Prayer: Lord, we thank You that You have brought us back again by gathering us into Your name. We trust in Your blessing. You helped us last night in one way. This morning we look unto You for further help maybe in another way. Thank You, Lord Jesus. You are the One in whom we trust all the time. We needed You yesterday, and this morning we need You again. We need You every moment. Be with us. Show us Your presence. May You be so dear and so near to us. Each one of us needs Your presence. Visit us, Lord. Visit us with Your mercy, grace, blessing, light, life, strength, and power. Thank You, Lord Jesus, You are the Head. You are the Lord of all. You are God's centrality and universality. You are our center and our everything. We trust in You for this meeting. Amen.
Before going on to see the revelation of the Body of Christ in Ephesians 2, I want to share a further word on this revelation in Ephesians 1. I have shared messages on the book of Ephesians in conferences and trainings probably more than ten times in diverse places. We may feel that Ephesians is a familiar book to us. Some may wonder why we need to come back to Ephesians again. To explain this I would like to use the illustration of our physical body. To know the outward features and appearance of our body is easy, but to know the intrinsic composition and structure of our body is difficult. The medical field is very difficult because there are many intrinsic, mysterious things in a person's body. It is easy for us to declare that the Body of Christ is the fullness of the One who fills all in all. Even a second grader can say this, but what does it mean? I do not have the confidence that we understand this. We need to see what the Body of Christ is intrinsically. My burden is to help us all to get into an intrinsic view and an intrinsic apprehension of the Body of Christ.
I would like to summarize what we covered in the previous chapter. We saw God the Father's impartation into His chosen and predestinated people. God the Father's impartation is of two items. First, God the Father imparted, dispensed, His nature into us. We know this because Ephesians 1:4 says that God chose us in Christ "before the foundation of the world to be holy." The phrase to be holy indicates that God has to put His nature into us. God, however, did not put His nature into us in a wild way. He did it in a planting way. God has planted His holy nature into our being.
In the previous message, we pointed out that only one in the whole universe is holy. Holiness is nothing less than God Himself. Holiness is God. Then how could we be holy? The only way is for God to plant Himself into us as a small seed. At the moment we believed in the Lord Jesus, God the Spirit planted or sowed Himself as a little seed into our being. This little seed is organic. Any organic seed of life grows and increases. It is the same with God as the seed within us. This divine seed grows within us gradually until our whole being is sanctified. Eventually, we will be saturated wholly with God's nature as the seed. Very few Christians have ever seen this. Some may have seen that God's choosing is to make us holy, but they have not seen that to be made holy by God implies that God has to plant, to sow, Himself into us as the very seed of holiness. This is a great thing.