It’s a Growing Body: it grows into the head by the ministry of the parts<\/a>‘. In this message, we went through Eph 4.11-16 talking about the process<\/i> of the church, looking at ‘the body’ not as a static body but as a living, growing organism, growing up into its head, which is Christ. The Lord gave gifts to the church (men in authority) to equip the saints to do the work of serving and building so the body can grow to the goal of Christlikeness, unswayed and undeceived. For this to succeed in the local church, the saints in the body need to see themselves as essential role players in Christ’s body – the effort needed to ‘grow the church’ must come from saints (who are equipped by the leadership). The growth process can break down at several points: the leaders may fail to equip, the saints may fail to serve, the ‘neophytes’ in the body may fail to grow to take their place as servants in the body and the whole body can collapse when one part of the body fails to fulfill God’s plan.<\/p>\n~~~<\/p>\n
In my last post I said I had planned three more posts right away… they didn’t happen, but there is still a plan. I don’t know when I will get a chance to update the site next, however. My wife’s mother is very ill and we are getting my wife down to the airport in Seattle for Tuesday to go be with her. We are a bit in busy mode over the next few days.<\/p>\n
Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, we began our series in Romans today. I managed the exposition of the first word: “Paul…” I was quite pleased with the result. Our title and subtitle for the message is this: “Paul: or, what would it be like if Osama got saved“ In a real way, the name Paul represents the whole theme […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-8c","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}