God expresses Himself on earth the way He wants – in His church, His dwelling place. It is in the church that God can practice His New Testament economy, He can speak forth what is in His heart, and He can manifest His glory! God feels at home in no other place but in the church, and it is here that He expresses Himself and manifests Himself – all He is, all He’s doing, and all He wants to obtain are to be expressed in the church as God’s dwelling place.
the divine truth is revealed in the Bible, the Word of God; we need to be absolute for the truth!
The first and foremost matter in the Lord’s recovery is NOT a person and is NOT an experience – it is THE TRUTH. What brought us into the Lord’s recovery and what keeps us here is not merely the sweet church life, the vital groups, the gospel preaching, the rich meetings, or even some persons who are enjoying the Lord very much and are our patterns. The first great pillar in the Lord’s recovery is the Truth, and what brought us into the Lord’s recovery is the truth. The extent to which the Lord can recover our being to His original intention is the extent to which we are constituted with the truth.
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
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).
the key to our living and service in the Body of Christ depends on the law of the Spirit of life
The Body of Christ as the organism of the Triune God has a living and a service which is organic and corporate – all the members of the Body of Christ live together by taking Christ as life (Col. 3:3-4), and also all the members care for one another (1 Cor. 12:25-27). What I realize […]