Isaiah said of Zion, “So shall thy sons marry thee,” (Isaiah 62:5). Zion brings forth sons and they in turn are the cause of her fruitfulness.
It is an interaction in the Spirit; churches come forth through apostolic ministry and they in turn give birth to higher levels of apostolic ministry. It works back and forth.
Zion must travail to bring forth her sons.
Isaiah 66:7–8. Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she was delivered of a manchild. Who hath heard such a thing? who hath seen such things? Shall a land be born in one day? Shall a nation be brought forth at once? For as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children.
You see, the man child comes forth first without the travail of Zion, then Zion begins travail and brings forth again.
Verse 9. Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the Lord. Shall I that cause to bring forth shut the womb? saith thy God.
It is a chain of fruitfulness: one company after another, one spiritual level after another. We do not understand all this now, but we have come to a place where intercession is essential and there will be no going forth until it comes.
Ephesians 4:10–13 He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things. And he gave some to be apostles; and some prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the body of Christ: till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.
We believe for the freedom and the liberation of the apostolic ministry. Paul said, Am I not free? am I not an apostle? I Corinthians 9:1.
First there has to be an apostolic liberation and then the whole Body is to take part. Many Scriptures indicate that the apostles entreated the very churches that they started, to intercede for them; the apostles had become inter-dependent upon them.
The worship, prayer, and appropriation will all be balanced now. The worship has been the order of the day; we were like infants nursing at a mother’s breast.
The breast fetish, so prominent among American people, is because America has been given to bottle babies for so long and something was missing: that which comes to a child who nurses at the mother’s breast and receives a great deal of love.
The child in turn gives a love to its mother that is far beyond its mental or personal development. It is sort of a worship it gives to its mother, and that is what we do when we worship.
Whom shall He teach knowledge? …them that are drawn from the breast (Isaiah 28:9). It is out of the mouth of babes and sucklings that He has established strength (Psalm 8:2).
One of the great names that God had taken for Himself was El Shaddai. It means “the great breasted One,” and there we nurse and worship, for He is the One who supplies all our life and sustenance.
This is the maternal side of the Heavenly Father,-the Holy Spirit. The communion that we have with God never ends; we will never be weaned in that sense.
In the infant stage, the nursing is more important, but as we begin to grow up, we go on to the exercise, and that is the prayer; doing the function for which we have been nurtured by God.
The text said that He gives the apostles and prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers for the nurture of the saints that they be no more children.
The babes are nurtured to bring them into that worship. Then comes the time when they, in turn, exercise themselves; and the apostle’s ministry gives way to another phase in which it becomes an apostolic company with a spiritual father—not a father of babes, but of a tribe of warriors.
As he leads them into a new area, the right relationship among all the brethren is very essential. God has perfected a spirit in the people to be submissive and at this point that submission will be brought to a test more than at any other time.
This will be the test: up to now you could be submissive because you were trying to overcome the flesh, stubbornness, rebellion and things in your own spirit to get release and deliverance.
That was elementary submission because you had to be submissive to one who could minister to you; your submission was not unto one who was less, but it was as one who was less strong to one who was stronger. Time and again the devil would fight you on that one point of submission or rebellion.
This is true not only in the Body, but also in the home. Every wife knows (and this is why the women make such good intercessors) what it would mean if her husband did not precede her into Christ.
She finds that God lays upon her submission to one who looks more helpless or less capable in many situations than she. She has to recognize that no matter how much revelation she has moved in, she must be submissive because spiritual authority is greater than revelation.
She just has to pray for him and trust that God will lead him along in his stumbling and that he will get the right word. She will see him go ahead where he should not and then watch God deal with him and reverse it. Sometimes he does not even know what is going on but she must trust God.
Your submission to your pastor is not tested as much as wives’ submission to their husbands when they are coming in on a lesser plane than they know that they have been walking on themselves. That illustrates what is coming in a different way.
As you have depended on the ministry God has given your pastor as the source of the grace that came to you, now your pastor is dependent on the grace that flows through you.
That puts another slant on it, for now you have to be submissive to one who is dependent upon you. It is easy to be submissive to one on whom you are dependent, just as a child learns submission to its parents, but this now is contrary to nature so it has to be on a spiritual level.
So, from this point, you will have to keep carrying your pastor in ways that he cannot even carry himself, but he just depends upon it and has faith that it will come forth until the job is absolutely finished.
You can be open to somebody who becomes close enough to you in spirit that they can use their contacts and bonds as wires over which they transmit their garbage.
Sometimes the devil uses that as a direct channel to get at someone who is over you in authority. Often he cannot oppress the one in authority because he may have personal immunities, so he will attempt to lash out at him through a member of the Body.
People constantly pray for God to strengthen the thing that is the greatest source of problems, until the Body is responsible for keeping alive that which God wants to destroy, while others pray against the thing that God wants to bring forth.
There is a reverse ministry among people who are going against God. Instead of ministering blessing, they minister all the oppression and judgments that are coming upon them through natural and spiritual laws and dump it on everybody around them.
God opened a way for the innocent to suffer for the guilty but now Satan is perverting that by trying to dump on us the oppressions of all the wicked and ungodly.
In the grace of Jesus Christ you have accepted His innocence and He suffered for your guilt; but you are not Jesus, you are a member of His Body; and it is to no avail that you get sick and die because your neighbor throws his oppression on you.
If you died because a witch cast a spell on you, that does not save the witch. The innocent suffering because of the guilty is a lot different from the innocent suffering for the guilty. The strong should bear the infirmities of the weak, but this transference of oppression is crippling the saints and hindering the Body of Christ.
God gives deliverance on the basis of praying with compassion for one another, but human sympathy opens the door to the disease, symptoms and oppressions of the person with whom you are sympathetic.
Then, without realizing it, you pass it within the Body because what comes to any member of the Body is very highly contagious.
Bitterness in one can spread through the whole congregation. Sympathy also leads people to form associations and relationships that will not hold up because they are not based on true things in the spirit. They are put together by a human glue, when they should be welded together by divine love.
We must want the will of God and His greater glory in His Church more than anything else. We are not looking for the Lord to make it easy and prosperous for everybody.
We are praying to be loosed from these spiritual limitations that are coming through oppression, into an area of effectiveness that will reach the world. We are not asking for things to be easy, we are asking to do ten times as much as we are doing now.
You have to take an impersonal relationship. I pray for a brother not because I think he is the personality kid of the year. I refuse to think of him on that plane. I pray for him because he is an essential ministry and I will fight to the death for that ministry, to protect it, to love and help it.
No matter what he does on the human level, my relationship to him is on the spiritual level. It must be the same way with you. You have to see others in the Spirit; just look to God and say, “Lord, I want to see what You are bringing forth.” Pray and believe for that and God will help you.
We say, “Pray for the ministries.” But you do not know how to pray for the ministries. Keep praying for them anyway; God knows what they need, and God knows what has to be done.
You say, “I’m going to pray for everybody in authority but I don’t know how to pray for the elders and deacons.” That does not make any difference. Your ignorance surely does not handicap God; it has not so far.
Your ignorance of what to pray for or how to pray does not make any difference. Be filled with the Spirit and make groanings in the Spirit.
Even though your knowledge and understanding is unfruitful, God will still answer it. God delights for you to pray.
He is using prayer as a channel through which He can link His omnipotence to human need. If God has chosen that means, then you honor it with all of your heart and pray.