Rock the Vine and the Living Body 1975

who decided that instead of leaving all his wealth and his will to them, he would give it to them while they were alive, or a good portion of it. But instead of giving them money, what he did was, he bought three lots of land, good-sized lots with ocean frontage, and then he had the building supply trucks come in with everything necessary to put up a very substantial home on each of these lots, to dump the thing there on each lot. The first son got right to work, he poured the footings and started on the slab foundation, and very soon he had his house going.

Now the second son had a thing against structures, and so he covered the whole thing with a tarp, and brought out a couple of lawn chairs and a beach umbrella, and he just sat there in the silence of the ocean. The third son took a shovel and just started to dig. Okay, a few weeks went by, and pretty soon the first son had the whole thing, his house was started in, and the roof was on, and he was going along like a house of fire.

The second son was still sitting there under a beach umbrella, meditating as he looked out over the sea, and he was rather embarrassed when his friends came to explain about this pile of building materials on the lot, because they didn't believe in structure either. The third son was busy digging this hole, and he was down quite a ways now, and it was so big he had to put a rope around it so people wouldn't fall in. Two or three months later, the first son had his house finished, beautiful, beautiful, and now he was coming with a wheelbarrow and bringing in the fill, topsoil, so he could landscape his thing.

The second son had decided to get rid of his beach umbrella and his lawn chairs, because he was against structure, and he was just sitting on the grass with his legs crossed, meditating. The third son had finally come down to rock, and he was now beginning to lay the foundation for his house, he was getting the footing for it. A year went by, the first son's house was absolutely beautiful, beautiful.

People came from miles around to look at it. In fact, ABC television was planning to do a special on it. Second son, still meditating.

The third son had his house finished, but oi, oi, oi, what a house. It was so squashed and so ugly that the first son was quite embarrassed to admit that that was his brother's house. Then came the hurricane.

Now, the hurricane only lasted one night and a day, but when it was over, the first son's house was gone, and he lived. The second son, with all his materials, was gone, too. He was just spread out over the ocean someplace and was never seen again.

The third son was still alive and well in his house, which should destroy him. All right, now, the body of Christ will one day appear before you, Lord, as a beautiful city, a beautiful building, a structure like the New Jerusalem. Better still, she will be like just a magnificent woman dressed in garments which are spotless as a bride adorned for her husband.

But now, in the eyes of the world, the body of Christ, which is his bride, doesn't look very beautiful. And this doesn't bother her because her only concern right now is that she get down to the rock bottom and that she build a foundation on that rock of reality which is Christ. Believing that if she does that, everything else will follow.

Let me just read 1 Corinthians 3.10.11. According to the commission of God given to me, like a skilled master builder, I lay a foundation and another man is building upon it. Let each man take care how he builds upon it, for no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid which is Jesus Christ. Now, what's been happening among us, I believe, is that there are quite a few among us who are really not alone because they reflect what's going on probably in every single one of our hearts who are becoming anxious about the fact that things in our fellowship here just aren't taking shape fast enough.

Well, perhaps they feel that things aren't even taking shape at all. And we look around and we see fellowships all over the place that are just mushrooming. Beautiful things going on, numbers increasing, doubling and tripling in a year's time.

They're coming into worship which is perfectly heavenly. They have an order that's scriptural right down to a T and the power of the Spirit seems to be moving with tremendous force and manifesting God's grace. And what are we doing here? All we're doing is digging, digging.

And how long are we gonna go on with this digging? Is that all we're ever gonna do? Dig, dig, dig. We become especially nervous when we look next door and see our brother putting up a house that's quite elaborate and very impressive. And we wonder, too, if we're never going to come into an authentic and effective body ministry.

Well, listen, at least as far as I'm concerned, I believe that we are indeed going to come into a body ministry far more effective than what now is happening among us. I'm convinced of that still. When we in fact get down to the rock.

I believe that when we in fact and in truth, and we'll know when we hit it, get down as a fellowship and as individuals in the fellowship to the rock which is Christ in fact and in truth, get down to something really solid, then suddenly the metaphor itself changes. And we find that we are no longer building anything, but that this building is beginning to rise by itself. And that this rock that we've been building this footing on, putting the footing on, is not something dead like a rock, but it is a living thing.

It is a body. And the best description in the entire Bible of what a body ministry is, I'm convinced is John 15. And that when we talk about the body ministry as described in Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4 and 5, we must see these descriptions of a body ministry in the light of what we see in John 15.

Now in John 15, Jesus describes to us what a body ministry is. And he shows us that a body ministry is nothing but individual branches that are truly grounded and rooted, established in a single body. Let me read the first six verses.

I'm gonna read a continuous passage, but I'm gonna take the first six as a unit. We're familiar with this, but consider this in terms of a body ministry, in terms of a body ministry functioning among us right here. Or whatever fellowship you may belong to, it applies, I'm sure.

I am the true vine, and my father is the vine director. Every branch of vine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes, makes clean, that it may bear more fruit. You are already pruned, made clean, by the word which I have spoken to you.

Abide in me, and I in you, as the branch cannot bear fruit unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches.

He who abides in me, and I in him. He it is, she it is, who bears much fruit. For apart from me, you can be nothing.

If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers, and the branches are gathered and thrown into the fire and burned. Many branches, one vine, and each branch is responsible for its relationship to the vine. Nobody else is responsible for your relationship to Jesus but you.

And where we have even one branch that truly makes sure that it is indeed abiding in that vine, there you have the beginning of a body ministry, always. Just take one branch and let it truly abide in the vine and you will have the emergence from that in time a body ministry. Now what happens, of course, with us is that we begin, many of us, to think that our relationship with divine Jesus is healthy when it's not.

So what does it mean to abide in the vine? Truly it means to live in him, to dwell in him. He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. And the secret place of the Most High that I talked about in Psalm 91 is Jesus.

And to dwell in Jesus obviously means that we live in him. We draw our strength from him. We are satisfied in him.

We eat and sleep and think him, breathe him. We move in his will. It's not enough to just say, well, I got saved at such and such a time two years ago.

Or I had my doctrines together. I have to, in a living relationship, be in Jesus. If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation.

All things are passed away. Behold, all things have become new. Now anything less than this won't do it.

And don't allow even your relationship with brothers and sisters to become a substitute for your relationship with Jesus. Now granted, if I'm not relating rightly to my brothers and sisters, my relationship with Jesus will die. That's true.

But unless I have a relationship with Jesus first, I will never rightly relate to my brothers and sisters. I can remember, must be 22, 23 years ago, back in the Maritime, I was hungry for a word from God. And it came from the last place that I would allow at the time, which is usually the way it works.

Clock radio came on one morning, and here comes this gravelly voice selling maps of Palestine and canned milk for the hungry Jewish children of North Africa. But there was a message, very brief, but very much alive in the spirit of God, at least for me. And morning after morning, I'd hear Dr. Michael sing, sometimes between six and seven.

You know, and in addition to his sales pitch for this and that, he would have a message. And in this message, again and again, he would talk about, my Jesus, as only Dr. Michael could say, my Jesus. And at first I wondered, you know, is he just saying that, or is that real to him? We got to Detroit in 1958, and shortly after we were here, Gene and I, and I probably raised aggression, they were small at the time, went to the east side to hear Dr. Michael sing.

We heard he was gonna be in some church. He needed to ride back, not to the Sheraton Cadillac or the Hilton, but to the Tick Fork Shelby. And so we were going that way, and he says, okay, I'll come along with you.

And all the way back to the hotel, he was firing questions at me. You know, I felt I was in the presence of somebody like the Apostle Paul. And I had the impression that this man was just loaded with Jesus.

And I'm convinced that his one concern was not how many maps of Palestine he sold, or how many cans of milk he gave away, or how many radio stations he was on, but that his one concern was Jesus, which leads us then to the Apostle Paul himself. The Apostle Paul, no man was ever used, as was Paul, in the building of the body by the hand of the spirit, and yet Paul's concern and Paul's satisfaction was not how many churches he established, how many memories they had, how things were going. And his primary concern was Jesus.

I can have all things but loss, that I might win Christ and be found in him. Second thing we have to have is we're gonna have an effective body ministry. We have to get into prayer in a serious way, far more serious than many of us have been into it up to now.

I read right on verses seven and eight. If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will and it shall be done for you. By this my father is glorified that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.

Many of us are not, because it's proven in our living, convinced that prayer is the basic work. What we do is pray when we're in trouble, and when we get together, we often will pray sermons back and forth to each other. But Lord, you know what, I'm telling the Lord what that guy needs to hear, and he gets over here and he's praying and telling the Lord what I need to hear, and we go back and forth.

We have a regular debate in prayer. That's not prayer, and we all do it. You know, but that prayer is the basic thing that needs to happen in our lives, corporately and individually, of this.

Many of us are not yet convinced. But our Lord was convinced. His entire life was based on prayer.

His ministry was prayer first, and he taught prayer as the essential thing, and the Apostle Paul followed our Lord in this, and he did the same. Prayer was number one for him. If we abide and abide, and he abides in us, then we're gonna know what to ask for, and we're gonna want what we need to want, and we will be given whatever we will, whatever we ask for, and there will be much fruit.

God will receive much glory, and it will be then evident that we are Jesus' disciples. Where you have a praying people, you will always have a body ministry, always. It may not be by somebody's definition of what a body ministry should be, but you'll have a body ministry, and you'll have a praying people, always.

There's no way out of that. It can't be any other way. What we need to do is get into prayer, first of all, in our private life.

Don't try to pray corporately. You can never pray individually, which means that we have to make a time for it, and we have to concentrate the mind on it. And if this seems like a broken record, if we have gone on this for 17 years, so be it.

There's nothing that we need more desperately after our relationship with Jesus begins in a prayer life. But we also then, after we have come into an individual discipline of prayer, where we find ourselves before God, thrown daily in a serious way, then we also have to learn to pray corporately. And let Him teach us how to pray together, where we're not just praying sermons at each other, but we're really, really opening our hearts, and up through the body rises a prayer that not any one of us could ever figure out.

The next step toward an effective body ministry is that we love one another. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.

If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in His love. These things have I spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

Now, don't even try to do this. If you are not, first of all, rooted in the Bible, and if you are not, secondly, given over totally to a life of prayer, because you'll never do it. But if your life is based on a relationship with Jesus, and if you have indeed begun to let God teach you how to pray, then you begin to love your brothers and sisters.

And how do we love our brothers and sisters? But the way He loves us, Jesus. And how does He love us? But by showing us mercy to the point of weighing down His life. The primary quality of the love that our Lord talks about is mercy.

Mercy is nothing but love and action. And what often happens with us is that we are manifesting dramatic kinds of love towards this brother over here, and at the same time, holding a hardness and a bitterness, you know, and an unforgiving attitude and a merciless spirit toward this brother over here, which belies my love for that brother, because it's impossible to have the love that our Lord is talking about toward one and not another. If I don't have mercy in my heart for it all, I don't have love in my heart.

It begins with mercy. And mercy simply means that you start with a person you're having the hardest time to accept, and you pray God's blessing for that person. You desire nothing but that person's good.

Jesus tells us this. That we desire that the Spirit of God should just shower every needful thing on that person's life. You start to pray that way, and you begin to think that way, and you start to live that way.

Love for one another is not measured in how much time we spend with each other, or how many secrets we share with each other, or whether we change our underwear. Love for each other, love for the brothers and sisters is measured by the type of mercy we cast toward our enemies, toward our neighbors, and then toward our brothers and sisters. Let that address the word of our Lord, if you think that's hard.

Final step for the body ministry, as we see it in this passage, is that we then go out and do fair truth. And that goes for every single one of us, no exceptions. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing. But I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father, I have made known to you.

You did not choose me, but I chose you, and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should abide. Notice it, it's a body ministry, not just a body lying there, or cleaning its fingernails endlessly. A ministry, a serving, and the fruit that we are to bear is the kind of fruit that we have been appointed to bear, not the kind of fruit that we particularly like, not some nice thing we think the Lord would appreciate, not something that we think would be a marvelous addition to the kingdom of God, but something which the Lord has made clear, and the basic ingredient of this is that souls are to be brought from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God.

That's the basic thing, and everything must move toward that end, or something's out of whack. Any fellowship or any gathering of believers that never gets out to do this is not a body ministry, but it's a club. It doesn't matter what your gifts may be, nor does it matter what your particular liabilities are, no matter who you are, you have been appointed to go and bring forth fruit.

Souls that have found the living God and will endure the fires of the end. Just as surely as Jesus called you into the kingdom, and sent you in a particular manifestation of the body, some fellowship somewhere, so surely Jesus has also sent you forth, equipped to, giving you every needful thing to bring others from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to himself. Now, there's no question about it, as a fellowship we have a long way to go.

We have much to learn, and we have much to accomplish, but we'll get there. We will come into a body ministry that may not look much to the world, look like very much to the world, but it will get the job done, and it will also survive the storm, if each of us makes sure of four things. Number one, that our relationship with divine Jesus is alive.

Two, that we have come into serious prayer. Three, that we are practicing mercy toward all men, particularly the brothers, but to all men. And four, that every one of us, in obedience to the command of the Lord, is going out and bearing fruit.

Let's pray. Give us the wisdom, Lord God, to consider these things, and in any area, Lord, where we know ourselves to be in need of help, we pray that the Spirit will come to us today with the encouragement we need to go along with your program and not to try to raise a bunch of excuses or form some kind of justification for where we're at now. And bring us, Lord God, into the kind of life together that only you can create, and deliver us, Heavenly Father, from ever attempting to take a shortcut.

We ask it in Jesus' name, amen.