My burden in these days is with this fellowship concerning the constitution and the building up of the Body of Christ. This book is a continuation of the burden in the two books we have published entitled The Satanic Chaos in the Old Creation and the Divine Economy for the New Creation and The Overcomers.
In the previous chapter, we saw the complete salvation of God, the vital importance of transformation in the complete salvation of God, and the significance of transformation. I hope that through the fellowship in this book, we will see a vision concerning God's economy. We have seen that God's economy is accomplished in us in three steps: regeneration, transformation, and glorification. In this chapter we want to see something further concerning the building up of the Body of Christ by the transformation in life.
Now we want to see the consummation of the transformation in the building up of the Body of Christ. We need to pay attention to the words consummation and transformation, since they are not common but very particular. Transformation cannot be consummated at once, so it must have a process. At the end of the process of transformation, there will be a consummation.
This transformation in its consummation, constitutes the believers, who grow and mature in Christ's life, into precious materials for the building of God (Matt. 13:44-46; 1 Cor. 3:12). Constituting is also a particular word. A physical building is not built by constitution but by pieces of material being added and joined together. With a physical building nothing is organic; it does not depend upon growth. A tree, however, is something organic which grows. It is not built up by the addition of materials. A tree can only grow up, and that growing up is a kind of constituting. The tree grows by taking in some life element. We may fertilize, water, and trim the tree, but it grows by itself according to its constitution with the life element. How can a small green sprout eventually become a tall tree? It becomes such a tall tree by being constituted with the life element, which causes it to grow.
The essence of the seed of the tree spontaneously mingles itself with the earth, not the whole earth, but just the essence of the earth. The essence of the earth with the essence of the seed grow together, and these two essences are the very materials for the constituting of this tree. This picture is very meaningful. When the Lord Jesus sowed Himself as the life seed into our heart as the soil, as the earth, the seed began to grow. Christ as the divine life seed and the believers as the human growing earth become one to produce the organic element for the constitution of the church (Eph. 1:22).