Praise the Lord for the recent ITERO in Holland! The main topic of the fall International Training for Elders and Responsible Ones, held in Baarloo, Holland, is, The Four Great Pillars in the Lord’s Recovery. These four great pillars are Truth, Life, the Church, and the Gospel. There is a book with the same name published by Living Stream Ministry (The Truth, Life, the Church, and the Gospel, Four Great Pillars in The Lord’s Recovery). This portion here is just a short enjoyment from this message, and is an attempt to bring more saints in the fellowship and collective enjoyment of the Lord’s up-to-date speaking.
we can share in Christ’s sufferings for the producing and building up of the Body of Christ
For the building up of the church we need the ministry – our experience of the riches of Christ in a subjective way, having Christ wrought into our being through all kinds of sufferings and consuming pressures…. This kind of experiences produces and constitutes the ministry for God’s new covenant, and these experiences are for the building up of the Body of Christ today! We love the ministry – we don’t “hate the gifts”, but we value more being a minister of the new covenant than desiring to be a gifted one…
We are called to enjoy grace and express God, and Christ is our model – we are His reproduction!
For us to become Christ’s “Xerox copy” we need spiritual light and the riches of the divine life – we become not an imitation of Christ but a reproduction of Christ! A monkey can imitate the things and actions a man does, but because the monkey does not have the human life, after the “imitation time” is over, he returns back to his monkey life. But to us Christ is the original copy, the model and the pattern, and we are the Xerox-copy of Christ by our enjoyment of Him and following in His steps!
praising God according to His New Testament economy as seen in Benjamin, Judah, Zebulun, and Naphtali
This Psalm is indeed mysterious, but today we saw that it speaks about “the spoil” (the Triune God as Christ’s spoil and all the processes Christ went through as the spoil), our enjoyment (we rest at home and divide the spoil, we just enjoy God as everything we need), God’s salvation (it has been accomplished by Christ as the man of sorrows and as the Man at God’s right hand), and the gospel (the redemption is applied to us, we are enabled and have a “shore” to go out and speak, and we are “a hind let loose” skipping over every problem/hill and speaking the beautiful words of the gospel).
just come to the meetings and praise the Lord: He loads you with good and the enemy is defeated!
This is a secret we all discover as we go on with the Lord in the proper church life – all we need to do is come to the church meetings and praise the Lord! Satan bothers us, situations may be overwhelming, people may have problems with us, we may have a lot of things we didn’t do quite right, or there’s a lot of accusations inside… whatever happens, don’t miss the meeting of the church!
in His ascension Christ led us as captives to the Father and received us as gifts to the Body!
We are gifts produced by Christ’s descending and ascending – He defeated us and took us with Him as vanquished foes, He presented us to the Father, and the Father gave us as gifts for the building up of His dwelling place. But God did not “stop travelling” – He is still travelling within us! Christ is bringing God into us and bringing us into God – by descending and ascending in us and making us gifts to the Body of Christ!
restfully “enjoying the spoil” of all Christ has accomplished and then “publishing the gospel”
It is amazing how this poetic expression – there are dove wings covered with silver, and its pinions, with greenish-yellow gold – signifies and points to the Triune God with all the items of His complete, full, and all-inclusive salvation (Rom. 5:10, 17). Christ has won the victory after He fought the battles in His death, His resurrection, and His ascension – and He has great spoils to share with those who resftully enjoy Him! We as God’s elect and as the women, those who abide at home, enjoy all the spoils of Christ as our portion in Christ and announce them to others as glad tidings