You yourselves also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house into a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 1 Pet. 2:5
Dear saints, let us pray that those who receive the burden to serve the Lord full time would be brought into a heavenly vision of the Body and would be tempered together and built up as one Body in their service (Rom. 12:4-5; 1 Pet. 2:5; 1 Cor. 12:18, 20, 24-27; Hymns, #913, ss. 1-4, 8, and chorus).
Hymns, #913, stanza 1 and chorus:
Serve and work within the Body,
This the Lord doth signify;
For His purpose is the Body,
And with it we must comply.Serve and work within the Body,
Never independently;
As the members of the Body,
Functioning relatedly.Strictly speaking, in the New Testament the service is not touched clearly and definitely until Romans 12. In this chapter both the words service and serving are used. In Romans 12:1 Paul exhorts us to present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy, well pleasing to God, which is our reasonable service. In verse 7 he mentions the service, and in verse 11 he speaks of serving the Lord as a slave. It is not until Romans 12 that the matter of service is so definitely revealed to us. From this chapter we can realize that, as Christians, our service to the Lord must be in the Body. The Christian service is not something individual; it is something corporate. The Christian service is something of the Body, in the Body, with the Body, and for the Body.
If we are going to serve the Lord, our service must be in the Body. We are burdened that all of us may be brought into this heavenly vision, the vision that no one can serve the Lord without the Body. All of our service must be in the Body because, as Christians, we all have been regenerated to be members of the Body. Each one of us is one member of the Body. Not one of us is a complete unit, a complete person, a complete being—not one of us alone is the Body. All of us have been re-created, regenerated, to be members of the Body (Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1969, vol. 1, “To Serve in the Human Spirit,” ch. 1)
More details via Beseeching.org, day 426.
