The Ministry of the Word, Vol. 24, No. 03

Book excerpt: This issue of The Ministry of the Word contains the first seven messages given during the Fall 2019 term of the full-time training in Anaheim, Cali­fornia. The general subject of this series of messages is “The Christian Life. ”A Christian is one with Christ and belongs to Christ, has Christ’s life and nature, and lives by Christ and lives Christ. The Christian life is a life in which the believers live Christ and magnify Christ—the One who has the unique, eternal life and who is the center of the Divine Trinity and the embodiment of the Triune God. God desires that the divine life and the human life be joined to become one life; this oneness is a union in life. The Christian life is not an exchanged life—the exchange of a lower life for a higher one—but a grafted life—the grafting of the redeemed human life into the divine life and the mingling of the human life with the divine life. Through this grafting, we are united, mingled, and incorporated with Christ to become in Him an enlarged, universal, divine and human incor­poration—the Body of Christ, which consummates the New Jerusalem. We need to increase in the excellency of the knowledge of the all-­inclusive, unsearchably rich Christ, who wants to live His life in us. Christ is the will-of-God-man, the unique One who seeks the Father’s will, the One who lives in the reality of the kingdom of the heavens, the reality-­of-God-man, a man under authority, the One who was obedient unto death, and the Triune God-man. The genuine Christian life is a life filled with the processed and consummated Triune God. The Triune God, proc­essed and consummated in the divine economy, is the contents of the Christian life. In order to understand what the Christian life is, we need to see a vision of the all-inclusive indwelling Spirit as the consummation of the processed and consummated Triune God. We need to realize that the Triune God has been processed and consummated to be the all-inclusive indwelling Spirit. The normal Christian life depends upon our knowing and experiencing the all-inclusive indwelling Spirit as breath. The consummated Spirit as the breath is everything to us in living the Christian life; only the breath, the Spirit, can be a Christian. The Triune God in Christ is life to us by shining in our hearts. In the Bible there is a close, inseparable connection between light and life. If we want to grow in life, we need more of the light of life. The gospel is the gospel of the glory of God, which shines in the human heart, begetting life through regeneration in our spirit. The more we exercise our spirit to contact Christ who is life, the more light we receive. Then as light shines through the Word, fellowship, and ministry, spontaneously more life comes forth. This is the cycle of the Christian life in the experience and growth in life. The illumination of the knowledge of the glory of God is in the face of Jesus Christ; this indicates that the gospel of the glory of Christ is a lovely person in whose face we can see the glory of God. Through the illumination of the gospel of the glory of Christ, the Christ of glory as the excellent treasure is received by the believers; now the shining reality of Christ, the embodiment and expression of the Triune God, is the treas­ure within us. The Spirit of reality guides us into all the divine reality, which is the Triune God and His word. Through the Spirit, the reality of the Triune God is transmitted into us; thus, the reality into which the Spirit guides us is the reality of the Triune God. As the Spirit of reality guides us into the divine reality by transmitting this reality into us, the divine reality—the processed and consummated Triune God—becomes the constituent of our being. The Christian life comes out of such a constituting work of the Spirit. The Spirit has been commissioned by the Godhead in His Trinity to come to function by applying what God the Son, Christ, has accomplished according to what God the Father has planned in His economy. The New Testament reveals various functions of the all-inclusive Spirit in the Chris­tian life. The all-inclusive Spirit gives life to the believers; sanctifies the believers, saturating all the inward parts of their being with God’s nature of holiness; renews the believers; transforms the believers; searches and reveals to the believers all things concerning Christ as the depths of God; becomes the joy in the believers for the kingdom of God; and becomes the essence for the organic building up of the Body of Christ, which building up is the total function of the all-inclusive Spirit dwelling in all of us. To live the Christian life, we need to have a vision of the seven aspects of Christ’s person and work in His all-inclusive death. In His all-inclusive death Christ was the Lamb of God taking away the sin of the world; died as a man in the flesh, causing sin to be condemned in the flesh by God; was the last Adam, causing the old man to be crucified; was the Firstborn of all creation, terminating the old creation; was the reality of the bronze serpent, destroying the devil, who has the might of death; died as the Peace­maker; and died as a grain of wheat falling into the ground for the release of the divine life to produce many grains. The Reports and Announcements sections contains an “Update on Rhema Mass Distribution in India.” Also included is a list of upcoming conferences and trainings hosted by Living Stream Ministry and a website link for information related to similar events in Europe.