The Charge to the Church

The Charge to the Church gathers Stephen Kaung’s 2014 messages on the vision and responsibility of the church. Its central claim is simple but searching: the church has been charged to bear the testimony of Jesus. Kaung argues that when God’s people lose this vision, they become vulnerable to compromise, complacency, fragmentation, and activity without spiritual direction. The remedy is not a new program but a return to Christ Himself as the one unifying vision and the content of the church’s testimony.

The opening message asks, “What is our charge?” and surveys the principle of divine commission through biblical examples such as Adam, Abraham, Moses, Israel, and Paul’s charge to Timothy. The corporate application is the church’s mission to bear the testimony of Jesus. Christ builds His church upon Himself, and what He builds is meant to express who He is. Revelation 1 is therefore important: John suffers for the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus, while the risen Lord identifies Himself as the First and the Last, the Living One who was dead and is alive forevermore. Luke 24 also supports Kaung’s conviction that the Scriptures ultimately testify of Christ.

The book then asks what vision can hold God’s people together. Kaung’s answer is Christ and Christ alone. Spiritual vision is not merely knowing a doctrine about the church; it is seeing the Lord in such a way that He has first place in affection, thought, decision, service, and corporate life. This vision confronts private preference and self-direction. The church cannot be united around human personalities, methods, or secondary interests without losing its proper center. A true vision of Christ therefore carries a practical demand: He must be Lord, not only in confession but in the actual ordering of life and fellowship.

The third message develops the testimony of Jesus more directly. A testimony declares a reality that has been seen and known. For Kaung, Jesus Christ Himself is the reality to which God bears witness and which the church is called to display. The testimony is more than correct teaching about Christ; it requires the witness and the testimony to correspond. What the church says concerning Christ must become living reality in the people who bear His name. This makes the book relevant to readers asking what the church exists for, what a Christ-centered church actually means, and how believers can recover a common spiritual purpose.

The final message asks how the church will be made right and answers: by overcoming. Revelation 2:7, Revelation 7:9–17, Revelation 12:10–11, Revelation 15:1–3, Revelation 19:8, and Ephesians 5:27 form the principal biblical setting. Overcomers are not presented as an elite class but as believers who respond faithfully to the Lord where the church has fallen short. Revelation 12:11 gives a concentrated pattern: the blood of the Lamb, the word of their testimony, and not loving the soul-life even unto death. The blood of Christ supports this overcoming pattern as the basis of cleansing and victory, while costly faithfulness is joined to the testimony believers bear.

Across the four messages, vision, testimony, faithfulness, unity, and overcoming belong together. The book addresses churches that have lost clarity of purpose and believers asking how the church can be brought back to Christ. Its answer is to see Christ afresh, bear His testimony in reality, refuse compromise, accept the cost of obedience, and answer the Lord’s call to overcome so that the church may become the expression He desires and be prepared for Him.