Christ is in the believers as the Spirit of life (Rom. 8:2a, 9b). He is the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:17; 1 Cor. 15:45b). When I came to this country about thirty years ago, I began to tell people that Christ is the Spirit. There are a number of hymns we wrote in our hymnal concerning experiencing Christ as the Spirit (see Hymns, #493, #539). Brother Nee wrote some of these hymns, which stress that the very Christ, whom we experience today as the life that we live, is the Spirit (#490, #491, #492).
Christ lives in the believers that they may live by Him (Gal. 2:20). We need to be clear that it is not wrong to say that we live by Christ. But we need to see that to live by Christ signifies one thing and to live Christ signifies another thing. Christ lives in us so that we may live by Him.
The believers who live Him as such a One are His living members, constituting His organic Body. First, we constitute His Body as the fullness of Christ, the One who fills all in all, as His expression (Rom. 12:5; Eph. 1:23). Then we constitute His Body as the fullness of the Triune God, the God who has been processed and consummated, as His corporate expression in the expression of Christ through the church (Eph. 3:19). These are two layers of expression. We as a corporate church are the expression of Christ. Then in the expression of Christ there is another layer of expression, that is, the expression of the processed and consummated Triune God.
When the church came into existence, that indicated that God had completed His process and that He had been consummated. Before God's incarnation, He had never been processed. God has gone through a long process from incarnation to ascension. Within a short time of less than thirty-five years, He completed this long process. We all need to speak about the wonderful process through which the Triune God passed.
By His being processed from incarnation to His ascension, He was consummated. His work to produce the new creation began from His incarnation, and that work was consummated in His ascension. He came down from heaven to be incarnated, and He went back to heaven in ascension. But after going back, He was altogether a "different" God. Some may wonder how we could say this, but there is such a fact. Before His incarnation, He did not possess the human nature. But after passing through the process of incarnation through ascension, He now has both divinity and humanity. Before His incarnation, He did not possess such a wonderful death and surpassing resurrection. But today after His ascension, this death and resurrection are now elements in His composition.
The church does not express the God who has not been processed, but the church expresses the very God who has completed His process and has been consummated. The church can express Him because the church has become the same as He is. He is divine and human, and the church is human and divine. He possesses a marvelous death and an excellent resurrection, and the church possesses the same. The church is the same as He is, but the church does not have His Godhead. The church has the nature of God, the life of God, and the very death and resurrection which God possesses. The church is the same as God in all these things, but not in the Godhead. The church as the organic Body of Christ is the fullness of the Triune God, the God who has been processed and consummated. We are Christ's living members, constituting His organic Body to express Him.