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Scripture Reading: Heb. 1:3a; John 1:18; 14:8-11, 16-20, 23; 15:4a, 5a, 7a; 16:13-15; 17:21; Matt. 28:18-19; Gal. 3:27-28; 2:20a; 4:19; Rom. 8:9-10; Eph. 4:6
Prayer: Lord, how we thank You for Yourself. We do worship You for Yourself. Lord, we thank You for Your word, the living word that You have spoken to us in the Holy Scriptures. Lord, we thank You even tonight for this gathering. We trust in Your cleansing blood. Thank You for this precious blood that cleanses us all the time. Under this blood we do claim Your full anointing, and we believe that right now we are under Your anointing. Thank You for the rich anointing. Lord, give us an open spirit. We are looking to You for a clear sky. Take away all the clouds. Take away all the veils. Take away all the conditional and traditional concepts. Lord, we pray that You would bind the enemy and chase away the darkness from this hall. Fill this hall with Your glory, with Your presence, and with Your love and grace. Lord, we thank You. We believe that You are one with us and that we are one spirit with You. Lord, do speak Your word in our speaking. Be one with us in this speaking. Anoint every attendant. Oh, visit everyone! Touch everyone! How we thank You for such a gathering with Your word! In Your precious name, Amen.
In this chapter we come to the contents of God’s expression in its reality. In recent messages on the Gospel of John, we pointed out that John is the fulfillment of the tabernacle and all the offerings. One crucial thing we pointed out is that the entire universe was created for God’s expression. The invisible God desires to express Himself, and to express Himself He needs some vessels. First, He created the universe. The heavens are for the earth, and the earth is for man. After creating the heavens and the earth with all the items, God created man. Man was made in God’s image so that one day God might enter into him. Romans 9:21-23 indicates that we are clay vessels prepared unto glory. Surely the clay vessels are to contain Him. God made us in His own image just as a glove is made in the form of a hand with the intention that one day a hand would get into the glove.
When God created man, He created a spirit within him. We have a body outwardly, and we have a spirit inwardly. Between these two is our being, our soul. We are a person with an outward organ, the body, and an inward organ, the spirit. When we touch the material world, we use our body. When we touch God and the spiritual things, we use our spirit. We cannot contact God by using our body. That is the wrong organ. God made us in His image with a spirit for us to receive Him so that He might come into us to be our life and our content. Then we will be His expression.
This expression began with individuals in the Old Testament. The expression first began with Adam, but Adam fell. Then Abel was raised up to express God. To some extent Abel was successful in expressing God. Then Enosh called upon the name of the eternal One who was and who is and who is to be — the great I Am, the great To Be. Then came Enoch, who walked with God. Later, Noah came on to the scene, not just to walk with God but also to work with God and to have a common interest with God. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob depict one complete person with Joseph as an annex to Jacob. In these four persons as a complete being, God was very much manifested. But these were just individuals, and God wants a corporate expression.
In Exodus God came in to save His chosen people, a collective people. He saved not one or two persons but several million people. He delivered a collective people out of the tyranny of Pharaoh in Egypt. They were brought first to Mount Sinai to receive the revelation of the building of the tabernacle so that the very God in the heavens could come down to dwell and to express Himself in a material dwelling place. From Exodus through Malachi is a history of this dwelling place of God. On the surface you may say that that is the history of Israel. Actually, that is the history of God’s dwelling place. The Old Testament is so simple and clear. It has nine great men as landmarks of the human race and a people raised up to build a dwelling place for God on the earth for His expression. The entire universe was created by God with man as the center to express the eternal God. Yet what is revealed in the Old Testament was only the model. That was not the real structure.
The reality came in the New Testament, but it is the same in principle. First, an individual came who was unique. This was God Himself becoming a man, Jesus Christ. On the one hand, He is nothing less than God. He is our Creator. On the other hand, He is a man because He took our nature, our blood and flesh, upon Himself. He became incarnated in the flesh to be a real man. He is both God and man.
This wonderful One lived on the earth for thirty-three and a half years. What did He do? You might say that He did a lot of miracles and gave a lot of teachings. That is right, but it is a kind of apprehension on the surface. If you get into the depth of the matter, you can see that He was expressing God. His entire life and His entire living on this earth was the very expression of God. No one has ever seen God, but this One declared God (John 1:18). This One is the effulgence of the divine glory, and this One is the express image of the divine substance (Heb. 1:3). How wonderful!
On one occasion three disciples went with Him to the mountain, where they saw His glory (Luke 9:28-32). One of these three later wrote the Gospel of John and said, “We beheld His glory” (1:14). Whether He was doing a miracle, or whether He was teaching, He was the expression of the invisible God.
So the Bible tells us that Christ is the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15). When we see Him, we see God. He is nothing less than God. He is the expression of God. John says that when He came in the flesh and dwelt among men, that was a tabernacle (John 1:14). John, of course, was writing to the Jewish people, and they all surely understood what he meant by a tabernacle. They knew that a tabernacle was a dwelling place for the God in the heavens to come down to the earth to dwell in for His expression.
The Jews, though, being blind due to their traditional religion, hated this One and tried their best to kill Him. While they were trying to kill Him, this wonderful One told them to destroy the temple, and in three days He would raise it up (2:19). The New Testament tells us that the temple of the Lord’s body was destroyed on the cross. When He raised Himself up, however, He was raised up with all His believers. All His believers were resurrected with Him. Do you realize that we were raised up before we were born? This is a kind of divine and mysterious mathematics. Before we were born, we were resurrected. This is according to Ephesians 2:5-6. The divine spiritual fact is that when Jesus Christ raised Himself from the dead, He included all of us. In the resurrection of Christ a bigger temple was raised up. This bigger temple is the enlarged Christ; it is Christ increased. This increased Christ, this enlarged Christ, is just Christ Himself as the Head with the church as His Body. Ephesians 1 tells us that after His resurrection He ascended to the heavens, where He was made Head over all things to the church, which is His Body, and this Body is the fullness of the unlimited One, the all-inclusive One, the all-extensive One, who fills all in all. The church is the Body of such a One! What an immense church this is! This is Christ enlarged and increased.
In the New Testament there is just one great individual: Christ as the Head and the church as the Body. Through His death and resurrection He brought us all into Himself. The Jews killed one person. They did not expect that by this killing, Jesus would get enlarged. The one person’s expression of God was increased to a corporate expression of God. Today it is universally corporate. Around the globe everywhere there are many Christians, many members of Christ. As a whole the aggregate of all these members is the Body of Christ, the church. This is the corporate expression of God. By His mercy and grace we are in this expression.
Today four negative things oppose God’s expression: human culture, religion, ethics, and tradition. God created man to enjoy Him. God was man’s portion, but in the fall, man fell away from God and lost God, so man turned to his own invention, human culture. Humanly speaking, culture is not bad, yet it is a replacement of God. God should be everything to man — his pleasure, his satisfaction, and his protection. But man lost God, and man turned away from God to something else, human culture.
Then in human culture, man discovered that he needs God. So in the human culture another item was invented, religion. In human culture there is an invention concerning the worship of God. As long as you are in the human race, you worship something. Man was created to worship God. Whether people worship rightly or wrongly, they have the need to worship something. This was discovered by human culture, and the invention of religion came in.
Furthermore, man likes to be right and to be good because God created something in man’s nature that is good. Of course, according to our fallen nature, there is another tendency to do evil things, but according to our God-created nature, there is a tendency to do good. So through all the generations ethics and morality have been promoted. In China, Confucius was the greatest promoter of ethics.
From culture, religion, and ethics a lot of tradition came out. Many of the traditions are not bad. But all these things — culture, religion, ethics, and tradition — are four layers upon your eyes to veil you from seeing Christ as God’s expression. It is hard to convince the Chinese people to believe in Christ, because Confucius’s ethical teachings have become a thick veil upon the Chinese eyes. Likewise, the Jewish religion has become a thick veil preventing the Jews from believing in the Lord Jesus. They consider that they have the typical religion, a religion founded by Moses according to the Holy Scriptures. When the Lord Jesus was on the earth, for the last three and a half years He was opposed by the Jews mainly due to Judaism. By reading John 9 you can realize that the Pharisees thought of themselves as disciples of Moses. They had their inherited religion, which was so typical, so right, and so holy, yet the Lord Jesus indicated that they were blind (vv. 39-41). Judaism had become a thick veil to them.
Today if you talk to people who are in the Catholic Church, you will realize that Catholicism is a thick veil upon their eyes. One brother who was an altar boy in the Catholic Church got saved while he was in high school. He was so happy, and he went back to tell his parents and grandparents that he had the Lord Jesus. They pointed to the pictures of Jesus on their walls and told him that they had had Jesus for generations. They had Jesus in the kitchen. They had Jesus in the bedroom. They had Jesus everywhere but not within them! Surely Jesus does not like to be hung upon the wall or carved or painted. The Lord Jesus wants to be within you, in your spirit. The Lord Jesus is not an idol, nor is He an image. The Lord Jesus today is on the throne in the heavens as the Lord of all and as the Head over all things, yet at the same time He is the living Spirit who can enter into our spirit.
While the Lord Jesus was on the earth, He was with twelve disciples, and He had a very intimate time with them. They lived together, they ate together, they walked together, and they worked together for three and a half years. The night that He was betrayed, He told them to their great surprise that He would leave and go away. He told them that if He did not go away, He could not be in them. He had been incarnated, and He was among them, but this was not His goal, His destination. His goal was to enter into them. His destination was not to be among them but to be within them. He told them that He would go to the cross to be killed but that He would ask the Father to give them another Comforter, the Spirit of reality (14:16-17). They had His physical presence temporarily among them and outside of them. But until He was crucified and resurrected, they did not have Him as their reality within them. He told them that if He went away, another Comforter would come, who is the Spirit of reality. He would not only be with them but also in them. The Lord Jesus as the first Comforter could only be among them. What they needed was a second Comforter, actually just Himself as the Spirit of reality, to come and enter into them. He told them that His going away was His coming to be within them. He said, “I will not leave you as orphans; I am coming to you” (v. 18). He went on to say, “In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you” (v. 20). Verses 16 and 17 say that the Comforter, the Spirit of reality, will be in you, and verse 20 says, “I in you.” Are these two or one? No one can figure this out. In the Bible you do have the divine mathematics.
We all know that God the Spirit is one, uniquely one. But in the book of Revelation, God the Spirit is the seven Spirits (4:5). Is God the Spirit seven or one? He is one-seven and seven-one. This is the divine mathematics. Do not try to figure this out. This is why Martin Luther said that if you fully know the things concerning God, you must be God. We do not know the things concerning God so clearly. They are too mysterious.
John 14:16-20 says that the second Comforter, who is the Spirit of reality, would come to be with the disciples and in them, and the Lord said that the Spirit’s coming would be His coming. So this means that the Lord Himself would come and be in them on the day of resurrection. In that day they would know that He was in the Father and they were in Him and He was in them. Then who was in whom? He was in the Father. They should not think that He was there without the Father. Even while He was with them, He was in the Father. But they were not in Him yet. On the day of resurrection they would know that He was in the Father and that they were in Him and that He was in them (v. 20). When they are in Him, they are also in the Father, and He is in them. When He is in them, the Father also is in them. There is not only the coexistence among the three of the Godhead but also the coinherence. Each is in the other. I can testify that daily and hourly I experience this coinherence. I am living in my Lord, and He is in the Father, and He is also living in me. As He is living in me, the Father is also. Hallelujah! We all are in this mystery. This is for God’s expression.
You have to put aside your culture, your religion, your ethical thought, and your tradition. Take off all these layers of veils. Some condemn this matter of coinherence because they are blinded by their religious veils. Their blindness keeps them in darkness. They talk about religion and theology and the Bible in darkness.
What about culture? Galatians 3:27 and 28 say, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There cannot be Jew nor Greek, there cannot be slave nor free man, there cannot be male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Those who have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ, and they are all one. In this oneness there is no Jew and no Greek, there is no slave and no free man. This means there is no culture.
What about ethics? In Philippians 3 Paul tells us that he pursued only Christ. It was not a matter of his own righteousness according to the law (v. 9). That is ethics. When you keep the commandment of the law in order to be moral and good, that is ethics. That had been Paul’s pursuit in the past, but after he was saved, his pursuit was a living person, Christ. He was not pursuing the righteousness which is out of the law, but the living righteousness, which is the righteousness out of God and based on faith, that is, Christ the person Himself.
In Galatians 1:14 Paul also tells us that he was exceedingly zealous for the traditions of his fathers. This means that he was zealous for the Jew’s inherited traditions. But one day on the way to Damascus the Lord met him and knocked him down. From that day Paul began to know not tradition but a living person. Paul did not pursue culture but the living Christ. He did not care for religion but for the living Son of God. He was not zealous for ethics but for the very Christ as his righteousness. Christ was Paul’s righteousness and justification and sanctification. He was everything to Paul. Paul did not have ethics, but he was full of Christ. He did not have tradition; he had a present Christ, a living Christ, an up-to-date Christ.
Dear saints, this is the expression of God that to some extent has been lost, missed, neglected, and even opposed by today’s Christianity. I came from China, but my teaching is not Chinese, nor is it something of man. My teaching is just a quotation of the holy Word. If you honor His Word, you surely would appreciate this kind of teaching. I do not care for the American pleasures and sports and entertainment and weekends. I only care for the Triune God, for the living Christ, and for the holy Word. I do not care for theology or any creed. I only care for the living God with His living Son and His living word.
In John 14:23 the Lord Jesus went on to say, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make an abode with him.” The Father and the Son of the Trinity will go to this one who loves the Lord Jesus. What will They do? Will They empower him or make him powerful and full of impact? No. They will go to make an abode. The word abode here is the noun form of the verb abide. This abode is a mutual one. The lover becomes the Son’s and the Father’s dwelling place, and the Son and the Father become the lover’s dwelling place.
In chapter 15 you have the mutual abiding: “Abide in Me and I in you” (v. 4). So there is the mutual abiding in the mutual abode. How wonderful! Have you ever realized that in God’s economy He wants to work out the matter of your abiding in Him, taking Him as your abode, so that He may abide in you, taking you as His abode. This is not just to live according to some Scriptures, such as husbands love your wives, wives submit yourselves to your husbands, or love your neighbors as yourself. Before you love your wife and before you submit yourself to your husband and before you love your neighbors, you have to abide in Him and let Him abide in you. Let Him within you love your wife. Let Him within you submit to your husband. Let Him do everything in you and through you and with you and for you. This is the Christian life. If I love my wife by myself, that is the expression of me. If a wife submits to her husband by herself, that is just the expression of her. If you love all your neighbors by yourself, that is just you. All these are ethics, not the expression of God at all. But when you would say, “I have been crucified and buried. It is no more I who lives, but Christ lives in me. It is not I but Christ who loves my wife. It is not I but Christ who submits to my husband. It is not I but Christ loving the neighbors through me, in me, with me, and for me,” these are not merely the real ethics but also the expression of God. This is the reality that expresses God. This very reality has been lost in today’s Christianity, but the Lord is going to recover it. The Lord’s recovery is not to recover certain doctrines and practices but to recover the Triune God being wrought into your being to express Him in your daily walk and in the church life.
When these kinds of persons who live Christ in their daily walk come together, there is an aggregate. The aggregate is the church life, and the aggregate church life is the reality of the expression of God.
Now we come to John 17:1, which says, “These things Jesus spoke, and lifting up His eyes to heaven, He said, Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son that the Son may glorify You.” In verse 21 He prayed, “That they all may be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us; that the world may believe that You have sent Me.” This is not a prayer for healing or for good fortune. He prayed that all the disciples would be one even as He and the Father are one. This prayer has not been answered yet in full.
So many of the real Christians today, who have been spirit-regenerated and blood-washed, do not know that the Lord’s prayer was for them to be in the Son as well as in the Father. This is too deep and too mysterious! Just as the Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father, so all the believers in the Son may be in both the Son and the Father. This is deep and profound, yet it should be a fact. And this fact is just the expression of God. When we live a life that is in the Son and the Father and a life of letting the Son and the Father live in us, this life is the expression of God. This is the thing that the Lord prayed for and is recovering today.
In John 20:22 the Lord Jesus breathed into the disciples and told them to receive the Holy Spirit. After forty days He told the disciples that all authority in the heaven and on earth had been given to Him and that they should go in His name to disciple all the nations. Then they should baptize those into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:18-19). M. R. Vincent, in his Word Studies in the New Testament, tells us clearly that the preposition into implies a spiritual and mystical union. We were outside the Triune God, but through baptism we were baptized into the Triune God, into a spiritual and mystical union with Him.
“The name” mentioned in Matthew 28:19 is not a vain name. Mr. Vincent goes on to say that the name is equivalent to the person. If there was no person, the name would be empty. To baptize the believers into the name means to put them into the person. This is confirmed by Galatians 3:27, which says, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” This proves that to be baptized into the name of the Triune God means to be baptized into the Triune God. We all have been baptized into Christ, and now we all wear Christ upon our being. This means that we and Christ are one. Here in this oneness there is only Christ. There is no Jew or Greek or slave or free man. There is no man of culture or man of race. All are one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 2:20 says, “I am crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” Furthermore, Paul was travailing until Christ would be formed in the believers (4:19). Christ not only needs to live in us but also to be formed in us. To have Christ formed in us means to have Christ saturate every part of our inner being — our mind, our emotion, our will, and our thinking. Christ may be in you, but He is still not formed in you. Christ needs to be formed within you so that you can express God.
Romans 8 tells us that the Spirit of God is in us, the Spirit of Christ is in us, and the Spirit of the One who raised Jesus from the dead is in us. Colossians 1:27 tells us that Christ the Son is in us, and Ephesians 4:6 tells us that the Father also is in us. So the Son is in us, the Spirit is in us, and the Father is in us. The Father is not only in us but also over us and through us. How wonderful! The Triune God — the Father, the Son, and the Spirit — is in us so that we might be His expression. When we love, it must be the Triune God loving in us, with us, and through us. When we are speaking, it must be the Triune God speaking in us, through us, and with us. The church life is just the Triune God doing everything in us, through us, and with us. Such a church life is the expression of God. This is the central thing that the Lord is going to recover. The Lord has no intention to recover the trivial things. The Lord is working to recover the Triune God wrought into our being and living in us, with us, and through us for His expression. This expression is just the church life.
