We may be touched by the Lord to be vital with the saints in our home meeting, or we may be involved in serving with the students and the young ones – but do we take the way of the ministry? As the Lord reveals it to us in His Word, do we take the way of being produced as ministers? We all need to pray, Lord, give me the experiences I need that will produce this ministry! There is a great price to pay even to produce a small measure of the Lord’s ministry. The Lord wants to have a group of brothers and sisters who have been broken, dealt with, consumed, crossed out, terminated, reconstituted, resurrected, and blended together – to produce the ministry!
the full time training is for the building up of the Body of Christ! (short testimony)
Even though I was in the FTTL for a short period of time, I was brought into the realization of a lot of things. WE NEED TO BE TRAINED! After one month and one week of short term training, I realised that 2 years is definitely necessary. In the training, you are brought on the high mountain and you enjoy God’s presence and His infusion. Can you imagine – Moses went up to the mountain and stayed there to enjoy the infusion of the Lord for “JUST” 40 days, and this caused him to express the glory of God? What about being in God’s presence for 2 years? [testimony from a brother who recently joined the FTTL short-term]
Christ put away sin once and for all and He imparted Himself as the divine life into us!
The two great things Christ did in God’s economy while being on earth were that He put away the sin (through His death on the cross) and He imparted His divine life into His believers (in His resurrection). Christ doesn’t just “wash us and cleanse us from our sins” – He dispenses His divine life into us, which life is a sin-dealing and sin-overcoming life!
God prepared a body for Christ to come to do God’s will to be God’s unique sacrifice on the cross
Christ was obedient to God even unto death, and that the death of the cross (Phil. 2:8). Christ did the will of God as prophesied in the Old Testament and as God Himself wanted – He became a man, lived a perfect human life, died an all-inclusive and all-terminating death on the cross, and He resurrected to be the life-giving Spirit. In His death especially Christ terminated the old testament economy of God and established God’s New Testament economy where Christ is everything: He is the sacrifices, He is the offerings, He is the unique way for us to contact and enjoy God!
The Four Great Pillars in the Lord’s Recovery: Truth, Life, the Church, and the Gospel (ITERO 2011)
Praise the Lord for the recent ITERO in Holland! The main topic of the fall International Training for Elders and Responsible Ones, held in Baarloo, Holland, is, The Four Great Pillars in the Lord’s Recovery. These four great pillars are Truth, Life, the Church, and the Gospel. There is a book with the same name published by Living Stream Ministry (The Truth, Life, the Church, and the Gospel, Four Great Pillars in The Lord’s Recovery). This portion here is just a short enjoyment from this message, and is an attempt to bring more saints in the fellowship and collective enjoyment of the Lord’s up-to-date speaking.
we can share in Christ’s sufferings for the producing and building up of the Body of Christ
For the building up of the church we need the ministry – our experience of the riches of Christ in a subjective way, having Christ wrought into our being through all kinds of sufferings and consuming pressures…. This kind of experiences produces and constitutes the ministry for God’s new covenant, and these experiences are for the building up of the Body of Christ today! We love the ministry – we don’t “hate the gifts”, but we value more being a minister of the new covenant than desiring to be a gifted one…
We are called to enjoy grace and express God, and Christ is our model – we are His reproduction!
For us to become Christ’s “Xerox copy” we need spiritual light and the riches of the divine life – we become not an imitation of Christ but a reproduction of Christ! A monkey can imitate the things and actions a man does, but because the monkey does not have the human life, after the “imitation time” is over, he returns back to his monkey life. But to us Christ is the original copy, the model and the pattern, and we are the Xerox-copy of Christ by our enjoyment of Him and following in His steps!