The Church
This month I've been reading the book "Praying in Authority" by Dutch Sheets. Dutch is considered by most to be a radical and outgoing Christian leader in the faith. He often talked about in the book God sending him all over the country to pray for the nation and it's people. Overall it's a great book and really opened my eyes to the importance if a healthy prayer life.
However it taught me something else as well. Dutch talks in his book about Jesus referring to the Church. In original Greek Jesus uses the word "Ekklesia" which is a body of people used to govern a nation or land that is under someone's authority. Essentially Christ built the Ekklesia for two reasons:
1) to build an intimate relationship with man and for man to live in unity and community with each other
2) to govern the earth with the given authority if Christ.
Now I'm going to go out in a limb here and admit some things that I did shortly after giving my life fully to Christ in 2011. You see I was infatuated with the idea that our God of today (the same as yesterday and tomorrow) truly did preform miracles DAILY! So I chased after those miracles by using authority that I didn't always have. I remember countless times praying over people who were hurt or sick and proclaiming them healed in Jesus' name! – that's a pretty strong statement in and of itself and looking back I see the immaturity and lack of understanding I had.
Now I see that God has a special way that He designed earth and the Ekklesia (Church) and operating outside if those boundaries we are not always guaranteed our authority to work (granted on occasion God did use me to heal someone).
The way the Church is set up is that God calls one man up to lead a church. This man is blessed and ordained by God Himself and has more spiritual authority over what God has given him, but is still equal to you and me in Gods eyes. This leader that has the authority of Christ over His congregation has the ultimate power to heal, break strongholds, cast out demons, raise the dead, break strongholds, etc. of course this is only as long as it goes along with Gods will. The leader also has authority to give authority to others within the Church to do Gods will.
Now I also believe that God speaks to individuals and tells them to go and do things and when He does He gives them more spiritual authority over those things than what anyone else who does not have that anointing.
Overall if the Church operated in this way as one unit and body Gods will not only be fulfilled to the fullest, but the Church body will be more involved with the process than we would outside of this plan.
