up phrase
on phrase in his eager attempt to have his Asiatic friends in and around
Ephesus take in the limitless power of the ascended Christ, he added the
significant words, "to the Church."[27] All that power is for the use,
and at the disposal, of the Church.

The Church was meant to be a unit in spirit in loyalty to her absent
Lord, wholly under the dominating touch of the Holy Spirit, not only in
her official actions, but in the lives of the individual members. If she
were so, no human imagination could take in the startling, revolutionary
power, softly, subtly, but with resistless sweep, flowing down from the
crowned Christ, among grateful men.

Not being such a unit it is not possible that that power shall be as
great in manifestation as was planned and meant. For no individual nor
group can ever take the place in action of the whole unified body of
believers, acting as a channel for the power of the crowned Christ. That
power shall be realized on the earth only when the Church is so unified,
and at work, under the reigning Christ, from the new headquarters up in
the heavens.

But meanwhile all of that power is _at the disposal of any disciple of
Christ_--the humblest--who will simply live in full-faced touch with
Christ, and who will _take_ of that power as the need comes, and as the
sovereign Holy Spirit leads.

It is of this, this _personal_ taking, that Paul is speaking when he
piles up that intense sentence: "able to do _exceeding abundantly above
all that we ask or think_ according to _the power that worketh in
us_."[28] The great bother in Paul's day and ever since, and now, is to
get people to _take_. The power is fairly a-tremble in the air at our
very finger-tips. And we go limping, crutching along both bodily and
mentally and in our spiritual leanness.

Those tremendous words of Jesus, "because I go unto the Father," with
the whole passage in which they occur,[29] must be read in _the light
shining from the throne_. Only so can they be understood. But then, so
read, they begin to grip us, and grip us hard, as we see what He really
meant and means.

He who has the warm, child-like touch of heart with Jesus, that the word
"believeth" stands for, shall--as the Holy Spirit has full control--do
the same works as Jesus did, same in kind and in degree, and then shall
do even greater than Jesus ever did. _Because_ it is now the glorified
crowned Christ who is doing them through some child of His,
simp