WE, the body, are His fulness to fill

The church which is His body is an exclusive term to describe the church used only by the Apostle Paul. It’s also Paul’s favorite term to describe the church.

What is that “body” terminology trying to say to you? You have many members in one body, says an illustration in Romans 12. He’s the head; we’re the body. We are organically united. If something’s organic, it means it’s living. When you’re in organic union with something, you’re in living union with it, explains Richard Jordan.

Your hand is organically, livingly, connected to your arm. Your arm is livingly connected to your body and your body is livingly connected with your head. The same life goes through all of your body and that’s why when Paul uses that term “the body of Christ,” he’s describing the living oneness we have with Christ.

But what’s the body really for? Your body is the vehicle that carries around your inner man. Ephesians 3:16: [16] That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man

I heard a guy say one time, “You know, I just don’t think it’s spiritual when people shout in church.” The guy he was talking to responded, “Well, have you ever heard of a spirit shout?” To say “Amen” you have to have a body. Your body is the vehicle that carries your inner man around on Planet Earth and expresses the life that’s inside of it.

You body is the vehicle to make visible the life that dwells within it, so the “body of Christ” has a purpose. It’s the vehicle through whom the actions, the attitudes, the life of Christ is to be made visible. It’s to bring visibility to who He is and what He’ s doing in us and through us.

II Corinthians 4: [7] But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.
[8] We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair;
[9] Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed;
[10] Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.
[11] For we which live are alway delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh.

Notice, you can be troubled, persecuted, cast down, but then there’s an inner man reaction. You’re not distressed, you’re not in despair—that’s something inside. You’re not forsaken is an understanding inside.

Verse 16: [16] For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.

The difficult circumstances become a context in which you renew your mind and that renews your spirit in your inner man and all of a sudden these things that were meant for evil turn out to be context in which growth occurs. Where? In your inner man.

II Corinthians 4:10 is another way of saying, “It’s not I . . . I died; I’m not the issue, but Christ.”

And when your faith rests and stands in the identity God gives you in His Son, and the power that He’s put in you in His Son . . . when your faith rests in the reality of that . . . Not just in a big concept of it, but in saying, “In this circumstance here’s how God would think and I. by faith, will think the way He thinks.”

Woah, now I’m not just living a desire-oriented life. I’m living godly, soberly, righteously. I’m thinking the way I ought to think; I’m thinking in the identity God gives me in His Son. Now there’s a god-likeness that’s produced. That’s what the body is about. That’s why he calls us a body.

Ephesians 1:23: [23] Which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.

For some reason when you listen to preachers talk about that verse, and you read the commentaries, they just go into a dither.  I have two commentaries on the Book of Ephesians written by seminary professors and they have two pages each on that one part of that verse, arguing about what it is, and neither one of them have any idea about what it ought to be.

That verse isn’t hard. His body . . . what are we? We’re the fullness of Him. There’s the Him. Listen, in Christ all the fulness of the godhead dwells bodily. The Father’s put all fulness in His Son. He doesn’t need you and me to complete Him. There’s nothing incomplete about Him.

The fulness there is not Him. The fullness is the body the church. What is He going to fill up? All those positions in the heavenly places, and you’re His fulness. You’re the fulness that He’s going to fill those places with! How hard is that?

His goal is to fill the universe with the glory of His Son. That’s the reason for the head-and-body analogy. Because we’re in living union with the head; we share His life and we’re the vehicle that demonstrates forth who He is. That’s His goal for us for eternity. Paul wants you to understand that’s the reality now, too.