by Joseph Mead

At Mount Hope Church, we have seven beautiful core values. These values function as cultural guardrails to keep us on track with biblical truths that the Lord has expressed in our unique church family. One of those values is particularly powerful and very significant for anyone who follows Jesus Christ. It states that, “Every member is a minister. Each member of the body is responsible to help the others grow.”

Can You See It?

Have you ever really stopped to envision what it might look like to have 1,500 ministers all gather in one place to worship Jesus and minister to one another? Can you imagine if every one of those worshipers were spiritual powerhouses like King David, the Prophet Jeremiah, or the Apostle Paul? What if everyone in the room was a person who knew exactly who they were in God, had impeccable godly character, knew their gifts, and were daily doing supernatural exploits for God in the unique area of their calling and anointing? Can you imagine how the earth would shake when these ministers gathered to worship Jesus together? Can you see how darkness and evil would flee the region due to the glory of this holy gathering of the sons and daughters of light (See John 12:36)?

What’s described above isn’t my vision. It isn’t even Pastor Kevin’s vision. This is God’s will and what He has made possible through Jesus Christ. And as believers, we have become the stewards of it! Maybe you need more proof that this is God’s will. If so, let’s look at Hebrews, chapter 8. The writer of Hebrews unpacks a prophecy from Jeremiah from the sixth century. The prophecy declares a day when God establishes a New Covenant with His people, and the outcome is amazing [Jer. 31:31-34].

“For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will imprint My laws upon their minds, even upon their innermost thoughts and understanding, and engrave them upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. And it will not be necessary for each one to teach his neighbor and his fellow citizen or each one his brother, saying, ‘Know (perceive, have knowledge of, and get acquainted by experience with) the Lord, for all will know Me, from the smallest to the greatest of them. For I will be merciful and gracious toward their sins, and I will remember their deeds of unrighteousness no more” (Hebrews 8:10-12 AMP).

Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of this prophecy in Jeremiah! He came and made a way for our sins to be remembered no more! He has lavished His grace on us and made us righteous before God. But it doesn’t end there! This mercy also empowers all who believe to have full access to God’s thoughts, ideas, and understanding! Each of us has a unique gift to pray, read, and study the Scriptures with the Spirit of God and then apply the truth He teaches us! This does not eliminate our need for others or our call to honor the five-fold ministry as described in Ephesians 4—for these ministers are also gifts to us to further empower us to come into our full maturity in Christ! However, this does liberate us into personal relationship with God and a responsibility to seek Him for ourselves (See Matthew 6:33).

This new covenant challenges the religious myth that only an elite group of qualified professional holy people have access to God for greater works. Additionally, this myth provides a convenient way out for those who would rather delegate spiritual responsibility to others. The myth of religious pride robs people from entering into God’s unique purpose for themselves. Believing this myth sets up a new veil between them and God (unlike the one God ripped in the Temple), and the separation keeps them at a distance, unable to experience anything close to what Jeremiah prophesied.

This Ought Not Be!

Jesus Christ came to die on a cross and ransom His sinless life for the world (See John 3:16). This spiritual trade made a way for us all to come close to God. The Father in Heaven ripped the veil in the Temple, as if to announce, “Come into the Holy of Holies! Through faith in Jesus, The Son of God, I have awarded you righteousness! So everyone, draw near to Me” (Read the Gospel of Mark, chapter 15). Therefore, we can all pray and be heard, we can all experience the Holy Spirit fill us, we call be given wisdom and godly character, we can all operate in spiritual gifts (See 1 Corinthians 14:1).

To further the point, read the miracle of the crippled man in Acts 3. When Peter prayed for the crippled man and he was instantly healed, God wasn’t saying that Peter and John had finally attained to some level of holiness to do miracles now. (I mean, Peter had just recently denied Jesus, months prior.) God was showing what the New Covenant through Jesus Christ is capable of through ordinary men like Peter and John.

“Now as the lame man who was healed held on to Peter and John, all the people ran together to them in the porch which is called Solomon’s, greatly amazed. So when Peter saw it, he responded to the people: ‘Men of Israel, why do you marvel at this? Or why look so intently at us, as though by our own power or godliness we had made this man walk?’” (Acts 3:11-12 NKJV)

It wasn’t Peter’s godliness or by John’s power that this miracle happened. It was possible because Jesus had finished what He came to accomplish on the cross and enacted the New Covenant. “For all will know Me, from the smallest to the greatest of them.” And now God had written His ways on the hearts of His people through the baptism of the Holy Spirit (See Acts 2). God had written on Peter’s heart that He has compassion on the poor and the broken and that He came to heal the sick! So that is exactly what Peter did, even though the “holy elite” threatened them and took them into custody for … ah, well … I guess you could say an unauthorized miracle. How insane is that! Religious pride blinded the Pharisees so that they could not see God working right in their midst. Instead, they were more worried about maintaining their spiritual high-ground, their money, and their elite status. The Pharisees missed the dawn of a new day where God had decentralized His Spirit and now sent His grace to every tribe, tongue, and nation!

The New Requirement

What the religious did notice was “…they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated and untrained men, they marveled. And they realized that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13 NKJV). There you have it! If there is a “requirement” to minister to others, this new requirement is to “be with Jesus.” The cross of Christ made you worthy, the resurrection made you alive, and the Holy Spirit made you powerful. So, let every member be with Jesus and be a minister, and all do our part “till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13 NKJV).