God’s economy is His arrangement. The word economy is an appropriate translation (1 Tim. 1:4b). Its original meaning is a house law, meaning a household management and administration, and it has the derived meaning of an arrangement or economy in administration. God has an administrative arrangement. He arranges to have every one of the members of Christ to be God’s priest of the gospel (Rom. 15:16). Hence, no matter how much you feel you are unable to preach the gospel, God has made such an arrangement. Actually, as long as you are a regenerated person, having God’s life within, your ability to preach the gospel is there by birth, just as a person’s speaking ability is there by birth.
God desires that we preach the gospel to save sinners, offering them up as sacrifices. Paul said in Romans 15:16 that he was “a minister of Christ Jesus to the nations, ministering as a priest the gospel of God, that the offering of the nations might be acceptable, having been sanctified in the Holy Spirit.” Verses 5 and 9 of 1 Peter 2 also say that we are built up “into a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ....But you are...a royal priesthood...so that you may tell out the virtues of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.” These few passages show us that we are a holy priesthood and that each one of us is a priest of the gospel for the telling out of the virtues of God’s salvation and for the offering up of the nations as acceptable sacrifices to God. God’s virtues are the gospel that we preach. Hence, every one of us has to preach the gospel and lead the sinners to salvation, bringing them to God and offering them up as sacrifices. But this does not mean that you should go out to invite people to come listen to one man speaking. That is to be a Levite; it is not to be a priest. Today, we have to reconsider the service of the brothers and sisters. Formerly, we encouraged everyone to come arrange the chairs, clean the floor, mow the lawn, and trim the trees, thinking that by so doing, the whole church would be in service. But why did we not use that time to have everyone go and preach the gospel? For this, I take the lead to confess to you my mistake.
After a person has received the gospel and been saved and baptized, he is like a newborn child. What follows is his need to be nourished and cared for so that he will grow in the spiritual life to the point that he can offer himself up to God as a living sacrifice (John 21:15; 1 Thes. 2:7; 1 Pet. 2:2; Rom. 12:1). This is the second step. However, it is not enough for a child just to be nourished and cared for; there is still the need of teaching and perfecting. The same is true with the spiritual life. Hence, there is a third step, which is to teach and to perfect the saints for the work of the New Testament ministry unto the building up of the Body of Christ (Eph. 4:12). In the end, these perfected saints are to be the prophets, speaking for the Lord and supplying Christ to build up the church, completing God’s New Testament economy and fulfilling God’s eternal plan for the satisfaction of God’s desire in eternity (1 Cor. 14:1, 3-5). This is the revelation of the Bible.
However, our actual situation is not like this today. We have managed our meeting hall well; but our gospel preaching, home meetings, small group meetings, and prophesying are not doing as well. This is because we are accustomed to cleaning the meeting hall, but we are not accustomed to preaching the gospel and nourishing people. We even consider that we cannot do the job ourselves. This is a mistake in our leading in the past. What we have said above is what God has shown us during the past four and a half years as the proper way for saints to meet and serve according to His ordination and the biblical revelation.
Today there are two trees before us. One is the tree of life, and the other is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. One is genuine; the other is a counterfeit. In the market there are often counterfeit goods. Satan is the top counterfeiter. For this reason, we have to expose his evil intent, deception, and confusion.
Satan’s evil intent is to frustrate God’s desire of working Himself into man to be man’s life and everything. The New Testament shows us clearly that God lives in us and that we live in God (1 John 4:15). We know that He lives in us and that we live in Him by the life which He gave us. However, many people do not emphasize this point in their preaching of the gospel. This is the frustration of Satan’s evil intent. For this reason, we have compiled a booklet for the preaching of the gospel called The Mystery of Human Life. We did this because the center of our gospel preaching is God working Himself into man to be his life and everything.