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 victorious Christ will return to recover the earth when He gains Zion, those fully open to Him!
Before the Lord Jesus can come as the King, He needs to have in all the local churches the reality of Zion – He needs to have His overcomers as His bride ready! In Psalm 51 we see how the goal of our repentance and confession marrying God’s forgiveness is that it amazingly produces a burden for the building up of Zion. The Lord needs to gain Zion, the aspect of the church that is fully open to Him, the overcomers who will hasten His return!
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!
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!
the details of Christ’s sufferings for us before He died: He was hated, reproached, mocked, betrayed
Many times we miss a lot because we know things in general and we don’t get into the details – we may know in general that the Lord Jesus suffered for us and died for us, but we may not know the details. How did He die, what happened, what are the details? When you get into these details in the Word of God, your appreciation of Christ’s death and His suffering will increase to the uttermost, and you will love Him more!
Christ as the Center of God’s Move on the Earth: Let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered!
God’s move today is in man – He moves in Christ to come into man and move in man. God’s move in man is to deify man – to make man the same as He is in life and in nature, but not in the Godhead!
Lord, restore to me the gladness of Your salvation, and sustain me with a willing spirit!
there is a connection here between the gladness of salvation and the willingness of spirit – when we are happy in the Lord and with the Lord, we also have a willing spirit! A willing spirit depends upon the joy of salvation – when we have the joy restored to us, we are happy and willing to go along with the Lord and do what He desires. We obey the Lord because we love Him and we are filled with the joy of our salvation!