No matter what our nationality may be, we all unconsciously or subconsciously hold to certain principles. We all have our own basic principles or elementary rules. For example, we may follow the principle of always being nice and never losing our temper. Suppose an unmarried sister living in the sisters’ house has such a principle to regulate her daily life. If she loses her temper, she will be filled with regret. She may even cry in remorse because she has broken one of her basic principles.
When a sister is about to get married, she may vow to herself that she will never lose her temper with her husband. She may never tell others that she has made such a vow, but God knows about it. Furthermore, this vow may become an elementary principle which governs this sister’s married life. From the first day of her marriage, she walks according to this elementary principle. However, to take such a principle as our elementary principle is wrong. The only elementary principle we should take is that of walking according to the new creation. Instead of caring about our temper, we should simply live a new creation as sons of God. Rather than practice niceness or submissiveness, we should practice the divine sonship, the new creation.
The new creation must be our basic principle, our elementary rule. The Son of God with the divine life and the divine nature dwells in us to be our enjoyment. As a result, we now have the divine element, even the processed God Himself within us. What a tremendous difference it makes to take this element as our basic principle and walk according to it!
When I was young, I once heard a missionary say that the teachings of the Bible and those of Confucius are the same. He went on to tell us that Confucius teaches us to honor our parents and that the Bible does likewise. Then he went on to encourage us to accept Christianity, since its teachings were the same as those of Confucius. When I heard this, I said to myself, “If this is true, why should we accept Christianity when we already have the teachings of Confucius?” What blindness to say that the teachings of Confucius and those of the Bible are the same!
The Bible does not teach us to seek the help of the Holy Spirit to behave properly as God’s creatures. According to the revelation in the Bible, God’s intention is to make us His sons. In His creation of mankind, God made the necessary preparations to reach this goal. He created man in His image and after His likeness. He designed and created man as a vessel to contain Him. Because we became fallen, God sent His Son to redeem us. When we believed in Christ, God sent the Spirit of His Son into us to regenerate us and make us sons of God. Now the Spirit, the ultimate consummation of the Triune God, dwells in our spirit to work, move, act, and anoint us that we may be sons of God in a full way. As God’s sons, we need to walk according to this Spirit, taking the Spirit as our elementary rule, our basic principle. To walk by the Spirit in this way is to walk according to the elementary principles.
We should not take ethical standards or religious requirements as our principle. Rather, our elementary principle should be the new creation, the divine sonship with the life and nature of God. Day by day, we need to take the sonship, the new creation, as our elementary principle and walk according to it. If we do this, we shall grow in God’s sonship unto maturity. Then one day we shall be in glory, and God will shine forth from within us. In this way we shall be a vast, universal, corporate expression of the Triune God. That will be the consummation of the divine sonship. In our daily life we should practice living according to this sonship as our basic principle, our elementary rule. Praise the Lord that it is possible for us to walk in this way!