If you have seen the points from the previous lessons and practice accordingly, you will have much experience of life and growth in life. Many people claim to be in life. Are they really in life? Are they experiencing life every day? Are they full-grown in life? How can you tell if you and others are people of life? We do not want to see you deceived by anyone, especially yourself in this matter.
Every life bears fruits or results. If you plant an apple tree, apples will be produced. A pear tree will bear pears. Every life brings forth fruit by its life power according to its life shape. What about the life of God? According to the first sixteen lessons, the life of God is God Himself. It is divine, eternal, and indestructible. It is the highest and most wonderful life in the universe. It must bear divine, eternal, indestructible, the highest, and the most wonderful fruit. Is this your case?
In this lesson [we want to see the truth of the two kinds of fruit out of the divine life. According to the revelation of the Scriptures, there is a divine principle set up by God as His design, as His economy. This design is that God wants to dispense Himself into us human beings to live in us as our life. This divine life is a producing life, producing two kinds of fruit. God’s intention for man is revealed in the first two chapters of Genesis. God created man according to His image with the intention that man could be His vessel to contain and express Him (1:26). God Himself wanted to be man’s contents. He brought man to the tree of life in Genesis 2 because He had the desire to be within man as man’s life (vv. 8-9). This unique tree of life, which was seen at the beginning of the Bible, is also seen at its conclusion in Revelation 22. It signifies God Himself as life to us.]
[In Revelation 2:7 the Lord said, “To him who overcomes, to him I will give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.’’ According to the entire book of Revelation, the paradise of God in 2:7 is the New Jerusalem (3:12; 21:2, 10; 22:1-2, 14, 19), of which the church is a foretaste today. The paradise of God is today’s church and tomorrow’s New Jerusalem. Today we are the church, and in the future the church will be the New Jerusalem. Today’s church life is God’s paradise. In the church life, we have some taste that we are in the paradise of God. At times we may be arguing or speaking corrupt things. But while we are meeting together, singing, praising, and praying, we have the feeling that we are in paradise. Sometimes in the church meetings we are in a kind of ecstasy. When I look at the faces of the saints in a meeting, nearly every face is smiling. This is because we are happy in the paradise of God. This world is a terrible place. Even many of the unbelievers agree with this. In today’s human society, one does not have the taste of paradise; instead, one may have the taste of hell. But when we are in the church life, we are in paradise. The paradise of God is located in the local churches! To be in the church life is to live a life in paradise. Eventually the consummation of the church life in the age to come and in eternity will be the New Jerusalem. In the New Jerusalem is the tree of life growing in the river of water of life for our eating and drinking. That will be our enjoyment in eternity. Even today we have the privilege of eating the tree of life and of “drinking at the Fountain that never runs dry’’ (see Hymns, #322). In the church life, we are in the paradise of God enjoying Christ as the tree of life.
Today, Christ as the embodiment of God is our tree of life, and this tree of life is growing in us. The Lord Jesus told a parable of a sower going out to sow the seed (Mark 4:1-20). He is both the sower and the seed of life. He sows Himself as the seed of life into us, the earth. We are the earth that grows Christ. On the day we were regenerated, Christ was sown into our being. Our very being is the earth that contains Christ and grows Christ. We have received the divine life, and this very productive divine life is growing within us. We have to grow Christ.]
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