May the Lord open our eyes to see that the church life is in this new person and nothing else. Regardless of how good, patient, humble, kind, and mild you are, as long as you are in the old person, you cannot experience the church life. You may be a very easy going person, yet if you are still in the old person, you are through with the church life and the church life is through with you. The church life is absolutely something in the new person. There is a new person within each of us. All of these new persons added together equals the church. What is the church? The church is the summation, the sum total, of all the new persons within us. The church life is in our spirit. This is why we need to grow and have to grow. By being born again, we become the newborn babes. Now we need to grow, not just in function, but in a person, in our inner man. Our whole person in the spirit needs to grow.
This is why Ephesians 3 says that we need to be strengthened with power into our inner man (v. 16). Our inner man is our spirit, but it is weak because it is short of power, the resurrection power, transcending power, subduing power, and overruling power. To grow we need to be strengthened, and the strengthening is by these few things: feeding on, drinking, breathing, and inwardly being filled with Christ. The more we feed on Christ, the more we drink of Christ, the more we breathe in Christ, and the more we are inwardly filled with Christ, the more we are strengthened. The more we are strengthened, the more we are empowered with Christ’s resurrection power. No death can prevail against us. All the deadness around us and within us is conquered by the resurrection power. When we are empowered, we are also transcendent, subduing, and overruling. This strengthening is the increasing of Christ within us, the growth of our inner man. By this strengthening our inner man, our new person, is growing every day.
We all need a change in our concept. We need the heavenly revelation so that we would drop all the wrong concepts we have collected from our background. We all have to realize one thing: as those who have been reborn, we should not live in our old person anymore. We have to deny and renounce that old person, and we have to realize that we now have a new person, our spirit with Christ as its life. We have to live and do everything by this new person. We should not care whether a thing is right or wrong, good or bad. We must only care for one thing: which person is going to do it, the old person or the new person? We should always be checked by this one point. If we feel that we are weak or empty in our new man, our new person, we need to be desperate and pray: “Lord, be merciful to me. Look at my situation. I am so empty, so weak, in my new person.” We need to deal with the Lord. Then we will be empowered.
If we know how to deal desperately with Christ, how to feed on Christ through pray-reading the Word, how to drink of Him by calling on His name, and how to breathe Him in day by day, we will be one with Him in our spirit. This will cause us, day by day, to grow in our new person. Today, we cannot see or realize that our new person is growing, but one day we will “be no longer babes” and “arrive at a full-grown man” (Eph. 4:13-14). That full growth will be the accumulation of Christ as the reality in us through all of our experiences of Him. It is not merely that we experience Christ a little bit as our patience, our strength, or our life. Rather, all day long we would live by the new person. If we are going to visit a brother, we have to check whether this is our old person, our self, or our new person, our spirit. We must check with this point and get a proper answer. Then we must go, not in our old person but in the new person. Even if a mother is going to talk to her children, she has to check whether her old person or her new person is going to talk. We are all born again, but are we living by the old person or the new person? Only by living in the new person can we have Christ as our reality. All day long, we must live by the new person. Even to study your lessons in school, you need to check this one point. For school you have to exercise your mind, but the new person, not the old person, should be using your mind. Whenever you study your lessons, you have to check: which person is going to study? If you study in the new person, your mind will work for you as an organ under the control of your new person. If you are going to dress yourself, do not check what kind of clothing you are going to wear. Firstly, you have to find out who is going to dress, the old person or the new person. We are the newborn Christians, yet most of the time we live by our old person and not by the new person, our spirit.
We all must see that, in the church life, all the members need to live by the new person. We should not live by a high moral standard nor by an immoral standard. We should not live by any standard of behavior but by a person. This is why 2 Corinthians 4:16 says that our outward man, the old person, is decaying, but our inner man, the new person, is being renewed day by day. The outward man has to be reduced, but the inner man needs to increase. We really have two persons within us; one is old and one is new. The old one has to be consumed, but the new one needs to increase. Our problem is that we do not realize this and continue to live by the old person and not by the new. We need a revelation so that we may have a shift from the old person to the new. Then we will be renewed in the spirit of our mind and put on the new man (Eph. 4:23-24), the corporate church life. The Apostle Paul says that we have to put off the old man, the old corporate man, and put on the new man (Eph. 4:22, 24). We all have to put off the old communal life, the worldly social life, and we have to put on the new communal life, the church life. We put on the church life bit by bit. We may participate in the church life yet still have something to do with the worldly social life. While we are being renewed in the spirit of our mind, we are gradually putting off the old communal life, and the new church life is being put on. This is what we need in the church life today. Eventually, with our new birth and through the growth of our new person, we will arrive at the goal, the new man, “where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave, freeman, but Christ is all and in all” (Col. 3:11). This is the church life.
After our new birth, we must grow, not in a doctrinal way but in a very experiential way. We all need to grow with Christ and live by our new person. We should not care for the adjustment of our outward behavior, but only for the inward shifting from the old person to the new person. We must live and do all things, both great and small, by the new person. If we do this, we will be empowered, having the real increase of Christ and growth in life. Then the old communal life will be dropped, and the new church life will be picked up. Eventually, we will have the full growth with Christ as our all in all. Then we will be in the proper church life, worshipping God not only in spirit but also in reality. We will experience the reality of Christ as our life, and we will grow into a full-grown man (Eph. 4:13). One day the Lord will bring all the local churches to this point. He is waiting for this. Probably that will be the day of His coming back.
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