The washing in verse 26 does not deal mainly with sins, but deals with spots and wrinkles. Spots are something out of the natural life, and wrinkles are signs of oldness. Only the water of life can metabolically wash away such defects by the transformation of life. All the spots and wrinkles in the church will be washed away through the inner cleansing of the water in the Word. The more we come to the Word, the more we are nourished. The nourishment we receive brings about an inner cleansing from the defects caused by the natural life and from the wrinkles caused by oldness. We all need such an organic, metabolic washing to take away our defects and the marks of our oldness. As the church is washed organically and metabolically in this way, the church is renewed and without blemish.
Such a washing takes place entirely by life and by the nourishment of life. Let us be encouraged to abide in Christ as the source of nourishment and to contact the Word to receive the nourishing element so that we may be washed organically and metabolically from all defects and oldness. By means of such a washing, the church will be perfected and become glorious.
It is such a glorious church that Christ will present to Himself at His coming back. Glory is God expressed. Hence, to be glorious is to be God’s expression. Eventually, the church presented to Christ will be a God-expressing one. Such a church will also be holy and without blemish. To be holy is to be saturated and transformed with Christ, and to be without blemish is to be spotless and without wrinkle, with nothing of the natural life of our old man.
The church that comes out of Christ will go back to Christ just as Eve came out of Adam and went back to Adam. As Eve became one flesh with Adam, so the church which goes back to Christ will be one spirit with Christ.
The church presented to Christ will be glorious; it will be the expression, the manifestation, of God. For the church to become glorious means that the church becomes God’s expression. Because the nourishing, the cherishing, and the sanctifying will cause the church to be saturated with the essence of God, the church will eventually become the Bride to express God. Every local church today must be God’s expression. The only way for us to become His expression is to be continually saturated with the divine essence. If we would experience this saturation, we need Christ’s nourishing, cherishing, and sanctifying.
We have pointed out that the glorious church, the church that expresses God, will be holy and without blemish. To be holy is to be separated to the Lord from common things and then saturated and permeated with the divine nature, with all that God is. The church that has become holy in this way will also be without blemish. Blemish here is like a defect in a precious stone. This defect comes from mixture within the stone. If we would be pure, we must be without mixture; that is, we must not have anything other than God in our being. One day, the church will be like this. It will be not only clean and pure, but also without blemish, without mixture. The church will be the expression of God Himself mingled with a resurrected, uplifted, and transformed humanity. This is the glorious church, the church that is holy and without blemish. In the future such a glorious church will be presented by Christ to Himself. Today, however, the church is undergoing the process of Christ’s nourishing, cherishing, and sanctifying.