If I am an independent sort of person and I develop a coldness and a remoteness and I do not connect much with fellow believers, and I come out to services maybe once a week but certainly not to the prayer gathering and not to the Bible study, and I am never subject to the help of others around me, I will be a very incomplete Christian. I will only be partially developed because God has distributed the various roots of ministry to my soul among us. So a person could be very clever; he could have a first-class honours degree and a postgraduate degree, and maybe the devil comes when he is at home reading the Bible and says, ‘You have got everything you need. You do not need anybody else. Of course, you must go and worship and hear the word, but you have all the intellectual capability to provide entirely for yourself.’ No you don’t. You need fellow believers. Sometimes you need their admonition, their advice, their encouragement, their friendship, their input, even apart from the pulpit ministry. And without it, God will not complete you.
Here is the foundation for the whole notion and the subject of the working church, a phrase so seldom heard today: the working church, emphasised constantly in past generations. Churches are not congregations and pulpits only; they are working units with all believers voluntarily, freely taking part in the effort of the church, exercising their various gifts as the Lord enables them. Nowadays it would seem there are few working churches. There are congregations but not people making the service of the Lord their grand priority in life in and through God’s unit, the local church, the particular congregation. The preacher cannot function without the people. There is so much to be done in any fellowship of the Lord’s people, and God distributes the gifts to make us inter-dependent, to wean us all away from the service just of ourselves and our families and our homes and this present world. Of course, this also promotes humility among us all, because we need each other. So it is that we find Paul constantly, repeatedly, appealing in his epistles for the prayers of God’s people. He cannot manage without them. They assist him, they support him, they send him on his way in his journeys as they pray for him. He is taught that without them he cannot accomplish much and, of course, without the Holy Spirit we can accomplish nothing.