Prayer: Lord, thank You for the constant cleansing of Your precious blood that we may receive mercy from You again to enter into Your word. Lord, we take You once again as our sin offering and as our trespass offering. By the precious blood that You shed as the offering, we come forward boldly before You. We ask that You open Your word to us. We ask also that You open Yourself to us, and we desire to open our whole being to You. May there be good fellowship between You and us. Lord, bring each one of us into the spirit and into Your grace. We pray that You will give us the word of grace that we may be nourished, supplied, enlightened, strengthened, and comforted within.
Lord, we beseech You to give each one of us a living word. What we need is Your word, not man’s word. Our speaking can neither help nor supply life to others. Lord, only You Yourself and Your word are the source of life to man. We pray that You will supply us so that each one of us may not go home empty-handed but may receive a supply, go home fully filled, and be full of You within, full of light, full of grace, and full of peace. Lord, anoint each one of us and be with each one of us. Bless the future of every one of us, and remember our families and our undertakings. We commit all these matters into Your gracious hand. In Your victorious name we pray, Amen.
I truly have a burden to show you from the Bible, the Lord’s word, what the Lord’s salvation is. What we have spoken in the past again and again from many sides all converges at this central point. Although many people have taken the Bible as a sacred writing, everyone reads according to his own way, so the understanding differs one from another. Much of our understanding of the Bible is natural and religious concepts. We think that as human beings existing in the universe we certainly need to worship a God who is in heaven, and then once we worship this God who is in heaven, He becomes our restriction. As a young boy I studied in an old elementary school where we had a class on “self cultivation,” which was actually a religious subject. The purpose of religion is to regulate man’s heart. One good thing about religion is that it regulates and restricts the human heart. Because the human heart is too wild, like a horse running wild that easily causes problems, mankind needs religion to restrict the heart.
Today I want to tell you that the salvation revealed to us in the Bible is not religion but the living God Himself. This living God is the sovereign Lord who created the heavens, the earth, and all things. The heavens, the earth, and all things did not come out of themselves but were created by God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth. In order to save us and to enter into us as our life, this God Himself came to be our salvation. Over nineteen hundred years ago, He came to this earth to be a man. He came to be born of a virgin in a manger. Then He grew up in a poor family in Nazareth of Galilee, and He passed through thirty years of human living in that poor family.
When He was thirty years of age, He went throughout the land doing the work of announcing God. He announced God to people, and He also lived out and expressed God for men to see. He worked in this way for three and a half years to announce and express God. Then He went to the cross to die for man and man’s sin, shedding His precious blood to accomplish redemption. He was buried, and after three days He was resurrected from the dead. Since He was God, He possessed eternal life, against which death cannot prevail; thus, it was not possible for Him to be held by death. When He went into death, He entered voluntarily in order to accomplish redemption. After accomplishing His great redemptive work, He walked out of death and was resurrected.
In resurrection He became the life-giving Spirit. At this point, He is not only our Redeemer and our Savior, but even more He is our Lord of life. This Lord of life is the life-giving Spirit. Today, He is the Lord of the universe, our Redeemer, and our Savior. Moreover, He is the life-giving Spirit who enters into all those who believe into Him to be their life and life supply. This is the salvation revealed to us in the Bible.
This is not a religion but the living God as our redemption and our salvation. Moreover, He is the life-giving Spirit, who has entered into us to be our life. Today, this Savior not only is seated in the heavens but also lives in us. The most central revelation in the New Testament is that the Lord of the universe, who created the heavens and the earth, became our Redeemer and our Savior and that today, as the all-inclusive life-giving Spirit, He dwells in our spirit to be our life.