The dispensing began with God’s economy. Before the ages God, in the universe, had a desire in Himself, which was to work Himself into His chosen, created, redeemed, and regenerated people that He might be their life and their divine element. Although they are human, these people are born of God to have God’s nature and God’s life and to thus become God’s genuine children. As such, these people become God’s expression, and this expression becomes the Body of Christ, which is also the fullness of Christ. This fullness is the riches of the Triune God fully worked into His chosen, regenerated, and transformed people. In order to accomplish this, God in His economy must have an arrangement and a plan, and He must find some faithful and useful ones and entrust this responsibility to them. Among them the most important group are the first apostles. God gave them the stewardship so that they would be responsible to dispense all the riches of Christ to God’s children, that is, to the Body of Christ. Paul’s fourteen Epistles are a full revelation. They show how Paul and his co-workers carried out the stewardship of distributing the riches of Christ in God’s great household through the writing of the fourteen Epistles. These Epistles bring in an unsearchable and ever-fresh dispensing throughout the ages, even until today. Tonight, in this little meeting, what we are doing and touching is this same dispensing. We are gathered into His name, that is, we are in His Spirit. Here we gather around His Word to consider the revelation in the Word, and especially the vision revealed in the fourteen Epistles of Paul. If we see this vision, we will realize that our need is the riches of Christ dispensed to us by Paul. We do not need any spiritual cultivation or any reformation. We only need to receive this divine dispensing from Paul again and again in a slow and steady way from morning to evening and from evening to morning. Practically speaking, Christ in resurrection is the pneumatic Christ. Hence, everywhere and all the time, He can enter into us, be with us, and be our life and our element within.
Most Christians today have left the proper truth and have turned from the inward dispensing of Christ to human work, merits, and religion. We ourselves have been under this influence and are not free from it even up to today. Whenever we read something from the Bible, we make up our mind to do and to fulfill it. However, such determination should be condemned and rejected. God does not want us to determine to do what the Bible says; He only wants us to receive His dispensing.
Here I would like to read to you Hymns, #501. This hymn expresses very well what I want to say. Verse 1 says:
O glorious Christ, Savior mine,
Thou art truly radiance divine;
God infinite, in eternity,
Yet man in time, finite to be.
Oh! Christ, expression of God, the Great,
Inexhaustible, rich, and sweet!
Such a One is for our enjoyment, and not for our imitation.
God mingled with humanity
Lives in me my all to be.