Section 03 - Necessities for Ministry

All three together will take us to our ultimate goal and level in ministry. We will continue this theme for now before completing this teaching.

What I want to look at now is everything that you will need to do ministry, so that you have a clearer understanding of what ministry is.

To make it clear I would like to illustrate it with the following example. Imagine someone who needs ministry, and remember that ministry means serving others.

What is our purpose for carrying out ministry? God wants to do things in the life of every human being. He has a plan and purpose, because God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.

God wants to bless and make available to every single human being the wonderful blessings that He has created for man. So He wants to pour out His blessing on them.

This person may be outside of Christ and does not know God. He or she could also be a young believer who has not come to a great experience of God, so they can go directly to Him to receive everything that they need.

So God needs to use somebody else to pour His blessing into that person. Who is that someone else? That's right, it is you. You are the one that God will use to bless this person.

Definition of Ministry

What God will do is to pour into you, and you in turn will pour out towards that person. That in effect is all that is involved in ministry. Ministry is receiving from God, taking what you have received and pouring it out to other people.

There is nothing complicated about this, but we tend to make it so difficult. But there is a lot involved, and there are many things that you will need before you can do this effectively.

So that is what I want to consider in more detail in this book. I want to look at exactly what you need in order to be used by God to bless other people; to release towards others what God wants to do in their lives.

The Spirit and the Word

There are two main things that you will need, and which God has given us to use. If you like they are two main tools that you must make use of, in order to be used by God to do the work of the ministry.

The first one is the Bible, which is also called the Scriptures or simply The Word. The Word of God is one of our main tools for doing the work of the ministry.

God has also given us something else. He has given us His Holy Spirit. We looked at that earlier, and now I am going to look at this in more detail as we consider exactly what God has given us through the Holy Spirit. We usually refer to the Holy Spirit simply as the Spirit.

These are two basic tools that God has given every Christian, and especially those who want to be used by the Lord in ministry.

He has given us the Spirit and the Word. You need nothing more than these two in order to do the work of the ministry and to do it well.

That might sound somewhat simplistic, but there is more to the Spirit and the Word than we realize. Before you can use the Word you need to know it.

How do you learn to know the Word of God?

Firstly you can learn the theory. You could get theoretical knowledge of the Word by reading it. But there are 66 books there with a lot of doctrines and teachings.

The Bible as a Jungle

I like to picture the Bible as being a wild jungle, like say the Amazon jungle, where there is tropical growth everywhere. As you walk through it you see every kind of plant and tree scattered everywhere.

It was not planted by man and laid out in rows. You don't have all the peach trees in one row and the apple trees in another row; the carrots and beans in their own little section. This is how we would do it in farming.

But here it is all growing wild and all the plants are scattered everywhere. If you were to walk through the jungle you would see a plant. Then as you walk further you might see the same plant again somewhere else.

You might even see another species of the same kind of plant - all of them scattered everywhere.

So if you were to go into that jungle and try to understand everything growing there by studying all the plants, you could spend a lifetime doing that.

But what if someone who knows a bit about botany or biology has gone ahead of you and studied the plants? He would come back to you and say,

"Do you see this plant here with the red berries?"

Then he would tell you what the plant is called and all the characteristics of that plant. He would tell you that it is scattered all over the jungle and looks different at times.

Now you have learned from someone who has gone and done some studying. You can take a guidebook with you into the jungle, and when you see something, you can look it up in the book and identify it.

You can see what kind of plant it is. And if it is poisonous you will know that it should not be touched. Without this knowledge you could learn the hard way by eating poisonous berries and dying.

The Bible is just like that; it is a garden of truth. Many people think that they can learn what is in the Bible simply by reading it. You could spend your life doing this and still not fully understand some of the deeper truths of the Bible.

God has raised up those to whom He has given a teaching ability, and there are those who have studied the Bible. But some people have even more than this, and this is what you need. You need experience.

Theory and Experience

You need to learn both theory and experience. You need to live what is taught in the Bible before you can understand it. Sometimes it is only when you have lived something that it comes back to your mind.

You may remember reading something in the Bible but you did not fully understand what it meant. But now that you have come across a problem, done something you regret, or accidentally done the right thing, you suddenly understand what that Scripture meant.

So there are two kinds of knowledge of the Word you must gain. There is theoretical knowledge and experimental knowledge.

The Gifts and the Fruit of the Spirit

When it comes to the Holy Spirit there are also two aspects that you need to learn. We touched on the first one earlier, which is known as the Gifts of the Spirit. We saw that there were nine of these.

But there is another aspect of the Holy Spirit as well, which the Bible calls the Fruit of the Spirit.

It is interesting that there are also nine of those. So there are nine gifts and nine fruits, and both are aspects of the Holy Spirit that we need to learn and use.

We combine this with a theoretical and experimental knowledge of the Scriptures. Then as the Spirit and the Word combine together, God is empowered to work through us to minister to other people. When this happens we can carry out the work of the ministry effectively.

I would like to look now at how we go about developing each of these. We will start first with the Holy Spirit.

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