I have one burden in saying these things. It is Zoe, the life of God Himself, given to us in Christ. The burden is Zoe. The goal is Zoe. The issue is Zoe. Everything I am saying about our corporate living must be understood from that beginning.
We have been made one with Christ. His life is in us. We are not standing outside Him, asking for occasional help to live a better Christian life. We have been brought into a union in which His life is our life. The calling is to abide in Him and live from the source we have already received.
That is what must govern our gathering, our speaking, our service, and our relationships. Without that, we can have an impressive Christian expression sustained by the same human life that sustains every other human enterprise.
The recovery needs to face this directly. We have made Christ as life a central teaching. But teaching life does not establish life as the source of what we do. We can understand the teaching, defend it, repeat it, and train others in it while continuing to function from our own ability.
We can build an entire corporate life around the explanation of Zoe while remaining practically dependent on ourselves.
That is the condition I am addressing. It cannot be corrected by making the meetings warmer or the brothers more approachable. The source itself must be faced.
Knowing How Without Abiding
We have learned how to do many things. We know how to speak in meetings. We know how to develop a spiritual subject. We know how to respond to a familiar phrase. We know how to conduct a gathering and how to recognize the form of an acceptable contribution.
Once we have learned these things, we can perform them.
That is where the danger lies. What once arose from living dependence can become a learned ability. The ability remains available even when the dependence has faded. We can continue producing the recognizable expression because we remember how it sounds and how it proceeds.
The saints may receive a meeting full of accurate statements about Christ without receiving much nourishment from the speaking. The speaker may have supplied his knowledge of life while scarcely attending to the life within him.
This is more serious than a problem with vocabulary. The vocabulary reveals how easily we can inherit an expression without living from its source. Words that began in discovery become familiar phrases, then accepted language, then a measure by which we judge whether someone understands.
They become grandchildren of reality.
Changing the words will not resolve this. We could abandon every familiar expression tomorrow and continue speaking from exactly the same source. Original language can express the natural man as readily as inherited language.
The issue is whether we are living from Christ.
The Natural Man Can Learn the Arrangement
The natural man is quite capable of religious activity. He can study. He can organize. He can sacrifice for a cause. He can become disciplined, courteous, and deeply committed. He can learn to speak softly. He can learn to wait his turn.
He can also become very interested in the subject of Zoe.
He can make life his emphasis, abiding his message, and the bride his project. He can pursue these subjects with tremendous energy and remain the originating source of the pursuit.
We must see this clearly. The spiritual character of a subject does not establish the spiritual source of the activity surrounding it.
A meeting does not become the expression of the Body because the subject is the Body. A work does not become the expression of life because its leaders continually speak about life. The source of the activity must be the life of Christ within His members.
Otherwise, we are supplying a religious expression from ourselves and giving it the name of something only Zoe can produce.
When the Gifts Fill the Room
This is why I am concerned about the prominence of gifted men.
The problem reaches deeper than how many minutes someone speaks. A brother can speak briefly and still govern the entire atmosphere through the weight of his personality, his recognized position, or the expectation that his understanding will settle every question.
Others learn to look to him. He learns to supply what they expect. Over time, the corporate living becomes dependent on his capacity.
We may call this supply. But we need to ask what the supply is producing. Are the members becoming more established in their own living dependence upon Christ? Is the life within them gaining expression? Or are they becoming more practiced at receiving what a few capable brothers provide?
A gift belongs to the Body. Its exercise should serve the expression of the life in all the members. When the gift occupies the room that belongs to that life, its prominence has become an obstruction.
Removing the prominent brother will not, by itself, answer the problem. Several others may take his place and supply the gathering from the same natural strength. Equal participation does not establish Zoe as the source. Everyone can have a turn expressing himself.
The Body’s expression requires the Body’s life.
Fruit Must Come From Its Source
This also reaches the matter of fruit.
A branch bears fruit because the life of the vine is flowing through it. The fruit arises from that life. Giving the branch an objective cannot supply what only the vine contains.
When people become our fruit, they easily become the visible evidence of our usefulness. We can count them. We can compare results. We can establish goals and measure our success.
The natural man knows how to operate in that arrangement. Give him a target, a method, and recognition for achieving it, and he has something he understands.
But Zoe is not established as the source merely because the target is religious.
People are precious. Their turning to Christ is precious. Yet they are never our spiritual possessions or the score of our labor. The fruit is what the life of Christ brings forth within people and among them. A growing number cannot substitute for that reality.
We must ask whether Christ’s life is transforming us. Is His love finding expression? Is our need for prominence losing its hold? Are we becoming free to serve without possessing the result? Is there nourishment in our living together?
Those questions bring us back to the source.
We Cannot Organize the Bride Into Being
The same issue governs the preparation of the bride.
We can make the bride the subject of conferences, the purpose of training, and the stated goal of our work. We can become intensely occupied with preparing her. Yet our intensity cannot produce her life.
The bride shares the life of Christ. Her beauty is the expression of that life brought to maturity in His people. Her oneness, purity, and love arise from Him.
We cannot collect the outward characteristics, arrange them carefully, and thereby produce the reality.
A considerate congregation is not, on that evidence alone, a mature expression of Zoe. Neither is an orderly congregation, a growing congregation, or one with an excellent understanding of Scripture. All these things require us to ask the same question: what life is supplying the expression?
The preparation of the bride cannot be handed over to the natural man as his highest religious assignment.
He cannot produce her.
Where We Begin
We begin by ceasing to evade the question of source.
Before we introduce another adjustment, another emphasis, or another training, we need to acknowledge how much we have learned to carry on by ourselves. Our ability to continue is not proof that we are abiding. Experience can carry us. Habit can carry us. Responsibility, ambition, and the expectations of others can carry us.
We need to become willing to let our confidence in those things be exposed.
I include my own writing. I can write about dependence independently. I can defend Zoe with the force of my own opinions. The accuracy of what I write does not excuse me from the reality I am describing.
The next step is abiding. This must become the governing reality of our corporate living.
We are in Christ. His life is within us. We do not have to manufacture access to Him. We have been made one. Our calling is to live in that union, dependent upon the life we share.
This is where prayer belongs. This is where our reading of Scripture belongs. This is where speaking and service begin. They belong within the living fellowship of Christ in His members. Their purpose is frustrated when we turn them into activities that can be completed satisfactorily without that dependence.
We must also consent to the cross where our own sufficiency insists on supplying everything.
We feel the need to make the meeting work. We want to say something substantial. We want the work to advance. We want to know that we have contributed. When the result seems uncertain, we reach for our ability and supply what we think is missing.
That inward necessity must be touched. We cannot keep filling every space from ourselves and then call the completed result the expression of Christ.
This does not require inactivity. Zoe is living. It generates, multiplies, nourishes, and transforms. There will be speaking. There will be service. There will be responsibility and costly love. Our humanity becomes available to the life within us. Our minds, voices, hands, and abilities find their proper use in dependence upon Him.
The action proceeds from the life.
Learning the Taste of Life
We also need to know the taste of what we have received.
A person can learn a great deal about food without being nourished. Descriptions become useful when they direct us to something we actually taste. They become an obstruction when familiarity with the description satisfies us.
We need a living recognition of Zoe. Its peace. Its simplicity. Its harmony. Its love. Its freedom from the need to establish itself. Its power to nourish another person without taking possession of him.
This recognition cannot be reduced to whether a meeting feels pleasant. Christ’s life exposes what resists Him. The truth may disturb our settled arrangements. Surrendering control may be painful. Yet the movement is toward fuller life, deeper love, and the freedom of Christ gaining expression in His members.
Those who have experience should serve this recognition in others. Help the saints know the life within them. Help them abide. Let the teaching bring them into a fuller living dependence, so that the teaching never becomes a substitute for the reality it describes.
Then let Zoe give rise to the corporate expression.
We do not need to determine every feature in advance and ask the saints to reproduce it. As we abide together, there will be practical decisions and necessary arrangements. But those arrangements must remain servants of the living fellowship. They cannot become its source or its measure.
One Burden
Leaving the recovery will not automatically resolve this issue. Remaining in it will not resolve it either. A home gathering can be sustained by human energy. A large meeting can contain real expressions of Christ. The address, the size, and the arrangement do not settle the question.
Wherever we are, the issue follows us: from what life are we living?
I have no interest in forming another identity around having recognized the failure of an existing one. Being correct about the problem cannot become our shared life. Neither can dissatisfaction, criticism, or the conviction that we see more clearly than others.
Christ is our life.
What I am asking is that we bring everything back to Him as the actual source of our corporate living. Our ministry. Our gifts. Our meetings. Our labor. Our understanding of fruit. Our hope for the bride. Nothing is exempt because it has a respected history or an accepted spiritual purpose.
We have received the very life of God. That life must have full access to us, individually and together.
The burden is Zoe. The goal is Zoe. The issue is Zoe.
One thought, one hope, one calling: to abide in Christ and allow His life full expression in us.
