Beginning in August of 1988, the Lord has been speaking to us concerning His organic Body and the organic building up of His Body. In this book we want to see the Lord’s advanced recovery according to His present speaking.
The divine revelation of the New Testament was fully completed with Paul’s ministry and John’s mending ministry. The New Testament tells us that at the end of Paul’s ministry, the church began to degrade and become deformed from the divine revelation (2 Tim. 1:15; 2:16—3:13; 4:10, 14-16). Later, the Apostle John wrote to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3, telling them to repent. The Lord charged the churches to repent of the degradation into which they had fallen. Within the first century were the completing of the divine revelation and the degradation of the church life. The Lord came in to point out the degradation of the church and to sound out a call for some overcomers who would come back to the enjoyment of Christ as the tree of life (2:7), the hidden manna (2:17), and the feast (3:20). According to church history, the Lord’s recovery with His overcomers began in the second century. Even within such a short time after the completion of the divine revelation, the church fell into degradation, so there was the need of a recovery.
Brother E. H. Broadbent in his book The PilgrimChurch pointed out that the line of the Lord’s recovery started in the second century and has continued throughout the centuries. Eventually, at the time of the Reformation with Martin Luther, the recovery of the Lord came into a definite form. The Lord used Martin Luther to recover the basic truth of justification by faith. In the seventeenth century, some within the Catholic Church reacted to the deadness of the reformed churches. These were the mystics, whom the Lord used to recover the experiences of the inner life. The Lord went on in the eighteenth century with Zinzendorf to recover the initial stage of the church life in the unity of the Holy Spirit. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the Lord raised up the Brethren in England under the leadership of John Nelson Darby to recover the church life in a fuller way. This recovered church life might be considered as the fulfillment of the epistle to Philadelphia in Revelation 3. The Brethren began in 1828, but within ninety years they were divided into about one hundred divisions.
In the early part of the twentieth century, the Lord caught a young man in China named Watchman Nee, and the Lord used him to continue His recovery. This advance in the Lord’s recovery struck God’s enemy, so His enemy rose up against it. Mainland China was lost into the hands of the communists, who were absolutely against the Lord’s interests on this earth. Brother Nee was put into prison in 1952 and died there in 1972. When mainland China was about to be lost, I was sent to Taiwan in 1949, and the Lord began His testimony on that island. From that time to 1958 on the island of Taiwan, we basically kept what we had seen and received of the Lord through Brother Nee’s ministry. In those years, we did not have much advance in the Lord’s recovery.
From 1958 to 1989, at least ten big divine items have been recovered as a continuation of the Lord’s recovery in the years before. The first item is eating Christ, enjoying Christ, and experiencing Christ. Eating Christ is for enjoying Christ, and enjoying Christ is for experiencing Christ. The second item is that Christ in His resurrection became a life-giving Spirit. The Lord showed us this particular point in the divine revelation in 1 Corinthians 15:45b. The third item is calling on the name of the Lord—“O Lord Jesus.” This practice is fully recorded in many verses in both the Old and New Testaments, but we saw this and practiced it only within the past thirty years. We taste the inward sweetness of the Lord when we call “O Lord Jesus.” The fourth item is that the Triune God has been processed and consummated. The fifth item is the all-inclusive, compounded, life-giving, indwelling, sevenfold, and consummated Spirit as the consummation of the processed Triune God. The sixth item is the dispensing of the processed Triune God. The processed Triune God is dispensing Himself into His people. The seventh item is that the processed Triune God has been dispensed into the transformed, tripartite man. We saw this truth in Romans 8. The eighth item is that the riches of Christ after being enjoyed by the saints become the fullness of Christ for His expression. The fullness of Christ is the church, the Body of Christ as the expression of Christ. The ninth item is the mingling of the processed Triune God with the sanctified man. The tenth item is God’s New Testament economy.