In John 4:24 the Lord Jesus said clearly that God is Spirit and that those who worship Him must worship in spirit. This is the basic principle. To worship God is just to contact God, to receive God, to enjoy God, and to experience God. However, very few among the human race today know that God is a Spirit and that we have been created by God with a spirit. God has ordained that we should contact Him and receive Him by the exercise of our human spirit.

In God's creation there are principles. For instance, if we want to see different colors, we must use our eyes. Suppose I were blind. Could I hear the colors? Could I smell them? Certainly not! In order to see colors, we must use the proper organ. The principle is the same in relation to us and God. God is real, yet some dare to say that there is no God. Of course, if we do not exercise our spirit, surely there is no God to us. We cannot touch God by means of our physical body. Neither can we realize Him by our mentality, by our mind, for this is not the proper organ to use in contacting God. God is Spirit. If we would worship Him, contacting Him and receiving Him, we must exercise our spirit. Thank God that in His creation He made three crucial, equally important matters—the heavens, the earth, and our spirit. Our spirit, therefore, is as crucial, as important, as the heavens and the earth.

Zechariah is a book unveiling Christ as God's center and circumference, yet this Christ is intimately involved with human history. Not just anyone can know this One, but God's chosen people who realize that they have a spirit can know Him. In reading the book of Zechariah and in contacting the Christ revealed in this book, we must first know that we have a spirit. Then we need to exercise our spirit to pray, saying, "Lord, I want to gain the Christ who is unveiled in Zechariah." If we exercise our spirit in this way, we will sense something living touching us deep within. This is why there is in this book such a verse as 12:1, a verse that charges us to pay full attention to the receiver within us, our human spirit, that we may receive the Christ revealed in the book of Zechariah.

God's purpose is for us to receive Christ. However, Christ is complex in all that He is. He is all-inclusive, because He is so many items. Furthermore, this all-inclusive Christ is very involved with history, politics, and governments. How can we understand such a One? The only way is, after reading and studying, to turn ourselves to prayer. When we turn ourselves to prayer, we exercise our spirit. At that moment, Christ imparts Himself into us. This is the heavenly, divine dispensing. Through this dispensing we receive Christ as our life, our light, our patience, our love, our everything.

Though Zechariah was a young man, he knew the secret of contacting God to receive what God has revealed. We all need to learn of him to exercise our spirit to receive God and to receive what He has revealed.

Let us now proceed to consider the prophecy in chapter twelve.