O’Hair’s
long-time associate, nationally renowned Bible scholar C.R. Stam, once wrote,
“What then, is our greatest drawback in Christian service? Obviously it is
our lack of appreciation of the infinite love of Christ. Why
do we not serve our blessed Lord as Paul did? Because we do not share his sense
of being loved by Christ. Mark well, we are not referring to our love for
Christ, but to His love for us.
“Have
you ever noticed that Paul says little or nothing about his love for Christ,
while he is constantly talking about Christ's love for him?. . .
“How
can we overcome our natural indifference to His love? How can we cast off this
evil drag on our Christian experience?
“Ah,
the apostle explains this at length in Ephesians 3:14-21. . . First, he says,
Christ must dwell in our hearts by faith that we might
be ‘rooted and grounded in love.’ We must draw our
strength from His love as a tree, through its roots, draws its strength from
the ground. All we do must be founded on His love to us, not a
desire to gain His favor, or fear that we might displease Him.
“Thus
alone will we be able to ‘comprehend,’ or appreciate, the breadth, length,
depth, and height of God's great message of grace.
“And
as we measure the dimensions of this glorious plan we find ourselves launching
out into the depths of the love of Christ.”
*****
In an introductory session of Grace School of the Bible, Preacher
Richard Jordan stresses, “The issue in the ministry is to present every person you
minister to as perfect. It’s to bring them to the place of being thoroughly and
completely equipped to function as a member of the Body of Christ.
“The Bible’s got a lot to say
about growing and becoming established in the faith. Ephesians 4:11 says, ‘And he
gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some,
pastors and teachers.’
“How else is the Body of Christ
going to be built up and edified? It’s through the work of the ministry. How’s
it going to be carried on? By perfected saints. It’s the only way.
“The Word saturates you. It
produces growth. Ministry comes as the result of spiritual growth. You know
what happens when you grow? You begin to move.
“I remember down in Alabama
we’d sit out on a hot August evening on an 80-acre field, out front of the farm
house we lived in, and my wife and I would just relax out there. It’d be hot
and we’d be fanning and trying to get cool in the evening.
“About every third year, Mr.
Adams on that farm, he planted corn and I always hated it when he did. You ever
heard corn grow? You’d sit out there in the August night heat and hear it pop.
It sounded like popcorn going off. It was those stalks expanding. You were
literally hearing it grow as it stretched.
“When you grow there’s
movement. As you grow spiritually, momentum and movement follows and it
increases. The way to get people to go do the work of the ministry is to get
them to grow up because that movement and activity and work will be a natural
byproduct.
“Romans 15: 14 is my heart’s
desire, to be able to say this about myself and about those people to whom and
with whom I minister, and if I had a verse I wanted to say about you coming out
of the School it would be Romans 15:14.
“We’ve made a commitment to
follow Paul. If I want the work of the ministry to be done, I’ve got to produce
some perfected saints who the doctrine then goes and motivates to do the work
of the ministry.
*****
“Back in the early ’70s I sat
down in a little farmhouse out in the Autauga County, Ala. (it wasn’t even a
city) out in the middle of nowhere, 17 miles from the nearest town. I’d been
through high school and college and been through Bible school, and then I went
up in those woods in that territory and started a church and got involved with
a local ministry.
“I lived in a house trailer on
the farm with my wife. All three of my kids were born there. We had enough
money to go to town three times a week. Two of them were on Sunday. One of them
was on Monday to buy $10 worth of groceries for the week and any of the rest of
the time I wanted to go in I had to hitchhike. I went back and forth many times
just that way.
“But I had a lot of time to
study. And after about six months of that out there in those woods I realized I
didn’t know what in the world I was doing! I said, ‘Lord, I’ve been to school,
I’ve learned everything they taught me in school. I read all the time. I’m just
taking stuff in and I don’t have any idea what I’m doing! I can tell you what
every theologian said that’s been published, and I know what all the
Neo-orthodox’s say and Neo-evangelicals; I know what they all say, but I don’t
know what to do!’
“And I said, ‘Paul said
perfected saints do the work of the ministry. I desperately want to know how to
be a perfected saint.’
“That’s when I began to find
the design in Paul’s epistles for it. I spent seven years of my life working
this stuff through.”
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