Prayer: O Lord, we worship You from deep within, and we offer to You our thanks and praise. We praise You that You are God and also man. As man You have become our Redeemer, and as the Spirit You have become our Savior. Thank You for gathering us before You. O Lord, we pray that You would remove the veils of heaven and give us a clear sky. Bring us all into the spirit that we may know You by the spirit within us, not by the letter without. Today You are the Spirit, the life-giving Spirit, and You have given us a regenerated spirit. These two spirits, Your Spirit and our spirit, fellowship with one another and are mingled as one spirit. It is in this spirit that we are gathered to worship You and enjoy You by dining with You.
Lord, we pray that You would give us a sober mind, an open spirit, and, even more, a hungry and thirsty heart that we may really sense that even though we already have You, we still need more of You. O Lord, every one of us needs You, and we need You at all times and in all things. We pray that You would touch all our hearts and gain more ground in us. We want to be possessed, filled, saturated, and wholly gained by You.
O Lord, shame Your enemy. You have already destroyed him on the cross. We are crushing him under our feet in Your church. Here he has no ground, but You have gained all the glory. Our spirit worships You, our heart exalts You, and our mouth sings praise to You. Amen.
As those who have received Jesus, we are different from others because we are those who bear the mark of Jesus, those who have been marked out by Jesus. Furthermore, we have all been attracted by His wonderful being and have become “Jesus addicts.” He is truly wonderful, and His wonderful being has drawn many millions of people to Himself. This is why we use The Wonderful Being of Christ as the title of this book.
We have already seen that Christ is both God and man. Now we want to go on further to see that this wonderful Christ is both the Redeemer and the Savior. Many Christians are not clear about the difference between redemption and salvation. Hence, they often mix up the aspect of Christ’s being the Redeemer and the aspect of Christ’s being the Savior, and they refer to Him simply as the Savior. Even though this is not wrong, the Bible is not that simple. According to the revelation of the Bible, Christ is both the Redeemer and the Savior. Moreover, the difference between these two aspects is truly big. I hope that in this message I can clarify this matter so that we can see clearly that our Lord is, on the one hand, the Redeemer, and on the other hand, the Savior.
God made man according to His image and after His likeness. He created man in this way for the glorious purpose that the created man may express Him and glorify Him. To attain this goal, God must work Himself into man as his life and everything. This is God’s procedure. Man must have God’s life in order to express God Himself in His image. Regrettably, however, before God had the opportunity to carry out His procedure, Satan went before Him to seduce the first ancestors of the human race, Adam and Eve, to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Consequently, the life of Satan entered into man to become sin within man and thus damage him. In Romans 7 Paul tells us that there is something in man’s flesh called sin. He said, “For I do not do the good which I will; but the evil which I do not will, this I practice. But if what I do not will, this I do, it is no longer I that work it out but sin that dwells in me” (vv. 19-20). The word dwells implies living and acting. Sin not only dwells but also lives and acts in our flesh to deceive, kill, and capture us, so that we become sinners dominated by sin and commit sins and do evil things involuntarily.
God created man with a glorious purpose, but because man was defiled and damaged, he became a fallen sinner. According to the righteous law of God, such a man has a problem concerning his position before God. Man’s position is that of a sinner with a record of sins before God. Man cannot make amends for this by doing good works through cultivating his morality. Furthermore, God’s righteous law says that he who sins must die because the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23). This is the sinner’s position and record, and this will be his fate.
According to our position as a sinner and our record of sins and according to the righteous requirement of God’s law, we need a Redeemer. We have sinned and have a record of sins; thus, we fall short of God’s glory and deserve to die and perish. Hence, we need a Redeemer to clear the record of our sins, to satisfy the requirement of God’s law, and to redeem us.