The fifth great revelation in the New Testament is the Body of Christ (Eph 1:22-23). The Body is not mentioned in the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament. The first mentioning of the Body in the New Testament is in Romans 12:5. According to Romans 12, we must present our physical bodies (v. 1) for the mystical Body of Christ (v. 5). When we present our bodies and are renewed in our mind, we see, discern, and prove by testing that the will of God is to obtain a Body for Christ to be His fullness and expression (v. 2).
God's economy and His dispensing are intimately involved with these five great revelations. If we desire to know the dispensing of the Triune God, we must know God in His economy, Christ in His all-inclusiveness, the Spirit as the consummation of the Triune God, the spiritual and divine transformation of the believers, and the Body of Christ.
In this message we will consider the main verses in the New Testament that deal with the matter of renewing.
Romans 6:4 says, "We have been buried therefore with Him through baptism into His death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so also we might walk in newness of life." Then, Romans 7:6 says, "But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that in which we were held, so that we serve in newness of spirit and not in oldness of letter." The spirit here is our regenerated spirit, in which the Lord as the Spirit dwells (2 Tim. 4:22). The newness of life is for our daily walk, and the newness of spirit is for our service. We may know the term the newness of life, but we may know very little of the reality. In our gospel service, we need to preach the gospel in the newness of spirit, not in the oldness of a certain way or a certain formula.
In the New Testament the believers are a new creation. Second Corinthians 5:17 says, "So then if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away; behold, they have become new." In the Bible the word creation refers to something created out of nothing. In Genesis 1 God did not need any material in order to create. God said, "Let there be light: and there was light" (v. 3). He is the One who calls the things not being as being (Rom. 4:17). The formation of Adam, however, was different; it was not called a creation. Genesis 2:7 says that "God formed man...." God used the dust of the ground as the material to form the first man, Adam.
God created His new creation without any physical material. The new creation was created by God with Christ as the embodiment of the divine life. Hence, the material for the new creation is the divine life. Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation because God's life has entered into him. Before our regeneration, we did not have the divine life, but through regeneration, God imparted Himself into us and became our life. Thus, we became the embodiment of Christ. He has been born into us as our life. In this way we have become a new creation.