The Day of New Beginnings

Christ Manifested in His Body

 

The revelation of Christ in His body is where His Lordship is made practical in our lives. My submission to His Lordship is proved by my submission to Him in His body. We’ve come to the realm where we can't or won't know Him apart from His manifestation in His people. The things I am saying are things that the enemy would twist to discredit Christ's current revealing. But I know that as we lose our lives into the body of Christ that's where we will find our individual functioning and fulfillment. 
 
Everything the enemy has brought in recent years in the way of crazy cults and false shepherds lording it over their flocks, etc., has been to discredit this hour we have come to. The enemy has sought to muddy the waters of the revealing of the Lord in our midst.
 
I don't believe our professed submission to the Lord or acknowledgment of His Lordship has much merit apart from our submission to His authority as it is manifested in the body. This is where the rubber meets the road. Do we see the revelation of Jesus Christ in our submission to one another as members of Christ? Do we perceive that to serve one another is to really serve Him? There's no distinction between the Lord and my brother or sister. It's one spirit before the Lord. 
 
The natural body is the model for all the spiritual realities of the body of Christ. That's why Paul used the example in 1st Cor. 12. We are moving into a realm where we relinquish our own wills and opinions in subservience to the mind of Christ as it flows from the Head all the way down to the feet. What kind of mess would our natural bodies be in if every member such as our arms, legs, fingers, etc., had a mind and will of its own? I believe the true manifestation and importance of divine order has finally come. Divine order was never meant to be a spiritual hierarchy but a channel through which all the divine life of God can flow. True divine order is dependent upon willing vessels that have a clear revelation of what they are giving themselves to.
 
I believe in the days ahead we will see all the afflictions that individual members incur taken care of through this principle that healing (or deliverance) is produced within the body. Just as the natural body has the ability to heal itself, fight infections, overcome foreign invasions, etc., so shall it be in the body of Christ. I believe the day is upon us for individual members of the body to stop looking for the Lord to heal them, deliver them, etc., apart from His free flow in His body. I think that as we move ever deeper into the agape love for one another, the servitude of one another, that we will heal ourselves, so to speak. Meaning that healing, deliverance, etc., will just flow through the body naturally the way healing does in the physical body when there is a cut or wound.
 
This issue of the Body of Christ will be the one stumbling block for those trying to enter the kingdom of God if they insist on retaining the rights to self. It's just not enough to say, "I give myself to the Lord.” It's to the Lord in His body that we must give ourselves. “I serve the Lord" becomes a nebulous or abstract thing apart from recognizing Him as coming in flesh and serving Him there (1st John 4:1-4). Notice verse four especially. John is emphasizing that the coming in the flesh of Jesus was not just His bodily coming when He was on earth, but His manifestation in us. Greater is He that is in you than he who is in the world! It is the antichrist spirit that denies the manifestation of the Lord in His body.
 
I believe that ultimately this revelation of Christ in His body will determine our access into the kingdom of God or our denied entrance. It's just too easy to skirt certain areas of self when we attempt to serve the Lord apart from His manifestation in His body.