The New Testament Church understood what it was here for…to make visible and known the life and power of the Lord Jesus Christ as His Incarnate body here on earth. In other words, Jesus lives among or abides within His Church. He promised to do this when He said, “where two or three are gathered in my Name, I am in the middle of them.” This seems to be a different presence than the individual presence of Jesus that each of us experiences on our own, the Christ in us.
It struck me that if Jesus doesn’t abide in a church, then what good is it? If the church only does what other groups of human beings can do, then it really isn’t the church…but if the church lives and moves in the abiding presence of Christ, then Jesus becomes the source of power, life, and mission and Jesus directs the steps of that church.
Francis Schaeffer said it this way, when talking about the New Testament Church, “This abiding presence of Christ gave them a sense of power, of adequacy, of readiness to cope with any situation that arose. These men were never at a loss to know the thing to do. Infinite resources of grace and wisdom and strength were available fo them to draw upon…a reservoir in the unseen realms that could never be exhausted. Men who felt that all the resources possessed and excercised by Jesus in the days of His flesh were still waiting to be appropriated and used would not shrink from any task that challenged them. Neither should we, if we had a like simple faith and confident trust and an experience with a living, reigning, indwelling Lord!
The church we plant WILL be a place where the Lord abides in visible presence and power. When people are with us, our prayer is that they leave knowing they have been in the presence of the supernatural.
