Personally we must rigidly examine ourselves and test our right to be considered members of the Body of Christ.  There are some New Testament evidences of the Spirit that we must still demand of ourselves.  One is loyal obedience to Jesus:  “No man can say, Jesus is Lord, but in the Holy Spirit.”  A second is filial trust in God:  “Because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.”  A third is self-devoting love akin to that shown on Calvary:  “The fruit of the Spirit is love;” “By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.”  And if the Spirit is within us, He is eager to work through us.  We may be quenching Him by laziness, by timidity, by preoccupation.  We are of the Body of Christ only as we are “members each in his part.”

Above all we must constantly remind ourselves of the Church’s adequacy in God for its work.  When we speak of the Church we are apt to think first of its limitations; when Paul spoke of the Church its divine resources were uppermost in his mind—­“the Church which is His Body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.”  Perhaps the Church’s greatest weakness is unbelief in its own divine sufficiency.  We confront the indifference, the worldliness, the wickedness of men; we face an earth hideous with war and hateful with selfishness.  We think of the Church’s often absurdly needless divisions, the backwardness of its thought, the coldness of its devotion, the inefficiency of many of its methods, the want of consecration in a host of its members, the imperfections and limitations of the best and most earnest of them; and we do not really expect any marked advance; we hardly anticipate that the Church will hold its own.  Would not our Lord chide us, “O ye of little faith! all power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth, go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations”?  “There are diversities of workings, but the same God who worketh all in all.”

The Church exists to make the world the Kingdom of God.  In the holy city of John’s vision there is no temple, for its whole life is radiant with the presence of God and of the Lamb.  In the final order there will be no Church, for its task is finished when God is all in all.  Meanwhile the Church has no excuse for being except as it continually renders itself less and less necessary.  It has to lose itself in sacrificial service in order to save itself.  It must never ask itself, “Will the community support me?” but “Can I inspire the community?” As it seeks to do God’s will, it can count on Him for daily bread; a more luxurious diet would not be wholesome for its spiritual life.  It exists only to spend and be spent in bringing the children of God everywhere one by one under the sway of His love and presenting them perfect in Christ, and in putting His Spirit in control of homes, industry, amusements, education, government, and the whole life of human society, until we live in “realms where the air we breathe is love.”