Christians must learn their great dependence upon the Lord. Are you grasping this? The most marvelous thing you can do is to just depend on God twenty-four hours a day.
Are you thinking, “That will take away from my self-sufficiency. It will take away my self-confidence. I will come to the place where I will just be a vegetable, if I do that.”
No, if you come to the place where you are absolutely given over to the Lord, and dependent upon Him every moment, in that dependency you will find your own fulfillment, just as Jesus did—depending upon the Father.
There is wisdom in this, which touches on one more basic little need that you will face, saying, “Lord, I kneel before You. I am not afraid of the relationships you desire in your body.” We feel this would make us vulnerable, don’t we? We feel that if we yield to develeping relationships with other individuals in the Body, we become vulnerable.
We do teach people to “be no more children” (Ephesians 4:14). We don’t want to protract their infancy; but the more the Body is perfected (the more it is mature), the more each member has a specific need of the other members of the Body.
This is to say that the members of the mystical Body of Christ are not clearly formed at the beginning. Each member is in a nebulous and formative state.
And so, in a general sense, love flows between members of the Body. But as those individual members take on their personal identity, of service to the Lord, it is such a distinctive ministry that they lose some of their general ability to minister to themselves or function by themselves.
For instance, the more pronounced any ministry becomes, the more God takes away its capacity to flow freely and independently from the rest of the Body.
The more a hand becomes a hand, the more dependent it is on the other members of the body to function as a hand. When it takes on the form and shape of a hand, then it is dependent on every other part of the body.
Otherwise, that hand stands alone; and because of its distinct identity as a hand, it is worthless unless it can move in union with the rest of the body. The more efficient the hand becomes to do what a hand should do, the more dependent it is on the other members of the body to function (I Corinthians 12:12–27).
The apostolic ministry is dependent upon the people as the feet, as the support, as the heart that gives him strength and puts him in a position where he can lay the foundation. There isn’t any such thing as a ministry that can function alone effectively. Jesus was saying the same thing about every one of us. We are dependent on one another.
I am utterly dependent upon the people, more than I have ever been in any phase of my ministry; and I am facing it with joy. Likewise, the more spiritual you become, the more you are dependent upon the ministry that I have in order for you to come into the perfection God so desires. Anyone can start out and start walking; but when the maturity comes, then comes the interdependency, or we will not grow into the full stature of Jesus Christ.