Believers want to know and obey God.

Believers truly want to know and obey Christ; therefore the issue of ministry is to remove obstacles and provide opportunities to fulfill the desires of the heart.

The prevalent ideology held by much of the church concerning the nature of Christians and ministry has been that Christians are no more than sinners who have changed their destination from hell to heaven. Their essential nature is still selfish and sinful.

Ministry, therefore, is responsible for getting the unwilling person to change his attitudes and actions and conform to an accepted standard of righteousness. To accomplish this objective, ministry has at times used guilt, condemnation, fear, amd promises of unobtainable pleasure, and it has often appealed to greed, ambition and pride.

When God made a new covenant with man, He put His love inside. He put it in the believer’s mind and in his heart. God’s Spirit has become one with man’s spirit (I Corinthians 6:17), and His inner work is to make real the tenets of the new covenant.

The conflict comes form the "flesh" (the unrenewed mind with the unglorified body) as it battles against the spirit (Galatians 5:17). The obstacles that must be removed so Christians can follow their inner desires are primarily the old ideas, thought patterns, conclusions and habits that were common to the natural man. (See I Corinthians 2:9-16).

New Testament ministry works in and with the Holy Spirit to encourage, establish and stimulate the inner man. It must refuse to strengthen the flesh by appealing to it, even to obtain acceptable behavior.

The obvious New Testament emphasis is on building the inner man so that believers can live in true freedom - getting what they want. No man is totally free if he is constantly failing to get what his inner man wants. We know God will not satisfy the "wants" of the flesh, but He is the supreme satisfaction of the spirit of man. He has recreated the new man to know and desire Him from the inside.

Jesus in His person is the essence of life and liberty. When the individual is focused on Him, and ministry draws attention to Him and His finished work, then single-minded simplicity is the resulting lifestyle.

Romans 8:1-2, 14-16, 29-31

I Corinthians 2:11-12

II Corinthians 4:16