The contents of our fellowship in this book will be to study the new way for the Lord’s new move. Our desire is to see and enter into the God-ordained way to practice the New Testament economy. Related to this practice, there are two crucial items. The first item is that we go out to visit people in their homes. We are not merely going to knock on people’s doors, but we are going to visit people in the same way that the Lord Jesus did. He came far away from the heavens to this earth to visit people, so He also gives us the order or commandment to go to visit people (Matt. 28:19; Luke 10:3). Because we are going to visit people in their homes, we need to knock on their doors. The second thing we have to do in the new way is to set up home meetings with the ones we have just baptized. Two words are very crucial in the new way for the Lord’s new move: go and home. We go to visit people in their homes, and we set up home meetings with them. We need to go to people’s homes and bring the meetings to them.
All of us need to dream about the new way for the Lord’s new move so that God’s New Testament economy can be carried out and practiced. We need to learn to dream for the Lord Jesus. The Lord’s new way is a dream that we all need to be brought into. I have been dreaming this dream, and my burden is to bring you into this dream. We all have to bear the responsibility and the burden to bring this dream to the whole earth. If we are faithful by the Lord’s mercy to practice the New Testament economy according to the God-ordained way, we will see the fulfillment of this dream.
In order for us to practice the New Testament economy, we need to see the divine economy. This economy is clearly revealed in the holy Word (1 Tim. 1:4; Eph. 1:10; 3:9; Col. 1:25; 1 Cor. 9:17). The center of the entire New Testament is God’s divine economy. God’s economy is God’s plan, His divine arrangement, to dispense Himself into His chosen people. Our going out to visit people by knocking on their doors is for this economy and should be linked with the divine economy. Since the Lord brought me to the United States in the early sixties, every message I have given has touched this point of God’s economy. I was sent to the United States by being linked to this economy, and I did not do anything that was independent of this economy.
When we go out, we must hold on to the concept and deep feeling that we are going out to visit people for God’s economy. Without knocking on people’s doors, it would be hard for us to seek the sons of peace for God’s eternal economy (Luke 10:3-6). God’s eternal economy involves and includes millions of sons of peace. These sons of peace need us to go to visit them in their homes. We go to knock on people’s doors by having ourselves linked to the divine economy, linked to eternity, linked to the heavenlies. We need a clear vision and deep impression concerning God’s economy, which involves the completion of Christ and the propagation of the pneumatic Christ for the producing of the church (Eph. 3:6-11).
We need to ask the Lord to grant us a vision of the completion of Christ. Some may ask, “Does Christ need to be completed? Isn’t He perfect?” In answering such a question, we have to differentiate between what it is to be completed and what it is to be perfected. We human beings all need to be perfected, but God’s Christ is eternally perfect. He does not need any perfection. Such an eternally perfect Christ, however, needs a completion. To help us understand this, I would ask, “Before Christ was incarnated, did He have the human nature?” Concerning this matter of having the human nature, He needed to be completed. Before Christ was incarnated, He was eternally perfect but not complete because He was still short of the human nature. Christ passed through the process of incarnation to possess the human nature (John 1:14).
The four Gospels have many stories about Jesus in them, and when I was young, my mother used to tell me these stories. But very few New Testament readers realize that the four Gospels are not merely composed of stories about Jesus, but are books that show us the completion of Christ. The Gospels show us a particular Person living on this earth and passing through human living. In order for Jesus to be God’s anointed One, the Christ, He needed to have a human living (Phil. 2:7-8). If He had never passed through human living, how could He be our Shepherd, our High Priest, or our Helper, our Comforter? Because Christ needed to be completed in this matter, He became a man and passed through human living. Luke 2:40 and 52 tell us how the little child Jesus grew and advanced in wisdom and stature. His divine wisdom matched His growth in physical stature. He was a human boy, growing among human beings. He passed through this growth for thirty-three and a half years. This process of human living was necessary for Him to pass through so that He could be God’s Christ to carry out God’s eternal commission to fulfill God’s divine economy.
After passing through the process of human living, Christ went through the process of crucifixion (Acts 2:23). In order for Him to be God’s Anointed to carry out God’s eternal commission, He needed such a death. His death annulled all the negative things and solved all the problems in the universe. After His death, He entered into resurrection (Acts 2:24). Christ was not only life but also resurrection (John 11:25). However, it was not until the day of His resurrection that He passed through resurrection and entered into resurrection in His physical experience. He was Jesus in the form of the physical flesh for thirty-three and a half years, but He needed to be in the form of the Spirit. He needed to be not only the physical Christ, but also the pneumatic Christ. He passed through resurrection and came out of that resurrection to be in another form, in the form of the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45). That He could be such a Christ with a body of flesh yet resurrected in the divine life is a wonderful mystery (John 20:19-20). Thank the Lord that in the entire universe there is such a resurrection.
To fulfill God’s eternal purpose, Christ needed to be divinely equipped with these four items: incarnation, human living, the all-inclusive crucifixion, and the wonderful resurrection. Now we have a Christ with this great and divine equipment. In His resurrection He became a life-giving Spirit. We have to see the four Gospels in the light of the completion of Christ. The four Gospels do not merely tell us stories of Jesus performing miraculous things. We have to see that the greatest miracles are the incarnation, human living, death, and resurrection of the wonderful Jesus. Today Jesus is different than He was before His incarnation. Through His incarnation, He partook of blood and flesh (Heb. 2:14) to become a man. Through His crucifixion and in His resurrection He was transfigured from the flesh into a life-giving Spirit.
On the evening of the day of resurrection, the Lord came with a resurrected body (Luke 24:37-40; 1 Cor. 15:44) into the room where the disciples were with the doors shut. We may say that He could do this because He was a Spirit, yet He showed His disciples His hands and His side (John 20:20). After eight days, the Lord appeared to His disciples again in the room where the doors were shut. He asked Thomas to touch His hands and His side so that he would believe (20:27). Our limited mentality cannot comprehend this, but it is a fact. If someone asks you whether Jesus was a physical person when He appeared to the disciples in resurrection, the best response is, “I don’t know.” This Jesus is a person whom we can never know with our limited mentality. In His resurrected body it is hard to say whether Christ is physical or spiritual, but we do know that in the universe there is such a marvelous thing as the resurrection of Jesus.
Now Christ is fully equipped with incarnation, human living, crucifixion, and resurrection. In resurrection He became a life-giving Spirit, the essential Spirit of life (1 Cor. 15:45; John 20:22). His becoming such a Spirit through His death and resurrection cut a new and living way for Him to impart life into us and for us to receive Him as this very life. Without such a new and living way cut by His death and resurrection, there would be no way for God to impart His divine life into any sinners and no way for any sinner to receive God as his life. The new and living way is the way cut by Jesus’ death and resurrection. Now He is the life-giving Spirit, the very pneumatic Christ, the essential Spirit of life.
The next step in the completion of Christ was His ascension (Acts 2:33-36). He entered not only into resurrection but also into ascension. We have a Christ in ascension, and we are in a Christ who is in ascension. He is in ascension, and since we are in Him, we are also in ascension (Eph. 2:6). Whenever I speak, I have the realization that I am speaking from ascension and in ascension. In resurrection Christ became a life-giving Spirit, the essential Spirit of life, and in ascension He became a powerful Christ, the economical Spirit of power (Acts 2:1-4, 33b). In resurrection He is the life-giving Spirit in the essence of the divine Being. But if He had never entered into ascension, He would not have received the authority. As a man, He would have never been enthroned (Heb. 12:2b) and crowned with glory and honor (Heb. 2:9). Today, Christ is a person in ascension who has been glorified, enthroned, and entrusted with all the authority in heaven and on earth (Matt. 28:18).