Prayer: O Lord Jesus, speak to us again tonight. We are all here listening attentively. Speak into every one of our hearts the words in the depths of Your being, the words concerning Your eternal economy. Lord, we worship You. You are the centrality and the universality of God. You are the Head of all things, and You are also our Savior. May You enlighten us, that we would not only know Your church, but would see Yourself, so that You would make home in our hearts. Lord, we give You all the ground. May You make home in us, be the Head in us, and fill us up, so that we would all be built up to be the fullness of God and His expression in this age. Tonight is the time for You to be glorified, for the enemy to be shamed, and for us to be blessed. Amen.
In the last chapter, we have seen how God’s Spirit of life has become the way for our spiritual living. I have been a Christian for over sixty years. Frankly speaking, during the first thirty years, I did not understand what spiritual living is all about. I knew the term, but I did not understand the reality of it, until one day when the Lord opened up a holy word to me from His Scriptures. This is 1 Corinthians 15:45b, which says that the last Adam became the life-giving Spirit.
That day, when I read this sentence, the words seemed to jump off of the page. I marveled that there is such a word in the Bible as the last Adam becoming the life-giving Spirit. This last Adam is the incarnated Christ ultimately becoming the life-giving Spirit. From that point on, I was completely enlightened. The whole heaven seemed to be opened to me. This burden began to come into me and upon me; I have no other message to give but to speak about the Lord as the Spirit of life. This has become not only the message I preach, but the hymns I have written. In 1961, I spent two months to write eighty-five hymns. They are all on Christ or on the church. The subjective ones are about life, and the deeper and still more subjective ones are about the Spirit.
Today, Christ is the Spirit. He is not only the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, but He is also the all-inclusive life-giving Spirit. This Spirit is the ultimate consummation of the processed Triune God. The first step of the process of the Triune God was in becoming flesh. The self-existing and ever-existing Triune God created the world and mankind. Then after four thousand years, He was conceived of the virgin Mary and was born of her after nine months of pregnancy, according to the law of the human life, to become One who is both God and man, a God-man. His name is Jesus, which means Jehovah as our Savior. He is also called Emmanuel, which means God being with us. He passed through thirty-three and a half years of human living. This was a long period of time. During the first thirty years, He lived in Nazareth in a poor carpenter’s home. During those years, this God-man must have worked as a carpenter.
After this, He appeared before men to fulfill His ministry. At the appointed time, He became the Passover Lamb. On the cross, He was willing to lay down His life. He entered death, passed through death, and had a tour of Hades. This also was a process. On the third day, He rose from the dead and entered into resurrection. He was transformed for the second time to become the life-giving Spirit. By this step, He reached His ultimate consummation.
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