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!
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!
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
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…
the details of Christ’s sufferings for us before He died: He was hated, reproached, mocked, betrayed
Many times we miss a lot because we know things in general and we don’t get into the details – we may know in general that the Lord Jesus suffered for us and died for us, but we may not know the details. How did He die, what happened, what are the details? When you get into these details in the Word of God, your appreciation of Christ’s death and His suffering will increase to the uttermost, and you will love Him more!
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).