May the Lord have mercy on us and give us His heart for man that we may see that the way He wants to gain man, recover man, and rule over man is not by judging or condemning but by watering man! Where the flow of living water is, there is the dominion of the Lord Jesus! People are happy when they drink the living water, and they are happy in the Lord’s kingdom!
the reigning of Christ will be in righteousness and in justice, by which peace will be ushered in
Today we as believers in the Lord need to learn to submit to the Lord’s throne – we need to set Him as the King in righteousness in our being. As Matt. 6:33 says, we seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all the other things that we need will be added to us. The reality of the kingdom today is in the church life – here we learn to live out the righteousness expressed by keeping the new law of the kingdom. In other words, in the church life today we learn to live out Christ as our righteousness. When we live out Christ as our righteousness in the church life, we have peace!
seeing the reigning Christ as unveiled in Psalm 72 and choosing to take the way of the ministry
We may be touched by the Lord to be vital with the saints in our home meeting, or we may be involved in serving with the students and the young ones – but do we take the way of the ministry? As the Lord reveals it to us in His Word, do we take the way of being produced as ministers? We all need to pray, Lord, give me the experiences I need that will produce this ministry! There is a great price to pay even to produce a small measure of the Lord’s ministry. The Lord wants to have a group of brothers and sisters who have been broken, dealt with, consumed, crossed out, terminated, reconstituted, resurrected, and blended together – to produce the ministry!
the victorious Christ will return to recover the earth when He gains Zion, those fully open to Him!
Before the Lord Jesus can come as the King, He needs to have in all the local churches the reality of Zion – He needs to have His overcomers as His bride ready! In Psalm 51 we see how the goal of our repentance and confession marrying God’s forgiveness is that it amazingly produces a burden for the building up of Zion. The Lord needs to gain Zion, the aspect of the church that is fully open to Him, the overcomers who will hasten His return!
Christ put away sin once and for all and He imparted Himself as the divine life into us!
The two great things Christ did in God’s economy while being on earth were that He put away the sin (through His death on the cross) and He imparted His divine life into His believers (in His resurrection). Christ doesn’t just “wash us and cleanse us from our sins” – He dispenses His divine life into us, which life is a sin-dealing and sin-overcoming life!
God prepared a body for Christ to come to do God’s will to be God’s unique sacrifice on the cross
Christ was obedient to God even unto death, and that the death of the cross (Phil. 2:8). Christ did the will of God as prophesied in the Old Testament and as God Himself wanted – He became a man, lived a perfect human life, died an all-inclusive and all-terminating death on the cross, and He resurrected to be the life-giving Spirit. In His death especially Christ terminated the old testament economy of God and established God’s New Testament economy where Christ is everything: He is the sacrifices, He is the offerings, He is the unique way for us to contact and enjoy God!
as the factor to enact God’s New Testament economy, Christ replaced all the sacrifices with Himself
Praise the Lord – everything of the old is gone, now everything is new! God is new, Christ is new, and we are the new creation! In His incarnation and His death Christ replaced everything of the old – including the old creation – with Himself, the new and living One! In Psalm 2, Psalm 8, Psalm 16, Psalm 22-24 we can see what kind of Christ we have in His incarnation – He came to carry out God’s will and His commission to terminate the old and bring in the new creation. We were included in the old creation terminated and germinated by Him! In Christ we are no longer old – we are a new creation