I Corinthians 12:12 tells us, For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ. Christ is a many-membered Body. This explanation, if you will remember it, will make the importance of this walk real to you continually. When Jesus was born, according to the announcement of the angel Gabriel, the Holy Spirit would overshadow Mary. That which was conceived of her would be of the Holy Spirit and He would be called the Son of God (Luke 1:28–32). The Father, Son and the Holy Spirit were present; and when Christ was born it was said of Him that in Him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. Colossians 2:9. We know uniquely He was the Son of God. He was the second person of the Trinity, or the Triune God, manifested in the flesh of one individual. (That was the reason Satan tried to kill the babies of Bethlehem, to get at the Son of God.)
The Son laid aside all of His divine prerogatives and attributes, to be born as a man and to be in all points tempted like as we are. Hebrews 4:15b. You say, “God is unlimited; so how can you say that?” The fact that He is unlimited means that He is not limited by any idea we have of Him. You must not presuppose that He has no capacity for limiting Himself, or you have limited God. He can forget your sins and blot out your transgressions as a cloud, to remember them against you no more (Isaiah 44:22); He can bury your sins in the sea of His forgetfulness. It is amazing that God, with His perfect love and wisdom, Who knows everything that can be known, cannot know if He doesn’t want to know, He is unlimited—that means all things are possible with Him—yet He can even limit Himself to things He cannot do. By His very nature, God, Who can do anything, cannot do some things that His creatures can do! The Scriptures say that God cannot lie: in His righteousness He has decreed that lying is the one thing He will not be able to do.
Imagine all these attributes bottled up in the flesh of just one man. This is the reason that Jesus, toward the end of His ministry, said to His disciples, It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send him unto you. John 16:7. Mysterious and simple little words, so easily understood: what He was saying was that He would remain individualized in the flesh of one man until the day He ascended to the Father; then by the Holy Spirit, He would be released from the limitation of the flesh of one individual and would become the Head, the federal Head, of a many-membered Body. And just as real as that one was in the physical, so this one is in the Spirit.
As the physical body has many members but is one body, so Christ is the Head of a many-membered Body and you are a part of the Christ (I Corinthians 12:12–14). This is a reality. It is like the nervous system: if one member suffers, every member suffers with it (I Corinthians 12:26). If someone steps on your toe, your whole body reacts because you have a nervous system like that. In the Body of Christ, if one member rejoices, all of us rejoice with him; we have the same care one for another.
We are believing that this mystical, spiritual oneness we have in Christ can be developed. You ask, “Why don’t other people do it?” Because they don’t think of it that way. Why don’t most churches have healing meetings? Because they don’t think of it that way, yet the Bible is full of healings. Each denomination thinks a certain way—it is surprising how few of us think the Scriptural way.
The Bible says that we are one Body and that there is a oneness, yet nobody capitalizes on that, nobody dwells upon it. But we begin to feel it here as we reach out in the spirit: we can feel the contact and bonds because we are not individuals; we are swallowed up in one Body. God sets us in the Body as it pleases Him (I Corinthians 12:18), and though we are one Body, we retain our individuality, just as a finger retains its individuality as a finger. You do not say of your finger, “There is my body”; it is your finger—and although it is a part of the body, that finger retains its individuality. It can pull triggers, it can point, it can help in grasping things, it can do many things. You do not think of yourself as just one member of a body where all the members have the same function. They don’t! The finger can’t be the eye or the ear, for each has an entirely different function. You retain your individuality and the functions that you perform are separate, yet you move as one body. Only one Body, one with Christ, and we will have an interrelationship and an interconnection with each other that will constantly grow as this day of the Body ministry is brought forth by the Holy Spirit, all functioning and members one of another. It is a whole new frontier.
Through the years there have been some that have failed because they have tried to retain their individuality with independence. You must almost repent of this independent action and independent thinking; you have to get the mind of Christ. The thumb cannot say, “I’m going to go over to here and leave the rest of the body.” That thumb does what the head tells it to do; it is connected. We will find that Body ministry works as we are in tune with the Holy Spirit. We find out what the Lord wants us to do and do it because He is the Head.
We are His Body, the members of His Body. There is an old poem that says that Christ has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet, and it is truer than you think. Christ once limited Himself to the flesh of one man to live in it and to work with it—God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, II Corinthians 5:19—Now Christ has limited Himself to a spiritual Body. That is what He is working through: He is speaking through you when you prophesy; He ministers through you when you intercede for each other and you become participators in His intercession.
Does this make the Body ministry more real for you? It is very important that you become aware that you are really one. Perhaps you find it embarrassing to be exposed to each other. It can be disconcerting at first. This bothers young couples when they get married—they can love each other and live together as man and wife but find it embarrassing to get down beside each other and pray. They don’t like that exposure in the realm of spirit. That is what we are talking about! When we come here we see the needs of one another and nobody is embarrassed because we have learned to be exposed to each other in this Body.
The Body ministry is creating an intimacy on a spiritual plane so that we see the faults and needs of each other, but we love one another and go right on believing for each other just the same. We have come into that oneness and concern for each other. It’s real, unfeigned love for one another that is very special, right from the heart; people loving each other very deeply. It has taken a little while to get on to it. We had to grow to stay off that individual plane. Now we are not fighting our own battles but with this oneness, when a member is strong then we are all strong in that strength.
Now we that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak… Romans 15:1. Bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. Galatians 6:2b. This is what it’s all about. From the very time a man comes into this walk it is possible for him to be protected. No matter how weak he has been morally, spiritually or physically, he will be protected if he comes within the protections and defenses of the Body and becomes submissive to the authority that can protect him. He will be like a little child, born with older brothers and sisters to look out for him