapped members of Christ and wonder why our experience does not rise to the level it should. More specifically, we will wonder why we are unable to find unity and love among individual Christians in our sphere to the degree we believe possible.
The reason is simple: If not fitly framed into a local living Spirit-led body, we are living a sub-normal Christian life; God’s greatest empowerment is given to build the local body.
What if you know of no such body to even join? We’ll touch on that further in, but first understand such bodies are possible; they were the mission of the first Christians, and God who changes not still desires this model of a local fully functioning body that follows all of the original apostles’ doctrine.
Lose Yourself in Christ
America has a self-focused culture. It prizes individual liberties, but this paradigm was never what Jesus wanted for a body called to “unity in the spirit in the bond of peace.”
So much Christian teaching today addresses the individual, caters to the individual, and woos the individual as though this were the unit God sees first. It so often preaches from the standpoint of “what God will do for you” if you obey, believe, etc. Americans and the lost world in general always think in terms of “what’s in it for me,” and while God does promise individuals blessings for obedience and faith, our highest blessing is becoming part of the whole of Christ’s body that’s expressed locally. This is the truth, and “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
God is Wiser Than Men
Being eminently practical, God ordained local assemblies. This is God’s way for the “salvation of your souls” and finding out who we are in Christ to the fullest degree.
God is wise; not random or disordered, and finding one’s place in a local body is the truest expression of spirituality. The Holy Spirit prizes this local assembly model as the way Christ would build His church (Mt 16:18).
Of course it is true that God’s universal body consisting of all baptized believers everywhere is one, and when the Lord returns, He will gather us together, but meanwhile Jesus and His original apostles centered on building up local assemblies!
The epistles are sent to these local assemblies. They address local issues, deal with people in follow-up to specific localized instruction meant to transform a group of people into a body of Christ – a fitting counterpart to the Lord.
Gal 4:19 – My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is formed in you,
In Revelation 1-3, Jesus calls out local assemblies by name. He warns them individually, as local units. God’s vision for “the church” is local.
It is absolutely vital for individual Christians to see this, meditate on it, and look for what God says of it in the scriptures.
Why? Many reasons!
The Word of God includes teachings and promises that are conditional on practical circumstances being in place and this is found only in a local body.
The Word speaks of members in a local body as being like those in an extended family. It speaks of different roles of sheep, and offices and functions of leaders. It is to be a highly organized structure – not by the will of man alone – but rather held together in the will of God by His Spirit. This is a spiritual reality where God “fitly frames” each member and “every joint supplies.”
1 Cor 12:18 – But now God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He pleased.
Another prime reason for the local assembly is we humans are tied geographically within a fleshly human frame. This was especially true of the early Christians before high-speed travel, and modern communications, but does it become less so today with cars, trains, airplanes; the internet, texting, email, the telephone, etc?
No, because just like when your loved ones travel afar off to another state or a distant country, it is not the same as when they are accessible, and in reach.
And make no mistake. A close agape love far more than many normally experience is the goal Jesus set down as a real testimony among “living epistles” (2 Cor. 3:2,3) that we are Jesus’ disciples.
John 13:34-35 – A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. 35 By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.
Ask yourself: if you love someone, do you want them out of reach, or do you want to be with them? Do you want to hear what they say, and share yourself with them? Being near is part of practical body ministry for the good times, and the trials.
Rom 12:15 – Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.
This and so many other instructions and exhortations speak to real-live people having frequent face-to-face contact, and this is practically best expressed to its fullness extent in the local assembly.
The model of pew-sitting “laity” who come to hear a preacher pronounce a sermon, then travel off to their “real” lives was NEVER God’s way! It is a false construct, a legacy even among Protestants from the Catholic church.
By contrast, there is such a thing as sensing the Spirit of the local body and God works within this community to knit their hearts together as one.
1 Cor 1:10 – Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.
Ask yourself: How could God command this degree of spiritual unity to the world of “Christendom” as we have today? He could not, He did not; instead He wants local believers to coalesce, lose their individualistic personalities, and submit to His Spirit as one.
Is Jesus Lord? Do you believe this is His command? Jesus defined “love” as obeying His commands (Jn. 14:15), and this goes well beyond a warm fuzzy feeling of the self-focused individual basking as a solo entity in His presence.
John 17:20-23 – I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; 21 that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. 22 And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: 23 I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.
Jesus Himself prayed to the Father before He went to the cross that we should be one, even as He was with the Father. This, He said, was to be another testimony to the world that the Father had sent the Son of God to earth! The local body was to be that witness!
We must obey all of Jesus’ direct commands and His commands through His chosen apostles pertaining to His body. A local body rises or falls in proportion to its collective obedience to God through the scriptures, and the Holy Spirit of the scriptures. We say the Holy Spirit “of the scriptures” because He inspired the scriptures so let’s not minimize that. These scriptures give us our only reliable glimpse of the original church, and God works in harmony with the spirit of their truth to this day, if we will allow Him to.
Other practical realities favoring the local assembly: If given the opportunity, God will take a whole body through learning processes. Like, say for instance, some of the members are moving in sins He wants to deal with, like pride, or lust, or lovelessness, etc. God by His Spirit may choose to do a work, treating the body as a unit for a veritable sickness in spirit to further purify it. We have seen how illnesses, or job loss, or other chastening may afflict several members at once in a body. Conversely, He may give spiritual breakthroughs and blessings to His members in waves through the body as they submit to Him, and He does things according to the counsel of His will.
He is the Good Father and Jesus is the Great Physician!
In such a paradigm, it is like the body is one unit, and issues that matter to God are dealt with in parts of the body as needed, not just one isolated individual – though individual experiences will also happen alongside.
By the way, the Holy Spirit was given to administer the will of the Father and Jesus Christ. He does not call attention to Himself, and the Bible does not say to worship or serve Him, but to worship and serve the Father through the Son.
Some Charismatic and Pentecostal theologies in trying to shake off dead religion have become especially attuned to the reality of “The Spirit.” These nebulous teachings on the work of the Holy Sprit have filtered into other Protestant and even Charismatic Catholic circles, but tragically, they may try to adapt these teachings to the context of their understanding of the Church.
There are all sorts of blended and mixed teachings on church life, and individuals in the body out there, but if they bear witness to lies, or do not aspire to grow into all that God first wanted for His body, something is wrong.
If the full expression of a biblical church is like a large jigsaw puzzle, some groups may seem to have pieces of the whole puzzle. Some emphasize holiness, others scripture study, others spiritual gifts. Actually all these are part of the whole picture of a local body, and they are not a la carte.
Sadly, what we see in assemblies today is too often a mixture of flesh and spirit! Tradition, emotion, and misinterpretation merged with sin, iniquity, and doctrines of demons keep people in a state of suspension short of the whole. Make no mistake, the scriptures teach a bad tree cannot produce good fruit, and by extension, an unhealthy tree will not produce its full harvest of good fruit!
Coming back to the local body, there is no emphasis on individualism in the scriptures, but rather the Body of Christ.
1 Cor 12:12 – For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ.
Yes the scriptures do call each individual to receive Christ, and carry his cross. Yes, they do speak to individual needs and even the hairs on our heads are all counted. Seeing this and being rooted and grounded in love is vital also, so this is not saying we utterly efface ourselves, but we do subordinate our selves, and this fulfills the law of love. Carnal man puts “self” on the throne of his heart. So many secretly love themselves more than anyone, some love self more than the Lord though they may be blind to it, and deny it, but this was not God’s plan for His body.
“You shall love your neighbor [or brother/sister] as yourself.” (Mark 12:31)
All Christians know these things, but we do not see it happening to the degree to which the Spirit in us yearns to see happen. Why are so many body members divided over issues? Why is there so little love amongst the members of the body?
Because they have not the vision of God and like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, they have half-baked notions of all God wanted in a local body, and do not submit and strive to let God form them into such bodies.
Feed from the Same Spiritual ‘Trough’
Coming back to how God’s Spirit works in a local assembly, in teaching things that are geographically and demographically specific, He calls His sheep in covenant fellowship to feed from the same spiritual trough.
Satan’s strategy on the other hand has been divide and conquer, and he has done this amazingly well for 2,000 years.
Jesus once said:
When the Son of man returns, will He even find faith on the earth? (Luke 18:8)
To leave this satanic paradigm of disunited, disempowered sheep, it is vital that members of Christ, as they are so led of God, coalesce and commit to a local assembly as their home unit.
It is here the Holy Spirit representing the Father’s will for His children, and Christ’s will for His Bride will deal with them personally, and most closely. And, there is spiritual strength in a united body formed into one.
This is not to say others from outside the local body cannot add to us, or that we do not share with others either. This is not the recommendation for a cult, but a church of Jesus Christ in its fullness.
And, in this, the true Spirit who wants to make us fully free also needs us to make Him free, as God’s people may through unbelief or other blindnesses or sins “limit the Holy One of Israel.” (Ps. 78:41)
Be it known that dry cessationist theology will not produce Christ’s church, and neither will lawlessness masquerading as liberty in free-spirited Charismatic, Pentecostal and other self-focused, post-modern mingling of flesh and spirit.
Babel Among Believers
God loves His sheep, and to use a common term, He effectively does damage control, or does what He has to as a faithful keeper of His children no matter what conditions they find themselves living under. He does what He can with whosoever will hear Him, but His eternal Word speaks of the body that He wants.
So many who name the name of Christ however are feeding from different spiritual troughs. That is, they may believe mutually incompatible teachings and/or they’re at such different places in their subjective Christian experience with a God who’s doing what He can with this disembodied body part.
If one’s view of being a disciple of Jesus is to be an eclectic Christian at large, picking and choosing spiritual foods to our tastes, he/she is operating under the principle of individualism, which is satanic in nature.
Moreover, even if reading the same passage from the Bible, one Christian may subjectively interpret from it a whole different flavor of meaning than another reading the same thing. Or worse – and quite common – Christians may have been taught a certain spin on the scriptures so what they read is really reading-into, and not letting the scriptures speak unfiltered. In a word, Christians get indoctrinated to a certain slant on the “faith once delivered to all the saints” – if that is not ironic enough, and indeed a travesty.
And under these conditions, believers today ever continue to form subjectively into different types of Christians. They have laid up teachers for themselves, when God Himself was to be their first Teacher (Jn. 6:45).
A key question is “what manner of spirit” is a person of? When people from different backgrounds discuss scriptures, or truth in general, often division is the natural result. Why? They mutually lack ears to hear.
What are pearls and words of greatest value to one person may come across as anathema to another! Or, what may be the expression of the “Spirit” in one person may be heard on the receiving end as the doctrine of demons – or at least flesh, or distortion that cannot be accepted.
This was Satan’s doing, and the problem is writ large. We all are living in conditions conducive to ever increasing division and dispute, and never will the love of God and unity Jesus called for happen under this paradigm.
No, this is a recipe for perpetually increasing division and the very fact there are over 35,000 denominations today is a mockery against God who gave His Son that we all might be one. They are a shame to the Christian faith as it is largely practiced, and many ought to lament and weep, and seek God for repentance!
And if you can see it, dear Christian, you will agree that God’s solution is the same that it ever was: the local church with anointed teaching, and a message that looks for conditions conducive to letting the “ministry of the Spirit” transform us into the image of Christ.
2 Cor 3:7-18 – But if the ministry of death, written and engraved on stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance, which glory was passing away, 8 how will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious? 9 For if the ministry of condemnation had glory, the ministry of righteousness exceeds much more in glory. 10 For even what was made glorious had no glory in this respect, because of the glory that excels. 11 For if what is passing away was glorious, what remains is much more glorious.
12 Therefore, since we have such hope, we use great boldness of speech— 13 unlike Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the end of what was passing away. 14 But their minds were blinded. For until this day the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament, because the veil is taken away in Christ. 15 But even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil lies on their heart. 16 Nevertheless when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. 17 Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. 18 But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.
All the scriptures calling for “unity” are to local believers following God the Spirit. This takes surrender, desire, and unity in teaching and submission among all. It calls for honoring God’s roles for male, female, young, and old. It calls for true submission to God’s authority, prayer, diligently seeking His face with a soft heart, and so much more.
The very fact that Christianity is so disunited, turned in on itself to the degree it is, is proof that these things are true.
Other religions not so divided into tens of thousands of sub-sects, though they be not the true religion of Christ, actually have a better testimony in this regard than God’s own people.
Brethren, these things ought not to be so! And make no mistake: Outside of the confines of a genuine Spirit-built house that aspires to these things, the full expression of who we might be in Christ will never happen!
Handicapped
God’s people need to first wake up, and see this truth outlined above. We need to believe this is God’s will, and the Spirit will flow strongest to build what the apostles first wanted under the instruction of Jesus Christ.
Meanwhile, individual Christians floating out there in sub-optimal bodies, or no real fellowship at all, are handicapped because the Spirit gifts and calls them to fit into the Body as Christ wanted, and died to enable. All our instincts are set up for this.
Like an animal in a zoo, or a bird in a cage that was meant for more, we sheep were meant for God’s pasture, and this was His local church.
It bears repeating: Christians who pick and choose doctrine like from a cafeteria menu, or who subjectively listen to their own innate sensibility – or worse, evil whispering voices – may wonder why they feel like life in Christ should be so much more.
They try to apply the biblical promises out of context to their lives assuming the me-and-God individualistic model. God, being faithful, may come through on some level for them – especially because conditions today have not led to full expressions of the local body and many of His children are doing the best that they know to do, and know no alternative.
The good news is God is willing; indeed Jesus Christ came as God and man, lived a perfect life, was crucified, and raised from the dead just for the purpose of creating a body.
She is His bride, and He is most zealous for her, you can be sure of that. If these truths witness to you, seek the truth further in the Word and prayer.
The more you look, the more an honest heart will see the local body is God’s way to unite Himself with man, create a testimony that the world cannot honestly deny, and all of it is to be to the glory of God!
1 Peter 2: 4 – Coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious, 5 you also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
Ephesians 2: 19-22 – Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, 22 in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.
