The Ministry Of The Word Vol 03 No 03

In this issue of The Ministry, we continue the speaking by Brother Lee concerning the God-ordained way as the present practice in God’s economy. In this message we see some practical steps to carry out the home meetings so that the church life becomes a part of the saints’ daily life. The churches should make a “census” of all the dormant members and be burdened to recover them house by house until they are firmly established and rooted in the church. This requires our diligent, thorough, and practical labor together with God. In addition, Brother Lee speaks a word on how the churches should care for the full-time serving ones among us. The next three messages are a continuation of messages given in the full-time training in Anaheim in the fall of 1997 concerning the grafted life. These messages begin to unveil the relationship between the grafted life and God’s organic salvation. Message Seven unfolds the matters of regeneration and sanctification. Regeneration is to bring God into man, to have God as life in addition to our original, human life. Sanctification is to be saturated with God organically; sanctification is for God’s “sonizing”; that is, sanctification is for sonship. Message Eight presents the matters of renewing and transformation. As believers we must be thoroughly and absolutely renewed so that we may be the new creation of God and for God. To be renewed is to have God’s element added into our being to replace and discharge our old element. Transformation as the issue of renewing is not an outward change or correction, but it is a spiritual metabolism; it is the metabolic function of the life of God in the believers. Message Nine shows us that conformation denotes the shaping of life; as the divine life grows within us and transforms us, it spontaneously shapes us into the form, the image, of the firstborn Son of God. Glorification, however, is the step in God’s complete salvation in which God will completely saturate our body with the glory of His life and nature. Lastly, we include letters concerning the Lord’s move in the Pacific Islands and Romania.

In this issue of The Ministry, we continue Brother Lee’s fellowship with the elders and co-workers in Taipei concerning the present practice for the carrying out of God’s economy. In this message Brother Lee points out that as soon as we contact someone, we should bring the meetings to his home. In the Lord’s recovery, this practice should be the fundamental factor in building up the church. We must also use the Lord’s word to teach one another in the home meetings. To this end, the serving ones in the meetings must carefully select the proper material for the home meetings. This is an absolute necessity and is in the principle of giving the household food at the proper time (Matt. 24:45). Then the serving ones should make it their job not to expound the reading materials but to direct everyone to focus on the main points. The key to the success of the new way is the spiritual material we use in the home meetings and the way we teach the Truth Lessons. The following three messages are the conclusion of the Thanksgiving Conference held in Anaheim in November 1998 concerning the principles of the Body. Message Four presents four more principles of the Body, including knowing the authority of Christ the Head, genuine spirituality being a matter of the Body, caring for the feeling and peace of the Body, and having the consciousness of the Body. Message Five stresses the crucial fact that the bountiful supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ is poured out upon the Body. Hence, to experience and enjoy such a reality today, we must be in the Body and for the Body. Message Six gives a number of practical applications concerning the principles of the Body presented in the foregoing messages in this series. Last of all, we include one report concerning the 1999 Chinese-speaking New Year’s Conference.

This issue of The Ministry of the Word contains the six messages from the Thanksgiving weekend conference held in Charlotte, North Carolina, November 22-25, 2018. The subject of this series of messages is "The Reality of the Body of Christ." The banners in the following section embody the crucial truths and the main burden of the conference. The Announcements section at the end of this issue contains a list of upcoming conferences and trainings hosted by Living Stream Ministry and a website link for information related to similar events in Europe.

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.

This issue of The Ministry of the Word contains the first eight of the sixteen messages given during the fall 2021 term of the full-time training in Anaheim, California. The general subject of this series of messages is "Chapters Five through Eight of Romans--the Kernel of the Bible." These first eight messages and the subsequent eight messages (published in an upcoming issue) will focus on Romans 5 and 6. This general subject will then be continued in the messages of the spring 2022 term and will focus on Romans 7 and 8. The life and death form two contrasting lines in chapters 5 through 8, showing that man is at the center of a triangular situation between God and Satan, that is, between life and death. The tree of life and the tree of knowledge (the tree of death) issue in two lines--the line of life and the line of death--that run through the entire Bible and consummate in the book of Revelation. The line of life begins with the tree of life in Genesis 2 and issues in the New Jerusalem in Revelation 22 as the city of the water of life with the tree of life, the light of life, and the glory of life. Similarly, the line of death begins with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 2 and ends with the lake of fire in Revelation 20. The kernel of the Bible is that Christ has been revealed into us as life and that we live, have our being, and exist by Christ as the divine life. God put us into Christ with the desire that we would be transformed and conformed to the image of His Son so that we might be thoroughly one with Christ. In this way we are built up together as the living Body of Christ to contain and express Christ for the Father's glory and for our glorification in Christ. Romans 5 reveals that the result of our justification is the full enjoyment of God in Christ as our life.

This issue of The Ministry of the Word contains the six messages from the Thanksgiving weekend conference held in Phoenix, Arizona, November 23-26, 2017. The subject of this series of messages is "The Genuine Church Life." The banners in the following section embody the crucial truths and the main burden of the conference. The Announcements section at the end of this issue contains a list of upcoming conferences and trainings hosted by Living Stream Ministry and a website link for information related to similar events in Europe.

This issue of The Ministry of the Word contains the first eight of the sixteen messages given during the fall 2022 term of the full-time training in Anaheim, California. The general subject of this series of messages is "Living in the Reality of the Body of Christ by Learning Christ as the Reality Is in Jesus." The phrase learning Christ as the reality is in Jesus is based on Ephesians 4:20-21. The reality...in Jesus refers to the actual condition of the life of Jesus that is recorded in the four Gospels. The actual condition of the life of Christ, who is God, is His living God in the four Gospels. Everything He did was in God, with God, by God, for God, through God, and to God. God was in His living, and He was one with God.The desire of God's heart is that the reality of the Body of Christ, which is "the reality…in Jesus" (Eph. 4:21), would be duplicated in the many members of Christ's Body by the Spirit of reality to become the reality of the Body of Christ, the highest peak in God's economy. He wants His God-man living seen in the four Gospels to be reproduced in us. To learn Christ means that we learn Christ experientially, enjoyably, and subjectively. The One we are enjoying is the Lord as the Spirit of reality in our spirit. The Spirit guides us into all the realities of God's eternal economy. The Lord wants the actual condition of His life to be reproduced in each one of us as members of the Body individually as well as in us all corporately. The corporate living of the perfected God-man, the reality of the Body of Christ, is the reality that is in Jesus.Every detail, aspect, and feature of the New Jerusalem is actually the reality in Jesus in its consummate state. Thus, Christ wants the life that He lived in the four Gospels duplicated and reproduced in us until we become the New Jerusalem. The Lord's recovery is to build up Zion as the reality of the Body of Christ by living out and working out the New Jerusalem. To live out the New Jerusalem is to become the New Jerusalem, and to work out the New Jerusalem is to build the New Jerusalem.The Announcements section at the end of this issue contains a list of upcoming conferences and trainings hosted by Living Stream Ministry and a website link for information related to similar events in Europe.