Page 91 - The Christian Life and the Church Life_Government of God

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Message 6
Living under Authority and Representing God

Living under the authority and representing God—these are two very
weighty, crucial, vital, necessary matters. It is not easy to speak along this
line, but we trust in the Lord’s grace and take Him as our person, and He
knows we need His supply to hear purely what the Spirit is saying, and to
allow the Lord’s word to lodge in our being, and then work out the reality of
this word.
I want to spend some time on the subject itself—Living under authority
and representing God. I have been considering who is living under authority,
and what is it like. And I would suggest this, on the one hand, everybody on
the earth is living under authority in some way. We all are under a government
in the country where we are, so in one sense, we are all living under authority.
But I would point out, on the other hand, no one in the natural life is truly
living under authority. Outwardly, it may seem like this; but inwardly,
intrinsically, there are issues, there are all kinds of negative things. I was
considering, how are the people on earth, without Christ, how are they living
under authority? Well, some are living according to ethics. They’ve been
raised concerning, “This is right. This is wrong. You respect this person.
You obey that person.” And so they are ethically, apparently, living under
authority. Others, by their disposition, they are kind of easy-going persons,
they give in easily, they do not like any confrontations, they do not like to
fight, they just give in. Then others are living under authority out of nothing
other than fear. They live under a dictatorship with secret police and people
spying on each other, and people being put in prison because they believe
in God. In order to preserve their life, they live under authority. In certain
countries, I’ve observed this, the people are trained by their culture to live
under authority, and so their submission is actually a cultural reflect. It has