" As the Father has sent Me, I am sending you." Then at the day of Pentecost the Spirit of God took up residence in mankind. Now, the people of the earth are identified as "in Christ." The "church" is born. The "church," a section of humanity in which Christ has taken form. Simply identified by Paul as "the body of Christ."
So you ask, what is God like? Look at the people in any church. "SURELY YOU JEST! I don't mean to be cynical but really. Is that what God had in mind?
Delegation comes with risk. When you turn over a job to someone, and you let go, you assume a certain amount of risk. So when God decides to make His appeal through us, He takes a risk. A risk that we will misrepresent Him. A risk that looks like, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, wars, hate, and all the other things humanity can execute on one another. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the doctrine of "the church"; God living in us. Paul says that the plan is the foolishness of God and I couldn't agree more. BUT... Paul continues to say, "the foolishness of God is wiser than men." While I try to embrace Paul's words and mind set, there are times when I wonder.
We the flawed, ordinary people, the church are the representatives of God's holiness on earth. The perfect God now lives inside imperfect human beings. And because He respects our freedom, the Spirit in effect "subjects Himself" to our behavior. We can lie to, or grieve, or quench the Spirit. When we choose wrongly, we literally subject God to the wrong choice that we made. Look at I Corinthians 6 to read a Biblical account of such actions. In this age of the Spirit, God delegates His reputation, His essence, to us, His people, His church.
We the flawed, ordinary people, the church are to do the work of God on earth. God provided manna in the wilderness for the Israelite and even made sure their shoes did not wear out. Jesus fed hungry people and ministered directly to people and their needs. So why not today you ask? In the new testament things seemed to change. Locked in a cold dungeon, Paul looks to his long-time friend Timothy to meet his physical needs. "Bring my cloak and my scrolls," he wrote, "and also Mark, who has always been so helpful." Then when famine broke out in Jerusalem, Paul led a fund-raising effort among the churches he had founded. God is still meeting needs but now doing it indirectly through the young church, through members of the body of Christ.
Paul drove this concept home with the people of his day and through his written words today. On the road to Damascus Paul, then Saul ,saw a light bright enough to blind him for three days and he heard a voice from heaven: "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" Persecute you? Persecute who? I am only after those heretics the Christians. "Who are you, Lord?" asked Saul at last, knocked flat on the ground. "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," came the reply. What hurt the body of Christ in fact hurt Jesus. What hurt the body of Christ hurt God. Paul learned this lesson well and never stopped sharing it.
Remember Richard who asked, "where is God?" Show me. I want to see him? Based on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, we must say that some portion of the answer to his question is this: If you want to see God, then look at the people who belong to Him - they are His bodies." They are the body of Christ. The word is full of passages that direct us to live lives in contrast to the world but I wonder how many of us understand the real importance of those words. I know that I don't. I am left asking myself this question. When they look at me, a part of the body of Christ, what will they see? What will their perception of God be?
Ephesians 1:20 All this energy issues from Christ: God raised him from death and set him on a throne in deep heaven, in charge of running the universe, everything from galaxies to governments, no name and no power exempt from his rule. And not just for the time being, but forever. He is in charge of it all, has the final word on everything. At the center of all this, Christ rules the church. The church, you see, is not peripheral to the world; the world is peripheral to the church. The church is Christ's body, in which he speaks and acts, by which he fills everything with his presence.
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