It would not be unfair to say that the Church of today is essentially an aggregate of individualities; we sit alongside each other, but we are not yet "together" in the biblical sense of that word. We do not yet constitute that wholeness or completeness. We do not yet reflect the genius that is in the Godhead itself, where the Son does everything for the Father, likewise the Spirit for the Son, and the three are One. When we come to that kind of corporateness, the principalities and powers of the air will know it; but God first needs to reveal to us how deep-seated our individualism, self-will and rebellion are.
The powers of the world are increasing, captivating the souls of men, rooting them in time, and blocking from their consideration the things that are eternal. We cannot come to freedom from this evil influence by ourselves alone. Separation from the world is so painful, and those evil powers are so pervasive and strong. And it is only through the support, the encouragement, the prayer, the wisdom, the counsel of others and the atmosphere that we generate together as the community of God's people that we can live and maintain that freedom without again being sucked back into the power of the world.
Community or life together is one of God's main provisions to resist and to overcome those powers. The sons and daughters of God are those who overcome the world, the flesh and the devil, and there is no place more conducive for being or becoming this kind of people except in such an intensive community setting.
There is not a living soul whose life is, or will be, totally free from deception. Our lives need to be submitted to the examination of God through the brethren in Christ. It is a painful revelation, but rather that pain now than the unspeakable pain of learning at the Judgment Seat of Christ that we were living a delusion. We may have thought ourselves to be spiritual, while all along we were far removed from authenticity and reality. The Lord is not going to indulge our romantic or wistful view of what we think true spirituality is. His gracious provision, therefore, is community life in which the true condition of our heart, and the things that would not otherwise have been understood, have the greatest possibility of being revealed to us!
The quality of our fellowship with the Lord vertically cannot be any better or more authentic than our fellowship with the saints horizontally. We cannot have the one independent of the other, and we cannot have the one out of proportion to the other. How many of us think that we can, and love to be solitary and isolated saints, having some kind of imagined and euphoric relationship with God privately, but hardly having any patience at all for the saints who are His Body? How can we cherish the Head more than the Body, and how can we honor the Head outside of the Body? The Lord has fixed it like that-the vertical and the horizontal beams of the Cross-and the one is in exact proportion to the other. It saves us from exactly that soulish thing we would love to indulge, namely, isolation, separateness and privatistic living.
God has called us to fellowship, and we are not going to see resurrection power and authority if we are not related in the Body authentically. God will not let us 'get by' with a supposed and imaginary vertical relationship with the Resurrected and Ascended One independent of an actual and existential one horizontally in His Body.
This requires something more than Sunday services. The Church needs to consider becoming a community in the sense of a closely-knit integration of life together in an intensive way. If it exceeds the numbers by which true relationship is feasible, then it cannot, in my opinion, attain to this reality. A generalized congregation of three hundred, five hundred or a thousand cannot effect what I am suggesting. Sadly, large church numbers are the great emphasis today, and constitute, therefore, a moving away from God's very provision for our sanity as well as the greater glory, namely, of being "witnesses unto Him."
As the conditions of the world become more extreme, people are going to be forced to choose more radically for or against God. We are in that painful interim between a conventional Christendom and the apostolic entity that God is wanting established again. And as we shall see, it is only the Church as an authentic, apostolic presence in the earth that can possibly fulfill its eternal purpose of making known the manifold wisdom of God to the principalities and powers of the air (Ephesians 3:9-11).
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