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You are either one or the other. Are you the Head or are you the Body? The
church, the ministry, and the work are all the Body. The church is the Body in
expression; the work is the Body seeking increase; the ministry is the Body in
function. So, the principles of the Body apply to each of the three. One of the
most basic principles of the Body is that we are all directly connected to the
Head. My hand cannot say to my foot, “I am closer to the head than you are,
so you are under me. I am one level, while you are another level.” If my foot
could speak, it would say, “I am just as close as you are to the head, because I
am directly connected to the head through the flow of the blood in the body.”
Is there any hierarchy in the Body? There are just two levels: Head and Body.
Hence, any teaching that talks about a hierarchy is a different teaching.
You might say to me, “In the ministry, there is also the teaching
concerning deputy authority.” Yes, there is this teaching and you must study
it, because it has been misrepresented. If you study it, then as soon as you
hear the wrong presentation, you will say, “No, that is not the teaching.”
Moses was a deputy authority but he never said so. Rather, he was meek;
he never exercised his authority. Actually, he did not even want to be an
authority. The ones who tried to exercise authority were Miriam and Aaron,
not Moses. This is called rebellion, and not authority. I say again, please get
into the truth. If you get into these particular truths here, many problems will
be solved spontaneously. I am so glad that I heard that word from brother Lee
in 1978. I took that word and I have been pursuing the truth since that time.
So, it is really hard to cheat me and it does not take me very long to know
when something is wrong. I only need to hear the first sentence and I can say,
“No.” I hope we all could be like this.

Peter Receiving the Vision of God’s Building
These last two messages on God’s building and on the recovery of the
church as the Israel of God are the issues of the first six messages. We must
have the first six, then we can have these last two. God’s goal is to have His
building, and Peter was the right person to write about this. When he first
came to the Lord, immediately the Lord told him, “Simon, son of John, that
is the name of your natural man. I am going to make you Peter, a stone.” Then
in Matthew 16, the Lord asked the disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” I
think this was the only time Peter ever got a question right in the whole New
Testament. He said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” The Lord