What shall you do when you come to the meeting? We all have to learn to say that we come to the meeting first of all to feed God. Secondly, we come to the meeting to eat before Him, with Him, with one another, and also to rejoice in what we eat. This is not a kind of common feeding, so the Bible calls this a feast, a festival (Deut. 16:16). You cannot have a feast just by yourself. To have a feast you need two kinds of riches. You need to have riches in people. You need a number of people coming together. I surely like to eat with people. The more the better! Feasting is a joy. Yet feasting must be rich in people and also rich in food.
Look at the picture. The children of Israel from the first day of the year to the last day of the year, with the exception of all the Sabbaths, were working on the land. And the land was Christ. No doubt, this is a picture showing us how that we as God’s redeemed people should work all the day on Christ. We sow the seed, we water the crop, then we reap a rich produce. We live on this and then we keep the top portion, the firstborn, the firstfruit, the top tenth aside for the time when we come together for the meeting. We gather into the name of our God, and we gather into His habitation. Where He dwells, we meet with Him. Actually, we all are invited by Him to come to His home.
Here is a strange point: usually those who are invited to a feast don’t bring food. But to come to a feast with a lot of food is very scriptural. God invited all His people to come together, yet God didn’t cook. Although God didn’t cook the food, He had given the food already. He had given them the food by sending the sunshine, the air, and the rain year around. Yet they needed to cooperate with God’s sending. All the things were sent, but they needed to cooperate with God to have the produce. Then the produce became the tithes, and the tithes were brought to answer God’s invitation. Everyone was invited to God’s home. Everybody came home to feed the Father and to satisfy Him. What a happy time this was!
All this must be Christ. When we come together, we should come with Christ in this way. You have to forget about your music. Forget about sopranos and altos. This is not the main thing. The main thing is how much Christ do you bring to the meeting? How much Christ you bring to the meeting depends upon how much Christ you produce, how much Christ you have grown. You have to labor on Christ as the land so that you can produce Christ. Actually, it is not that you produce Christ, but that Christ produces Christ Himself through your labor. The poor thing today is that the Christians as God’s redeemed people all come together empty-handed.
I believe thus far we have presented a clear picture of how we should come together. Meeting is the proper church life. Meeting is the practical church life. Without this kind of meeting we don’t have the practical church life. What we have might be just a kind of organization with certain communal activities. But the proper church life should be a meeting life. Before coming to the meeting we must be laboring on Christ. We must reap Christ. We must have gathered some amount of Christ so that when we come to meet we come filled with Christ.
In the Life-study of Exodus we have seen what is a priest. A priest is one not only washed and clothed and redeemed, but also filled without and within. Before we were saved, we were dirty, we were naked, we were sinful in nature, and we were empty without and within, having nothing to satisfy God nor ourselves. But one day God sanctified us. He sanctified us by washing away all our dirt, by covering our nakedness, by redeeming us, and by filling us outwardly and inwardly. Now we are full of Christ. The washing water is Christ, the clothing is Christ, the redeeming is Christ, and the filling up is also Christ. Our hands are full of Christ, and our inward being is full of Christ, and we do have something to offer to God for His food that He may be satisfied. Even we have something to satisfy ourselves, to saturate us, and to transform us. This is God’s revelation. To meet is to be filled with Christ and to come together to feed God with Christ and to feed one another with Christ, even to feed yourself with Christ, and to rejoice in this feeding.