- Signs of the Kingdom, Part XXVII
As we continue considering what the perfect church might look like, we should expect a vision for the perfect church to be as varied as the people who are in it—that’s how it should be. We may wonder how anything could be built with everyone having different ideas about what it should be, yet this is still far better than what we call churches today. We know this because God’s plan for building His house is much like He created the universe.
It is only when we begin to acquire the mentality of “unity by conformity” that ours and God’s visions tend to clash. When we realize God’s unity is a unity of diversity, we start seeing how different visions can complement and not contradict each other. We may think this is far too complicated for man to do, but He doesn’t want man to do it. He wants to build His church, and with Him nothing is impossible.
Having a pastoral and evangelistic church, for example, should not be contradictory but complementary. Those who come to the Lord through evangelism need pastoral care to mature and become established. Then all the other gifts and ministries He has given for the building of His church can be implemented at the right time, complementing one another.
When the Lord builds the house, we can trust that all the people He has brought together will be the right ones. God has made us all unique, therefore we can expect each person to have a unique vision of what the church should be. Since God’s unity is a unity of diversity, we should expect all the unique visions each member brings to fit together in remarkable unity that is infinitely diverse, living, growing, and changing in good ways. It is when we cannot change that we become old wineskins.
In our limited minds, we think this cannot work but will instead be chaotic. That is understandable until we see how the Lord made an incredibly diverse and chaotic creation fit and work together as one. How much more should we, His body, fit and work together like this? How much more do our own bodies with their many parts and functions work together as one body? Should this not be a model of how His body, the church, should function?
The apostle Paul did not say he had the mind of Christ; he said, “we have the mind of Christ” (see I Corinthians 2:16) plural.
No one person can have the mind of Christ, but each of us has been given a part, and when we come together, the different parts can be joined together to have His mind. Some may have bigger parts than others, but we all have parts. This makes us realize the true importance of each member.
We may give more weight to those the Lord has sent to be in leadership, but we cannot reject any member. As Paul also wrote the Lord likes us to give the weak, simple, foolish, and uncomely members more honor and attention (see I Corinthians 12:22-25). This keeps us all in places of humility, knowing that God resists the proud but gives His grace to the humble. Humility should be something to which we are all devoted.
That being said, we must not fall into the trap of thinking God will always speak to us through the least likely members. However, we must stay open to this. Unless God is dealing with some pride issue, we should expect Him to mostly provide leadership through those He has raised up as leaders. The key is not to seek to hear from any one person, but to seek to hear the Lord through whomever He chooses. It is not hearing the words of the Lord but hearing the Word Himself that we must seek. Our goal should be if He chooses to speak through a donkey, we will know His voice well enough to know it’s the Lord.
Knowing the Lord can speak through anyone at any time brings excitement to the life of God’s people. This requires us to know His voice. Until we recognize that God brings unity through diversity and not conformity, we aren’t really building churches but franchises that are so boringly uniform, not many people want to go to them, much less our Creator.
© 2023 Rick Joyner. All Rights Reserved
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