To the craft of false teachers St Paul would have his Churches oppose the weapons only of _truth and love_. "Holding the truth in love," they will "grow up in all things into Christ." Sincere believers, heartily devoted to Christ, will not fall into fatal error. A healthy life instinctively repels disease. They "have an anointing from the Holy One" which is their protection (1 John ii. 20-29). In all that belongs to godliness and a noble manhood, such natures will expand; temptation and the assaults of error stimulate rather than arrest their growth. And with the growth and ripening in her fellowship of such men of God, the whole Church grows.
Next to the moral condition lies the spiritual condition of advancement,--viz., the full recognition of _the supremacy and sufficiency of Christ_. Christ assumes here two opposite relations to the members of His body. He is the Head _into_ (or _unto_) which we grow in all things; but at the same time, _from_ whom all the body derives its increase (ver. 16). He is the perfect ideal for us each; He is the common source of life and progress for us all. In our individual efforts after holiness and knowledge, in our personal aspirations and struggles, Jesus Christ is our model, our constant aim: we "grow into Him" (ver. 15). But as we learn to live for others, as we merge our own aims in the life of the Church and of humanity we feel, even more deeply than our personal needs had made us do, our dependence upon Him. We see that the forces which are at work to raise mankind, to stay the strifes and heal the wounds of humanity, emanate from the living Christ (ver. 16). He is the head of the Church and the heart of the world.
The third, practical condition of Church growth is brought out by the closing words of the paragraph. It is _organization_: "all the body fitly framed [comp. ii. 21] and knit together." Each local _ecclesia_, or assembly of saints, will have its stated officers, its regulated and seemly order in worship and in work. And within this fit frame, there must be the warm union of hearts, the frank exchange of thought and feeling, the brotherly counsel in all things touching the kingdom of God, by which Christian men in each place of their assembling are "knit together." From these local and congregational centres, the Christian fellowship spreads out its arms to embrace all that love our Lord Jesus Christ.
A building or a machine is _fitted_ together by the adjustment of its parts. A body needs, besides this mechanical construction, a pervasive life, a sympathetic force _knitting_ it together: "knit together in love," the apostle says in Colossians ii. 2; and so it is "in love" that this "body builds up itself." The tense of the participles in the first part of verse 16 is present (continuous); we see a body in process of incorporation, whose several organs, imperfectly developed and imperfectly co-operant, are increasingly drawn to each other and bound more firmly in one as each becomes more complete in itself. The perfect Christian and the perfect Church are taking shape at once. Each of them requires the other for its due realization.
The rest of the sentence, following the comma that we place at "knit together," has its parallel in Colossians ii. 19: "All the body, through its junctures and bands being supplied and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God." According to St Paul's physiology, the "bands" knit the body together, but the "junctures" are its means of supply. Each point of contact is a means of nourishment to the frame. In touch with each other, Christians communicate the life flowing from the common Head. The apostle would make _Christian intercourse a universal means of grace_. No two Christian men should meet anywhere, upon any business, without themselves and the whole Church being the better for it.