Dear brothers and sisters,
I believe we need to stop and ask whether we have misunderstood the Christian life at its very source.
We have spent generations asking how to spread Christianity, how to build churches, how to educate believers, how to train workers, and how to preserve the faith for our children. We have devoted extraordinary amounts of money, intelligence, energy, and sacrifice to these concerns.
But there is a question beneath all those questions.
Where is Zoe?
Where is our living by the divine life we have received? Where is our dependence upon Christ within us? Where is the corporate expression of a people born of God, possessing His life and partaking of His nature?
I am not asking whether we mention life in our teaching. I am asking whether Zoe is the source of our living.
We can make life a subject and continue to live from ourselves. We can teach dependence while constructing something that depends upon our strength. We can explain abiding while refusing the Lord access to the inward places from which our ambitions arise.
My concern is that much of our Christian activity has become a substitute for living by Christ.
We have become occupied with what Christians should accomplish, while the divine life within our spirit remains largely disregarded in our actual decisions, relationships, and work.
My burden is Zoe.
The beginning is Zoe. The supply is Zoe. The growth is Zoe. The substance of the church is Zoe. The issue before us is whether we will live by the life God has given us or continue using our natural resources to produce something religious in His name.
I cannot raise that question without placing myself beneath it.
My writing can become another project. My concern for the church can become another form of self-importance. Even my insistence upon Zoe can become language behind which I hide from the Lord who dwells within me.
Therefore, I am asking that we come before Him together.
Lord, have we offered You our activity while withholding ourselves?
Have we devoted ourselves to Your supposed work while resisting Your actual operation within us?
Have we assumed responsibility for building Your church because we have never truly learned to live by Your life?
We need to be clear about what God has given us.
Zoe is God’s own uncreated, eternal life. In regeneration, we are born of God and receive this divine life in our spirit. We are not merely influenced by God or instructed to resemble Him. We have been born of Him.
John 1:12–13 speaks of those who become children of God through a birth that comes from God Himself. Jesus says, “That which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). Second Peter 1:4 speaks of our becoming “partakers of the divine nature.”
These declarations must be allowed their weight.
We are divine by participation in His life and nature. We are God in life and nature, but not in the Godhead.
We remain His creatures. We do not become independent deities, objects of worship, or additional persons of the Trinity. His unique identity, sovereignty, and place as the One we worship remain His alone.
Yet the life we have received is truly divine.
Our new birth is real. Our participation in His nature is real. We must not soften this into religious influence, moral improvement, or the adoption of Christian values.
God has given us His own life in our spirit.
First John 5:11–12 declares that eternal life is in His Son and that the one who has the Son has life. Colossians 3:4 speaks of Christ as our life. First Corinthians 6:17 says that the one joined to the Lord is one spirit.
We are speaking of an inward reality, a living union.
Christ has not merely stood before us as an example. He dwells within us as life.
The Christian life proceeds from this birth and this union. Its unfolding is the divine life gaining access to our thoughts, desires, choices, habits, relationships, and bodily living. The life already received in our spirit must become the life by which we actually live.
This is why regeneration does not make every impulse we have divine. We can possess Zoe and still act from pride, fear, resentment, or ambition. The presence of divine life does not mean that everything we initiate expresses that life.
We need to abide.
We need to turn to the Lord in our spirit and allow Him to govern us. We need the renewing of our mind, the surrender of our will, and the inward transformation Scripture describes in Romans 12:2 and 2 Corinthians 3:18.
The Christian life is the working out of what God has placed within us.
But much of Christianity proceeds as though God had given us an assignment and left us to fulfill it through improved human resources.
We organize the willing. We train the gifted. We motivate the hesitant. We persuade the unconvinced. We establish institutions to preserve the results.
Then we ask God to bless the whole undertaking.
Yet natural ability cannot become Zoe through religious dedication.
Intelligence does not become divine life because it studies theology. Ambition does not become divine life because it seeks a larger ministry. Persuasive speech does not become divine life because its subject is the gospel.
The source remains the issue.
We can do Christian things from ourselves. We can become so proficient at doing them that we no longer recognize how little present dependence upon Christ they require.
That is a terrible possibility.
A person may be able to preach, lead a meeting, teach a class, organize outreach, and counsel others while scarcely turning inwardly to the Lord. Years of experience may enable him to function competently without exposing his actual condition.
His usefulness can conceal his need.
I believe many of us need to become less confident in our competence and more honest about our source.
Jesus gives us the vine and the branches in John 15.
The branch has no independent life with which to fulfill the purpose of the vine. It receives the life it expresses. Its fruitfulness depends upon its living union with the vine.
The Lord tells us to abide in Him.
We often place abiding beside our other responsibilities. We should pray, study, serve, witness, attend, contribute, and also remember to abide.
But abiding concerns the source of everything else.
A branch cannot overcome its lack of supply through greater commitment. It cannot produce fruit by understanding fruit more thoroughly. Accountability cannot give it the life it is failing to receive.
The need is Zoe.
We must live from the divine life already given to us in Christ.
Perhaps the answer to our barrenness is not another training. Perhaps the answer to our exhaustion is not a renewed commitment to the work. Perhaps the answer to our lack of reality is not a clearer explanation of the same truths.
Perhaps we need to stop and turn to the One within us.
He is present. His life is present. Our need is to yield to Him.
That yielding reaches deeper than a devotional moment before we resume control. We must remain open to His direction throughout the activity itself, including His right to interrupt it, change it, or bring it to an end.
Jesus said, “I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18).
He identifies Himself as the Builder.
The church belongs to Him, comes from Him, and depends upon Him. Its divine reality arises from His life within His people. We cannot manufacture that reality through organization.
We can arrange people. We cannot produce their union in Christ.
We can establish an institution. We cannot make it the body of Christ through a constitution, a name, or a shared doctrinal statement.
We can fill a building. We cannot produce the expression of divine life merely by bringing people into the same room.
The church is a people born of God, possessing His life and partaking of His nature. Their oneness has its source in the life they share in Him.
This is why the church cannot be understood merely as a voluntary association of people who agree about Jesus.
We are members of His body.
Colossians 2:19 describes the body receiving supply through its connection to the Head and growing with the increase of God. Ephesians 4:15–16 likewise places the body’s growth in Christ and in the supply received through its members.
The growth is inwardly supplied.
The supply is Zoe.
We may serve that growth, but we cannot replace its source. Our service becomes genuine as Christ operates through us. When we act independently of Him, the Christian character of the undertaking cannot make our independence fruitful.
Psalm 127:1 allows for the sobering possibility that builders may labor in vain.
The structure may stand. The organization may continue. People may admire what has been accomplished.
Yet the Lord may not be the source of what they are praising.
We should allow that possibility to examine our work before another generation inherits its demands.
I am especially concerned about our assumption that an agenda of outreach establishes God’s approval in advance.
If the intention is to gain converts, we think the undertaking must be His will. The urgency of human need seems to authorize the method. Anyone who questions the activity risks appearing indifferent to those who do not know Christ.
But people need the Son, in whom the life is.
That is precisely why religious recruitment is insufficient.
We can persuade someone to accept our teaching, attend our meetings, adopt our vocabulary, and participate in our work. None of these responses, by itself, establishes that the person has received Zoe or is learning to live by Christ.
We should care too much about people to be satisfied with their incorporation into our arrangements.
What are we bringing them into?
A schedule? A set of obligations? A system that will soon train them to recruit others? An environment where their acceptance depends upon learning how everyone else speaks and behaves?
Or are we helping them come to Christ, receive His life, and discover their union with Him?
The distinction cannot be treated as a small concern within the larger work of evangelism. It concerns the very purpose of our witness.
The Lord’s warning about proselytizing in Matthew 23:15 shows that religious zeal can reproduce something He condemns. His words there address particular religious leaders; they do not condemn all witness. But they expose the assumption that gaining adherents is necessarily evidence of faithfulness.
We must ask what our efforts reproduce.
Are people becoming dependent upon Christ, or dependent upon us?
Are they learning to turn to the Lord in their spirit, or learning to seek permission from the organization?
Is Zoe becoming the source of their living, or are they being absorbed into the same religious busyness that has kept us from abiding?
Jesus commanded His disciples to make disciples. We cannot dismiss Matthew 28:18–20. Nor can we ignore the apostles’ preaching, journeys, teaching, and labor.
But the commission never made them independent of the life and direction of the Lord.
The risen Christ told His disciples to wait for the Spirit’s empowering before their public witness (Acts 1:4–8). Their knowledge of the commission did not make waiting unnecessary.
At Antioch, Barnabas and Saul were sent while believers were ministering to the Lord and fasting. The initiative belonged to the Holy Spirit (Acts 13:1–4).
Later, that same Spirit restrained Paul and his companions from preaching in certain places (Acts 16:6–7).
The general goodness of preaching did not settle every particular decision.
The living Lord still governed.
Does He govern our work in that way?
Can He tell us to wait when we see an opportunity? Can He stop a campaign after money has been raised? Can He bring a ministry to an end without our interpreting the ending as defeat?
If the organization cannot tolerate His interruption, we should ask whether it has taken His place.
A work can begin in dependence and gradually acquire demands of its own. Staff must be paid. Buildings must be maintained. Attendance must be sustained. Supporters must receive encouraging reports.
Eventually, people become responsible for keeping the machinery alive.
Their weariness is answered with another appeal for sacrifice. Their hesitation becomes a problem of commitment. Their longing for a simpler life before Christ is interpreted as withdrawal from responsibility.
But the Lord’s people do not belong to our projects.
They belong to Him.
We have no right to consume their lives maintaining something He is not supplying.
This is why we need a radical willingness to relinquish what we have built.
We must stop assuming that every Christian activity deserves to continue.
We must stop treating the survival of our institutions as though it were identical with the faithfulness of God.
His life is not dependent upon our machinery.
That includes the machinery through which we attempt to secure the future of our children.
Children need responsible care, education, affection, protection, and truthful instruction. Parents must not use spiritual language to evade these obligations. Ephesians 6:4 places their upbringing under the Lord’s nurture and instruction.
But no educational structure can produce Zoe.
A child can learn every expected answer and still need to be born of God. A young person can become proficient in Christian behavior while inwardly hiding confusion, unbelief, or resentment.
We should not mistake successful religious conditioning for spiritual life.
Our children need to encounter adults who actually live by Christ.
What do they see when we are contradicted? What happens when we discover that we have wronged them? Can we ask forgiveness without protecting our authority? Can they tell us the truth without losing our affection?
Zoe must reach these places.
A parent’s repentance may reveal more of Christ than years of instruction about humility. A home where questions can be spoken honestly may give a child room to seek the Lord that no tightly managed religious program can provide.
We should teach the Scriptures. But we should never place upon teaching the expectation that it can accomplish the new birth.
Only God gives His life.
The same distinction applies to our own Bible study.
In John 5:39–40, Jesus confronts people who search the Scriptures yet refuse to come to Him for life.
We need to let that passage reach us.
Scriptural knowledge can coexist with resistance to Christ. A person can understand what the Bible says about the divine life while continuing to live from himself.
We can explain the vine and the branches without abiding.
We can defend the indwelling Christ while withholding the actual government of our lives from Him.
Therefore, we must ask whether our reading brings us to the Lord.
Are we opening to Him? Are we allowing His word to expose our self-reliance? Are we receiving Him in the particular matter He touches?
Or are we gathering material through which to strengthen our religious identity and correct other people?
Zoe must be the reality of our study.
The words serve their purpose as they bring us into living contact with the One who is our life. We must not accumulate the testimony while neglecting Him.
Trainings face the same judgment.
They can teach information, clarify responsibilities, and develop practical skills. But they cannot manufacture divine life or produce spiritual maturity through repeated performance.
We can train someone to sound mature.
We can teach the right expressions, the accepted tone, and the expected responses. We can reward confidence until people learn to conceal their uncertainty.
Yet Christ may still be waiting for access to the person beneath that performance.
I am troubled by any environment in which the appearance of supply is more welcome than an honest confession of thirst.
The church should be a place where we can admit our need.
We should be able to say that our prayers have become words, that our service has become resentment, and that our knowledge has become pride.
We should be able to turn to the Lord together without pretending that our experience matches our teaching.
That turning is precious.
Zoe is already within the regenerated believer. We are not waiting for an institution to provide what God has withheld. We need to turn to the One He has given us and yield to His operation.
This is why prayer belongs at the center of our living.
“Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) opens the entire day to dependence upon Christ.
We turn to Him as we work. We turn when anxiety rises, when we are hurt, when we want to defend ourselves, and when we are tempted to control someone else.
We turn in gratitude and pleasure. We turn in confusion and fatigue.
Sometimes there are words. Sometimes there is a quiet acknowledgment of our need.
Lord, You are my life. Have access here.
This is no formula. The matter is our actual opening to Him in our spirit.
Prayer becomes a living relationship throughout the day. We cease treating communion as a brief preparation for the supposedly more important work of accomplishing things.
Our work itself becomes a place of dependence.
A difficult conversation becomes an opportunity to live by Zoe. So does an interruption, an unnoticed act of care, or an ordinary hour in which nothing appears spiritually significant.
The divine life belongs in our actual living.
We must also learn that a strong inward feeling is not automatically the Lord’s direction. Our impressions need to remain open to Scripture, to the discernment of other believers, and to the fruit they produce. Having divine life does not make our judgment infallible.
Dependence includes the humility to be corrected.
Corporately, we need to gather as people who live by this same life.
We need room for Christ to supply His body through its members.
First Corinthians 14:26 describes varied contributions directed toward the building up of the gathering. The purpose is the strengthening of the body, rather than the display of individual ability.
Can we receive that supply without forcing everyone into the same form?
Can the hesitant person belong fully? Can the person with little vocabulary be heard? Can someone arrive exhausted and receive care without being required to produce a spiritual contribution?
Zoe makes room for people.
The life of Christ will challenge our preference for the impressive. It will expose our impatience with weakness and our tendency to organize the gathering around those who are easiest to recognize as useful.
We need one another because Christ’s life finds expression through members we cannot replace with a program.
There may be speaking, singing, teaching, prayer, confession, or silence.
None of these forms guarantees reality.
We can be silent from self as easily as we can speak from self. The question is whether we are open to Christ and willing to receive His supply.
We should stop assuming that every silence must be filled and every meeting must produce an expected quantity of words.
The Lord does not need us to prove that something happened.
He desires access to His people.
That access will bring practical consequences.
If our pursuit of Zoe makes us indifferent to another person’s hunger, loneliness, grief, or material need, we have made Zoe into an idea.
First John 3:17–18 places the love of God in direct relation to a brother’s need. Divine life finds expression in concrete care.
We can bring a meal. We can share our money. We can listen without rushing to explain. We can remain with someone whose grief cannot be resolved by a lesson.
We do not need to turn every act of love into a ministry before it has value.
Christ can live through an ordinary act that no one records.
This brings us to our hunger for visible results.
Numbers are easy to report. Inward transformation is harder to summarize.
We can announce attendance. We cannot so easily describe the slow surrender of resentment, the healing of a relationship, or the freeing of someone from the need to dominate others.
Yet these may reveal the operation of Zoe far more clearly than the expansion we celebrate.
Galatians 5:22–23 describes the fruit of the Spirit in love, joy, peace, patience, and other qualities of a life transformed.
We must not replace this fruit with a score.
People are people to love. They are not evidence of our usefulness.
When we begin to regard them primarily as the results of our labor, we have already diminished the relationship. We may speak affectionately while inwardly needing them to validate our ministry.
Paul’s travail in Galatians 4:19 was that Christ would be formed in the believers.
That burden reaches deeper than attendance, agreement, or loyalty.
It concerns the inward formation of Christ in actual human beings.
Is that what we desire?
Are we content if people remain committed to our work while scarcely learning to live by the Lord? Or would we rejoice if Christ gained ground in them through circumstances that gave our ministry no recognition?
Our answer may reveal our source.
The cross must reach our religious ambition.
There is a self that can sacrifice enormously while remaining determined to be significant. It will endure discomfort, work long hours, and speak humbly, provided it retains a necessary place.
Zoe exposes that self.
The Lord may permit us to become less visible. He may use someone else in ways we had hoped to be used. He may ask us to release a work through which we had come to understand our own importance.
Then the question becomes personal.
Do I want Christ, or do I want the place I have gained through serving Him?
Paul’s desire in Philippians 3 was to gain Christ.
After his journeys, sufferings, teaching, and labor, Christ remained the treasure.
I believe we must return there.
We need to desire Him more than the preservation of our influence. We need to want His life to gain ground in us more than we want our projects to gain ground in the world.
This does not lead to passivity.
Paul labored, and he attributed that labor to the grace of God with him (1 Corinthians 15:10). Colossians 1:29 describes his effort according to God’s working within him.
Zoe can produce strenuous labor.
The difference is that the labor proceeds from His operation and remains subject to Him. We do not decide in advance that faithfulness must look like constant expansion or uninterrupted activity.
He may send us across an ocean. He may lead us to care quietly for a spouse. He may ask us to teach, and later ask us to listen.
The scale of the assignment cannot establish its spiritual worth.
Our privilege is to live by Him within it.
We must also surrender our pride in understanding this.
The word Zoe cannot become another badge of superiority. If we use it to establish ourselves above other believers, we contradict the life we proclaim.
We have received everything.
We need tenderness toward those who have poured themselves into Christian work, often at great personal cost. Many have loved the Lord sincerely within arrangements we now question.
But tenderness toward people does not require allegiance to the structures that exhaust them.
We can love the workers and question the work.
We can honor their sacrifice while asking whether the burden belongs to Christ.
We can acknowledge what the Lord has done while refusing to assume that every existing arrangement must continue forever.
Something once useful may need to end.
Gratitude for yesterday does not require bondage tomorrow.
For much of these two thousand years, Christians have repeatedly assumed the initiative, direction, and control that belong to the Lord.
This has never been the whole story. His life has continued to find expression through His people, sometimes in circumstances we would never have chosen. He has remained faithful.
But our recurring presumption must still be named.
We establish the machinery, define the expected results, assign the responsibilities, and ask Him to bless what we have already determined to do.
Then we call its continued operation faithfulness.
I believe we must repent of this.
We need to abandon our claim to build the church from our own resources.
We need to abandon the right we have assumed to make His people the workforce for our visions.
We need to abandon our belief that the future of His testimony depends upon our ability to preserve our institutions.
The divine life is already present. The Builder dwells within His people.
We do not need to manufacture what God has already given. We need to allow His life to govern what we do.
Every plan must be surrendered. Every ministry must be surrendered. Every ambition, method, reputation, and cherished arrangement must be surrendered.
Nothing may be protected from His judgment simply because we have called it Christian.
Let the program end if it has become a substitute for living by Christ.
Let the training fall silent if it teaches people to reproduce an appearance of life.
Let the building go if preserving it consumes the people it was meant to serve.
Let our reputations diminish. Let our influence contract. Let our plans be interrupted.
Whatever He truly gives can be received from Him. Whatever He does not give need not be maintained by our fear.
By abandoning everything, I mean placing everything without reservation into His hands.
We remain responsible to love our families, care for our neighbors, and fulfill the ordinary duties entrusted to us. But we relinquish our independent ownership of the work. We release our insistence that God’s purpose must pass through our arrangements.
We give up our demand that He preserve what we have made.
We have been afraid that if we stop, nothing will happen.
Perhaps that fear reveals how little we have trusted Zoe.
We proclaim the life that raised Jesus from the dead, yet behave as though the church will perish unless we direct every movement.
Brothers and sisters, He is alive.
His life is within us. His promise has not expired. His headship has not become ceremonial.
We cannot take away His sovereignty. But in our practical life together, we can occupy the place of initiative and direction that belongs to Him. We can fill our days with our intentions and leave scarcely any willingness to receive His.
That must end.
After two thousand years, we do not need a more efficient way of managing the church for Christ.
We need to give up the management we have claimed as our own.
We need to turn to Him in our spirit, individually and together, and live by the divine life we have received.
We are born of God. We possess Zoe. We partake of His nature. We are God in life and nature, though never in the Godhead.
Let that reality become our actual living.
Let His life reach our thinking, our desires, our decisions, and our relationships. Let it govern our gatherings and determine our service. Let the church emerge in its living expression through Christ operating in His members.
I do not want to spend my remaining years preserving a Christian enterprise while scarcely living by the Christ within me.
I want Him.
I want His life to touch every place in me that still insists upon acting independently. I want to be among people who desire that together, without pretense and without the need to prove our importance.
So let us open our hands.
Lord, we abandon our claim to build what belongs to You.
We surrender the initiative we have taken. We surrender the control we have defended. We surrender our insistence that Your purpose must depend upon our plans.
You have given us Your own life in our spirit. You have made us partakers of Your nature.
Have unrestricted access to us.
Bring our individual living under the government of Zoe. Bring our life together under the government of Zoe. Make us willing to obey when You move and willing to remain when You ask us to wait.
We have explained Your headship for generations. Now let us yield to it.
We have organized Your people for generations. Now let us receive Your operation in them.
We have tried to secure Your future for generations. Now let us trust Your life.
The church is Yours. The life is Yours. The building is Yours.
We surrender what we have taken into our own hands. Build Your church through Your own divine life in Your own people.
And now I must ask you personally, as I must ask myself:
Are you pursuing God Himself—or are you pursuing knowledge about God and doing for Him what He desires to do through His own life within you?
These can occupy the same hours and use the same words. Yet you can spend your life studying, teaching, serving, and building while withholding yourself from the One you claim to serve.
You can explain Zoe without living by Zoe.
You can defend His headship while continuing to make the decisions.
You can devote yourself to His work while refusing to surrender your work to Him.
When you turn to the Lord, do you come to receive Him as your life, or chiefly to obtain His help with what you have already decided to do?
If He asked you to lay down the work that makes you feel useful, needed, or spiritually significant, would you release it?
Would He Himself be enough?
Let that question remain before you. Let it reach beneath your explanations to whatever you are afraid to surrender.
He has given you His own divine life in your spirit. Will you live by that life? Will you give Him access to your ambitions, your plans, your knowledge, and your need to accomplish something in His name?
Will you surrender even your work for God so that God Himself can work in you and through you?
The church belongs to Him.
So do you.
Will you let Him have what is His?
