Prayer: Lord, we look to You that You would open to us Yourself with Your Word. You are our Father, and we are Your children. We come to You with a sincere heart, a seeking spirit, and an open mind to seek You so that we may receive mercy and find grace for timely help. Lord, we do express to You our longing heart. How much we need You and the covering and cleansing of Your precious, prevailing blood. Even more, we need You as the anointing to us. O Lord, we commit ourselves into Your hand. May these days be full of light and life that we may be brought into Your vision to see something heavenly and eternal. Do something definitely in these days, not for us but for Yourself, Your testimony, and Your recovery. By Your headship and lordship we claim all the seeking saints for the recovery of the testimony of the church in these last days. Lord, we praise You because we have the assurance that You are moving in a deeper way and in a mighty way. We trust in You for everything that You have committed to us. We say today that we are nothing; we are impotent and incompetent, but we trust in You and put our confidence in You. At this very moment cover us, head us up in Yourself, and fight the battle for Your kingdom. We pray, Lord, that You will bind the strong man, the enemy, to release what is Yours from his hand. We ask this in Your name. Amen.
In these messages we are covering the line of Christ as life and the church, the Body of Christ, as the expression of Christ. These two items are the urgent need today. As Christians, as reborn ones, we must see God’s revelation concerning His eternal purpose. There must come a day when we definitely see that in this universe God has a divine plan, an eternal plan, which He made in eternity and for eternity. If we do not see this, we will be Christians whose condition is below the divine standard. In order to be up to the standard, we must see the eternal plan revealed to us in the whole of the Scriptures.
In man there is a natural concept concerning God and the divine things. When we were sinners, we had no heart for God and no thought about God. We did not care for the divine, spiritual things; on the contrary, we were very much occupied by the worldly, sinful things and the desires of the flesh (Eph. 2:1-3; Titus 3:3). However, when we turned to the Lord, immediately we exercised our natural understanding to comprehend and apprehend the divine and spiritual things. We may think that our natural understanding is right, but we must realize that it is absolutely wrong. Although the natural concept seems good, it is very dangerous and is a great hindrance to our seeing God’s eternal plan.
When a person repents, that is, when he turns his mind toward the Lord, immediately he has many concepts. First, since the Lord has been good and gracious to him, he feels that he owes the Lord a great debt. Second, he decides to love the Lord and is willing to even sacrifice his life for the Lord. Third, he decides to read the Scriptures because he feels that there are many things he needs to know and to keep. Fourth, he decides to do only good things and to adjust and correct himself as a new man. Last, he may even decide to serve the Lord in the church or preach the gospel. Whenever a person turns to the Lord, he will naturally have concepts like this. However, such concepts are not of the Lord. To hold such concepts is to be taken advantage of by the enemy, who would hinder us from knowing the Lord in a real and spiritual way.
The Lord has a plan, and the center of this plan is that God in Christ as the Spirit desires to mingle Himself with us. The carrying out of God’s plan requires our cooperation. We were created as vessels for God, but God did not create us as vessels without life, feelings, intentions, desires, or understanding. We were created as living vessels. To fill a glass with water is easy because the glass is without any understanding, desire, thought, or intention. Thus, it is easy to deal with. However, as all parents know, to give medicine to a child is rather difficult. Sometimes parents need to grasp a young child and hold his mouth open before they can give him medicine. This is necessary simply because the child is living. He has his own intention, thought, and desire, and he does not want to cooperate with his parents. God made us as living vessels, but when He comes to fill us with Himself, many times we do not cooperate with Him.
The most glorious and pleasing thing to God is our cooperation with Him in allowing Him to fill us with Himself. Sooner or later we will discover that we are persons who are willing to act by ourselves in doing many things for God, but we are not willing to cooperate with God. Often in the past forty years I had a desire to do things for God. Yet in my innermost being I had the sense that I should stop and open myself in order to give Him the cooperation so that He might come in, occupy me, and fill me. Truthfully, although I knew I should do this, I did not have the intention or the desire to do it. I was like a child who knows he should take his medicine but has no desire to do so. A child would rather do many things for his parents than cooperate with their demand to take his medicine. This is our real condition before God. We like to help people, preach the gospel, and do many things for the Lord, but as we are doing these things, deep within us there is a sense that we must stop ourselves from our doing, open ourselves to cooperate with the Lord, and let the Lord operate on us.