Body Ministry 1 - Serving

As you look at the Body Ministries that Paul listed for us, one of the first ones he mentions is 'serving'. This is something that we can all do, and it means that we are available to help other people.

Instead of having others running around to do things for us, we say,

"I want to do something for the Lord."

In fact we call this 'serving the Lord'. One of the best ways of serving the Lord is to serve one of His children.

The Lord Jesus is up in Heaven right now. When He was on this earth He walked in an earthly body and He could reach out and touch people to help them.

But now that He is gone, He wants us to take His place on this earth and to do the kind of things that He did. You can go around helping people and serving them.

You may be wondering,

"What is my ministry?"

Or, "What can I do for ministry?"

If this describes you, then the first thing you should do is look around you and see if there is someone that you can serve. Who is there that you can help and do something for?

The moment you do that with the love of the Lord in your heart, so that you can show people the love of the Lord, you are doing ministry. It may be a very low level ministry, but it is a ministry and it is a Body Ministry under the direction of the Lord Jesus.

Body Ministry 2 - Teaching

The next kind of ministry Paul mentions is teaching.

Now you might think that in order to be a teacher you will need to go to university and get a degree first.

We always tend to think 'professional' don't we? But really teaching simply means taking all the knowledge you have learned about the Lord and the Bible, and sharing it with other people.

What can you teach?

The first thing you can do is to teach those out there who do not know Jesus, how to get saved. That is a simple evangelistic thrust, and we will look more at that later.

Teaching is simply taking the Word and sharing it with other people. So after finding someone to serve, look for someone that you can help with your knowledge. Then make an effort to try and impart some of your knowledge to them.

That is a very simple ministry that you can do anywhere and anytime. It is not your 'function in the church meeting'. It is what you do every day as a Christian.

Body Ministry 3 - Encouragement

What about this one? How far do you need to look to find someone who needs encouragement?

You probably won't even need to leave your house. Get up in the morning and you will probably find at least one person in the family who is feeling down. How much more when you go to school, work or wherever your daily duties take you.

You bump into people all the time who are feeling down and discouraged. What is the best way to encourage somebody? Surely it is by sharing the Lord with them, flowing out with a heart of love and saying,

"Let me pray for you. I believe the Lord wants to help you in your situation and lift you up."

You just need to be there to give them a smile or a friendly word and say something positive. You do all of this as Jesus.

In all of these things, try to imagine that Jesus is walking with you and living inside of you, because He is. As you go, ask Him,

"Lord what do you want to do for this person?"

He will tell you something like,

"Serve them, teach them and encourage them."

These are all ministries under the direction of the Lord Jesus.

Body Ministry 4 - Giving

Unless you are a mean Scrooge, you might want to get involved in the ministry of giving. There are always people in need all around you.

You don't have to look far. What is your usual approach if you walk down the street and a beggar asks you for money? Do you tell him,

"Go away you lazy bum and get a job! You only want my money so you can go and get drunk."

That might be true, but it is a good place to start practicing ministry. You may have been complaining and saying,

"I don't know where I can get involved in ministry. I don't have an outlet for ministry."

Look around you. There are always people asking you for something. If you can just give out in the love of the Lord you have started a ministry.

You may complain that you don't want to spend your whole life doing that, but I did not suggest that this was your calling. It is a Body ministry and something that you can get involved in right away. I am sure you are able to do that.

Body Ministry 5 - Leading or Ruling

Some people are better at leading than others. That is why I said at the beginning that these are not necessarily supernatural, but they can be very natural.

If you have natural leadership capabilities then you can help other people by leading them in how they should serve the Lord. The very first leading you can do is to lead someone to the Lord.

Even if you think you cannot be a leader, you can at least lead someone to the Lord. How do you do that? You simply speak to them about the Lord and say to them,

"Let me take you and show you the Lord."

Then you can lead them to the Lord. It means that you are taking initiative. In a way you are motivating and influencing people in their spiritual lives. Hopefully in the future the Lord has a calling for you that will lift you up into higher leadership levels.

What is the best place to start? Start right where you are and see how you can influence people in a leadership role in ministry.

Body Ministry 6 - Showing Compassion

Showing compassion is very specific kind of activity that mixes some of the others together. It means that when you look at people who have problems in life - people who are suffering, sick or mentally retarded - your heart is stirred inside you.

You want to help people like that. There are a lot of people out there who do not know the Lord Jesus and who are doing work like this all the time.

Once again this is very naturalistic. But how much better it is when we are doing it to show people that Jesus loves them?

This is not only because your heart is stirred, or because you grew up in a home where you suffered lack; not because you had bad experiences and feel sorry for others who have had the same.

Anybody can do that. But it is when the heart of the Lord and His love burn strongly inside you, and you want to cry out for these people. You want to help them and minister to them.

These may all be very naturalistic things, but they are the start of a ministry. If you will only open your eyes and look around you, you will see that there are so many people all around you that you can minister to right away.

Body Ministry 7 - Prophecy

This is the first one that sounds like it is supernatural, and it is up to a point. I do not believe though that this speaks of the ministry of the prophet yet. It speaks about using your words to speak and tell other people what God thinks or says.

You will find that after you become a Christian you are so excited to share the Lord with people. I am sure you have found yourself in a situation where you meet unbelievers and you start to share the Lord with them.

As you do this, something comes up inside of you. You find yourself talking and sharing as Scriptures come back to your memory. There comes an explosion from inside of you and a flow takes place. Afterwards you think to yourself,

"Wow, where did all that come from? That was awesome; I felt a surge that was just pouring out of me."

What happened was all that you had inside of you poured out as you ministered and spoke God's words to that person.

You can do the same thing with encouragement or teaching using the words you speak. Prophecy can simply mean 'inspired preaching' or 'inspired speaking'.

We tend to think of prophecy as an utterance that we give spontaneously like,

"Thus saith the Lord, behold I am with you tonight my child!"

It sounds spiritual doesn't it? But why can you not simply say to the person,

"Do you know that Jesus really loves you, and He is with you right now? He is sitting right next to you and He wants to put His arms around you and show you that He loves you."

Is that any different to saying:

"Thus saith the Lord, behold I am with you. I put my arms around you my child, and I love you."

The only difference is that you are sharing it from your heart. But it is the same as a prophetic word.

If you want to be used in prophecy, then start by learning to just speak to people what you know Jesus would say to them if He were there. We will deal more with prophecy later in this book.

If you can start with that, then you can move on into an actual ministry of prophecy. But to do that, you will need the next level of ministry.

Adding the Holy Spirit

You will need the Holy Spirit, because all of the natural ministries can only take you so far. You need an extra piece of power; something supernatural to add to it. You almost want Jesus Himself to appear to you and show His power.

You can reach out and try to bring healing, and under showing compassion you might even be offering medical treatment. But you need that supernatural power, where if you could just lay your hands on them and speak healing, God would do it and add to it.

The way we do that is by adding the Holy Spirit to the work of Jesus. We combine together the Ministries and the Gifts of the Spirit.

What are the Gifts of the Spirit? There are nine of them, and we will study them in detail under the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

There are the Vocal Gifts, the Revelation Gifts and the Power Gifts.

The Vocal Gifts include the ability to speak in tongues, the ability to interpret tongues, and the speaking of prophetic utterance.

The Revelation Gifts are the gift of the word of wisdom, which has a future orientation.

You have the word of knowledge, which tells us about the past and the present. And you have the discerning of spirits, which helps us to detect when there are demon powers present.

The Power Gifts are faith, which allows us to supernaturally believe for the impossible and to do wonderful things for the Lord. There are also miracles and healings.

If we can add those to the Body Ministries, we start putting together something far more powerful. So you start with the Body Ministries and begin where you are.

This is the starting point for your ministry. And as you try these things, you are like the little boy who chewed on everything until he found the rubber. Once he found that one he discovered that he preferred it to all the others.

You may find that as you do some of these things, several of them (seldom only one) will seem to grab you more than others.

You will feel more comfortable with those and want to do them more. After that, as your heart begins to burn within, you will begin to cry out,

"Lord, if only I had more supernatural power and ability to do this. Oh Lord, I need the power of your Holy Spirit."

It is around this time that you suddenly realize that Jesus alone is not enough. He is wonderful and you love Him. You have an awesome relationship with Him and He makes you feel good when you are down.

But suddenly you realize that you need something more. You need the power of the Holy Spirit. Only then are you open to move into the Gifts of the Spirit.

How do you do that? This will require a longer study so we will cover it in the next chapter. We will look at the Holy Spirit and the gifts next.

You will learn how to enter into and receive the gifts of the Spirit, and how you can start adding the Gifts of the Spirit to the Body Ministries. You will see that as you do that, some of those ministries will come to life in a powerful way.

They will now move from being largely natural to more supernatural, until they become even more supernatural. Then you will begin to see a clear ministry that is being controlled by both the Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit working together through you.

This will lead you up higher, just as I shared that the revelation of our calling is progressive. You start with the lower levels and progress upwards. The higher levels will be up where the Father is involved and we will learn this as we go through this study.

Next we will see how the first two combine together to form specific ministries that the Bible talks about. Then I will show you the highest level of ministry that the Father is in control of.

After that I will cover what you have probably been waiting for; the answer to the question,

"How do I go about doing this? Please show me how."

We will look at how you can be trained for the ministry.

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