Prayer: Lord, how we thank You for all Your divine provisions. We thank You for Your holy Word. We thank You for Your Holy Spirit. We also thank You for Your precious blood. Without the Word, we would be in darkness. Without You as the life-giving Spirit, we would be dead. Without Your precious blood, we would be under condemnation. Thank You, Lord, that day by day we have these three great items of Your divine provision for our enjoyment. We are enjoying Your cleansing with Your precious blood to free us from our sins, we are enjoying Your Spirit to make us living, and we are enjoying the Bible as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path to direct us. Thank You that we are in the light and not in darkness. Give us a clear sky with an open heaven. Lord, we desire to open ourselves to You as You open Yourself to us. We pray that Your presence would be with us. Give us the feeling that You are here so that we may enjoy You and share Your riches. Amen.
The last two chapters were a preparation for the fellowship in this chapter and the next chapter. They contain the most crucial fellowship in this book. Now that we have seen the life needed for the Lord’s present recovery, we need to see the way to practice the Lord’s present recovery.
We saw in chapter one that the present advance of the Lord’s recovery is first to recover the organic building up of the Body of Christ. Second, the Lord desires to recover the perfecting of the saints that they may do the same work of the New Testament ministry that the gifted persons do to build up the Body of Christ organically. Third, the Lord is recovering the church meeting in mutuality. In some places we can see these three items being carried out. We have seen the Lord recovering the organic building up of His Body, and we have seen the perfecting of the saints by the gifted persons that all the saints may do the same kind of work that the gifted persons do. What the Apostle Paul did, we can be perfected to do today. We have also seen the recovery of the church meetings in mutuality in some places. When fifty to one hundred saints come together, all of them can prophesy. To prophesy in 1 Corinthians 14 is not to predict but to speak for the Lord, to speak forth the Lord, and to speak the Lord into others, which is to dispense the rich Christ into all those attending the meeting. We have seen this in some places, but it has not become a widespread practice in the churches, so we have to endeavor to go on. In order to have the above three items adequately recovered among us in the Lord’s recovery, we have to do four things, which are the four steps of the way to practice the Lord’s present recovery.
The first step of the way to practice the Lord’s present recovery is to save sinners by contacting them where they are. Many people are home in the evenings and on the weekends. That is the right place for us to contact them. In Matthew 28:19a the Lord Jesus charged us to go and disciple the nations. Then in Luke 10 we see that we need to go to visit the homes to find the sons of peace (vv. 3, 5-6).
We should not ask people to come to us more than we go to them. We need to go to impart Christ into the repenting and believing sinners (Gal. 1:16). Much of the preaching today is that people need to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus; otherwise, they will suffer eternal perdition. But the main aspect of our preaching of the gospel is for imparting Christ into others. We need to impart the living Christ with all of His riches into the poor sinners. After imparting Christ into the repenting and believing sinners, we need to baptize them into the Triune God (Matt. 28:19b). This is a wonderful, divine traffic to bring the Triune God into someone and to bring him into the Triune God. By this traffic a sinner will be mingled with the Triune God. We need to go to impart Christ into people and then baptize them into the Triune God. To save sinners by contacting them where they are is to bear fruit as an issue of the genuine enjoyment of Christ (John 15:5, 16a). The evidence of our abiding in Christ and enjoying Christ genuinely is that we are bearing fruit.