In the past few messages we saw how God was processed to become the life-giving Spirit. Regardless of time and place, everyone who has believed in the Lord has been baptized into this Spirit and has been given to drink this Spirit. Such a person is in the Body of Christ and is a constituent of the church. Thus, Christ is in such a person, living in him, being formed in him, and even making His home in his heart. At this stage, his entire being is filled unto all the fullness of God. Furthermore, we see how this person is also sanctified by the gradual dispensing of the divine element into him, and through this dispensing he is transformed and ultimately conformed to the image of the Son of God.
If we have truly seen this light, we will have to confess that these important points were all lost during the preceding centuries. In today’s Christianity you can hardly hear anything concerning these subjective truths. What you hear are only human concepts, religious thoughts, or ethical teachings. Therefore, we must see that these subjective truths are what God desires to recover today. Although I know that in the past you heard some of these points, we must confess that our practical experience is insufficient. We do not have enough experience of allowing the divine element to sanctify and transform our entire being, and we have very little of the metabolic, organic transformation. We easily fall into the concept of outwardly improving our behavior. After believing in the Lord, we love Him, pursue Him, live in the church life, and even participate in His service. At this time, we often spontaneously try to improve or change ourselves. Our intention is proper and pure; we want to live before the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints and be like one who serves God in the church. Nevertheless, we must admit that these ideas are still human concepts and religious thoughts which also have the flavor of ethics. They are not our subjective experience of the God who was processed through incarnation, death, and resurrection to be joined with us that we may become a part of Himself. We still lack this kind of experience. Therefore, I hope that first we will speak these things, and by speaking them over and over they will become our experience.
The stratagem of Satan is always to take away what we have heard. This is similar to what we are told by the Lord Jesus in the parable in Matthew 13, that the word of the kingdom of the heavens is like the seeds that fell beside the way and were immediately devoured by the birds. The principle today is the same. The messages we preach are not religious or ethical doctrines, nor are they according to the natural human concept; rather, they are out of God’s revelation. However, we must confess that even though we have heard these words, we still lack the subjective experience. Therefore, I hope that these words will be recovered among us first. We need to fellowship about them and speak them again and again, so that we may truly understand what it means for us to be baptized into the Triune God, into Christ, into the death of Christ, and into His Body, and to be given to drink one Spirit. We must also understand what it is for Christ to live in us, be formed in us, and make His home in us that we may be filled unto all the fullness of God. We also need to comprehend what it means for the divine element to increase in us in order to sanctify and saturate us that we may be organically transformed and thereby be conformed to the image of the Son of God. Ultimately, we will be inwardly filled with Him, we will abide in Him, and we will become the one Body, which is the church. I repeat that we need to constantly fellowship these matters with thorough prayer until we practically enter into these experiences.
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