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Now that raises a question with each of us Are we joints and
bands? There are two thoughts here—“ministered to” is one,
and “united together” the other. What is the effect of your, or
my, being amongst the saints? Is it divisive? Is it to bring in
discord or disunity, or are we among the joints and bands
which enable this precious process of ministering and
unification to proceed? I think the Lord would lay this upon us
so that we may have the immense privilege, as in relation to
Christ, to minister what is positive and to unite the saints
together, so that the increase of God may be experienced.
Where we read in Ephesians 4 Paul warns the brethren about
being “tossed and carried about by every wind of that teaching
which is in the sleight of men”. Many of us have humbly to look
back to the time when that was so, when we were unstable,
wrongly influenced. What is our protection against it? Paul
says, “Holding the truth in love, we may grow up to him in all
things, who is the head, the Christ”. There is no other man
between us and Him. These glories belong to Him alone. He is
the Head and the Christ—God’s Anointed—“from whom the
whole body, fitted together, and connected by every joint of
supply, according to the working in its measure of each one
part, works for itself the increase of the body to its self-building
up in love”. So we have another thought here, not only what
comes from Christ, “from whom the whole body fitted
together”, and so on, but we have the working of the body
itself—a remarkable thought, that the body works for itself.
And how does it work? Because the whole body is fitted
together and connected by every joint of supply, according to
the working in its measure of each one part. How practical!
There is what is objective—Christ the Head; but then there is
what is most practical and experimental, which raises the
question again—Are you and I joints of supply? There is a
helpful footnote showing that it is the known supply which
comes from Christ. But it comes through these joints of supply.