Since we
have looked at the Imperial statement of Your
will be done as it relates to God – both the Father, and his Beloved Son,
our Lord and Savior, in His first advent (and
to some degree, as He mediates for us now, seated at the right hand of Glory,
and how He will come again to consummate His kingdom by subjecting all things
under His rule, per the Father’s will, then deliver such to the Father in
subjection, that God may be all in all– 1
Corinthians 15:28), we will now look a bit more closely at how
we are used by God to perform that which He decreed; that is, His will being done on earth as it is in heaven.
Again, great
humility enters the sphere of our activity in performing this great task on a
daily, moment-to-moment basis, as we realize we are but one of the secondary
means by which our God performs His will on earth (although the primary of those secondary means), for we know how
perfectly God’s will is done in heaven, and to seek to do it on earth in the
same manner is an astounding prescription of that divine decree – this, as with
all the commandments of our God we are to obey (as this encompasses all those commandments), is at once seen as
impossible, relating to ourselves, but possible, as pertains to the working of God through Christ in us, the hope of glory – Colossians
1:27.
So,
understanding that God’s will is being
done on earth as it is in heaven, and that of Himself, we also are to
understand that, although He has decreed to make that will known and performed
by we who are His in Christ Jesus, it is, necessarily, limited, as to how we
can perform it and make it known, because of the flesh we yet dwell in (Galatians
5:17).
While the
Imperative speaks of God’s will being done of Himself to His glory, it also
speaks of the intention and exhortation of His will being done in
this present age – it is a present striving, by the Spirit He has given to
dwell in we who are His, to put to death
our members which are on the earth (Romans 8:13; Colossians 3:5), and express those shared attributes
of God He has willed to allot to us, singly and corporately, that we may shine
forth His glory (and please note: it is His glory, not ours – Isaiah
42:8; John 17:5).
So, our
doing the will of God on earth as it is in heaven is understood to be His
willed expression of Himself in limited scope, due to the finite quality of our
present life and the weakness of this flesh we yet dwell in; however, as with
His use of His written Word, which He willed to use to express those divine,
infinite and external perfections of Himself to us by His Spirit, He also
expresses such through we who are His, as may be seen and comprehended in the
absolute statements of command for His children in that Holy Scripture (Matthew
5:48; Ephesians 4:1; 1 Peter 1:15-16). The present
limitations of expressing His glory and doing His will, by that eternal life
which He has given us through His Spirit regenerating us and indwelling us to
keep us in communion with Him, cannot be used as an excuse to deny that we are
to do just that (Titus 3:4-6; Galatians 2:20-21;
Galatians 5:16, 22-25; 1 Peter 1:13-14).
Such was
that which was expressed by our Lord Jesus Christ as He looked to the end of
His first coming to this earth; again, first instructing His disciples, then
speaking of that which He came to do, then importuning the Father to do that
which was to glorify the Father, then being answered by the Father (John
12:23-28).
Finally,
although there are many passages of Scripture in which this command of doing
the Father’s will are stated for our understanding and obedience, by the power
of His Spirit, we turn to just two in the Pauline epistles which speak to the
church, both individually and as a corporate entity, that we may have, along
with the Scripture passages already referenced above in the body of this
article, a plain statement of how we are to do the will of the Father in our
Lord Jesus Christ. Combined, these two passages of Scripture indentify both how
we are to do the will of our Lord, and so that will of the Father, both as
individual members of His body, and corporately, recognize the structure of the
church by which we live out the life of Christ in both His body and the world.
Before we cite
the two references of Scripture from two of Paul’s epistles, it is important
that we recognize the structure of our Lord’s church; too many, by far, are
those Christians who, for various reasons of the flesh, believe that they can
go forth and “make disciples” by
personal evangelizing that is not connected with a local body.
These
Christians wrongly understand the Great Commission of Matthew
28:18-20, thinking it is to individual Christians, and not to
the apostles, and through the apostles, to those who are given to actually
shepherd and feed the sheep of our Lord in local congregations.
It is the
elders in a local church who are engaged in the making of disciples; personal
evangelizing does not “make disciples.”
While all believers are to engage in proclaiming the gospel to the unsaved, it
is those whom our Lord has appointed that actually take on the responsibility
and the work of making disciples, which is to say that making disciples does
not happen outside of the local shepherding and nurturing of the sheep within
the structure of a local church. We are all held responsible for our own growth
in the graces of our Lord as His Spirit gives us the desire and power to do so,
according to the Scripture, but such cannot truly take place unless we are in subjection
to those who have been given the gracious giftings of God to watch over our souls
as those who must give an account to our Lord (Hebrews
13:17); when we go to do that work which is theirs – when
we seek to exercise that outside the corporate structure of our Lord’s body,
which is only and always to be worked out as members of that corporate body, we
are in disobedience to the Lord; whether it is through our own wrong
understanding of the Scriptures according to fleshly desires, or an ignorance
of those Scriptures (again, this will be
according to the fleshly desires). Those who do such not only do so to their own lack of growth in the Lord, they also do so to the
grieving of the elders who have the rule over them (if they are indeed members of a good, Bible believing, New Testament
church), and the suffering of all the other members of the local body; they
also quench and grieve the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:26; Ephesians 4:30; 1
Thessalonians 5:13). It should be noted that this grieving and
quenching of the Holy Spirit always takes place as a result of doing that which
is of the flesh, and is mentioned in passages which have to do with corporate
life in a local body of Christ, whether the member(s) doing so are acting
individually outside the body, or individually within the body.
To conclude
this post, then, rather than cite, in their entirety, those passages from two
of Paul’s epistles which we mentioned we would above, we simply give the
references, inviting the reader to read them, for these two passages of
Scripture show both the function of each member within the local church
regarding personal responsibility, regardless of God’s particular gifts to those
members, and how that function relates, by the power of our Head, Jesus Christ,
to the full-orbed presentation of our Father’s will being done now, in this
present time, to His glory. Here, then are those references:
Ephesians
4:1
Colossians
3:1-17
Although
many more Scripture passages could have been mentioned, the discerning reader
will no doubt find much to consider in these passages by which our doing the
will of the Father, and so our Lord, is defined, and it is hoped that such will
also study relevant Scriptures with that context of the Body of Christ, in
which the members duties of faith through love are made clear and distinct by
His Spirit to those who are His.
No comments:
Post a Comment