Section 02 - Levels of Ministry

We considered some of the differences between ministry and calling. I want to expand this subject now and discuss the ministry in more detail. You will see that there are different levels of ministry.

The most important thing you need to realize about ministry, is that ministry is man working with God to make things happen in the earth. Ministry involves us as believers making ourselves available to the Lord and letting Him work through us in this world.

If you want to find out where to start in your ministry, where you are going and what you should be doing, you cannot do it without the Lord. God is an integral part of what we do in ministry.

How God is Manifested

In my book on Bible Doctrine Made Easy we saw that God is manifested in three different ways. He is a Father, a Son and a Holy Spirit, and when we become Christians we begin to relate to God in all of these aspects of His being.

Each of these manifestations of God leads to a different kind of ministry. So when you look at the three members of the Godhead, you see firstly that we have the Lord Jesus, and under Him there is a certain level of ministry.

Then we have the Holy Spirit, and He is involved in a different aspect of ministry. And finally we have God the Father, the director and originator of all things. He is also involved with us and takes us to a different level of ministry.

I will show you as we go through this subject that it starts with Jesus. Then we add the Holy Spirit, and finally we move up to the Father.

As a believer this is exactly your experience. When you were first saved, the first one you came to know was the Lord Jesus.

Does this mean that you never experienced the Holy Spirit? No, it was actually the Holy Spirit that caused the New Birth to take place in you.

Did you experience the Father? Yes the Father was there, because He is the one who manifested Himself in and through Jesus.

You always have all three together. You don't have one without the other, but usually you deal with only one at a time.

So when it comes to ministry, you will find that your early ministry experiences are directed more under the influence of the Lord Jesus, because He is the one you got to know when you were born again.

Later on you find out that there is a little more involved in getting to know the Lord. There is the power of the Holy Spirit that is available to you.

Then you slowly move beyond just knowing Jesus as your Lord and Savior. You realize that there is a Holy Spirit who wants to work with you and give you power and strength to do awesome things.

Once you get to know Jesus really well, and you get to know the Holy Spirit really well, you are finally ready to come to the place where you are prepared to face the Holy Father Himself. Now you can communicate with Him.

Many Christians never go much further than Jesus in their spiritual lives, and they do not get to know the Holy Spirit.

There are others who get to know the Holy Spirit really well, but they never come into that real place of intimacy in the Throne Room with Father God Himself.

When you first start out in ministry, your relationship with God and each member of the Godhead will decide what kind of ministry you become involved in.

From the moment you are born again and you get to know the Lord Jesus as Savior, you start getting involved in a certain level of ministry. This ministry is available to every person who is born again, but at this stage you do not know much about the supernatural.

You have been born again and something magnificent has taken place inside your spirit; something miraculous and not natural at all.

It is spiritual and supernatural. But as you now come to doing something as a Christian, you do not know much about the supernatural at all. You only know that Jesus is your Savior.

You have a peace within and you begin to experience His love. Your whole life changes, you find joy and happiness, and many good things come into your life.

But you have not touched much on the supernatural. So your first ministry involvements in doing things for the Lord are not that supernatural. They tend to be almost natural and normal; the kind of thing that anyone can do.

Body Ministries

Paul gives us a list of the kind of ministry involvements you can have. You can read about them in Romans Chapter 12, verses 5 to 8.

I will not be including big passages of Scripture in these teachings, but you should go and look them up.

We have an online Bible program called the GBM Online Bible which you can use for this purpose. There you can look up all Scriptures on the subjects taught in these lectures.

Let's look first then at Jesus and what I like to call the Body Ministries.

When you think of ministry, most people have the picture of someone who goes into a job as a career. He or she goes to Bible School and then into 'full time ministry'.

That is one of the higher levels of ministry and we will look at that later. But according to the Bible, every one of us, from the moment we are born again has become a member of the Body of Christ.

This is a picture of the Body, where just as the body consists of many members all joined together to make one person, so each of us also is like a different member of this invisible body, which is the Church of God all over the world.

Together with Jesus we make up the Body of Christ. Now that we have become a member of the Body, every one of us has something that we can do.

If you are a hand it does a certain kind of thing, while the foot does a different kind of thing. Nose, eyes and ears and each part of the body, all have different functions and they all work together.

Sadly though, the idea of ministry up until now has been that ministry is only for ministers. We think that these are people who have been trained and are specialists, and they are the only ones who can do the ministry.

For the rest of us ordinary believers, our ministry is to sit in church on Sunday and listen to the minister preach. Our ministry then becomes doing whatever the minister tells us to do.

Most of the time all you will be told to do are things that do not need the Lord's help much at all. In many churches the best you can hope to do is become an usher or deacon; the one who hands out song sheets or puts transparencies on the overhead.

As a believer God has a function for each of us to do. This is not only something we do on Sunday when we are at church. It is something we do all the time, wherever we are, every day of the week, throughout our lives.

We are available to the Lord to do something, and whatever we do will involve working with other people. Ministry is always working with other people. It is like being a waiter or server; serving other people.

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