The following chapters are the messages given in the summer conference of 1964 at Los Angeles. The spoken form has been retained. The author would urge all the readers to give their attention to the spiritual reality conveyed in these messages rather than to the language itself.
The word economy used in the title of this volume may sound somewhat strange to the reader. God’s economy is a quotation from 1 Timothy 1:4, according to the Greek. Economy is the Greek word oikonomia which primarily signifies the household management, the household administration, arrangement and distribution, or dispensation (of wealth, property, affairs, etc.). It is used with the intention of stressing the focal point of God’s divine enterprise, which is to distribute, or dispense, Himself into man.
The three persons in the Godhead are for God’s economy, the divine distribution, the holy dispensation. The Father as the source is embodied in the Son, and the Son as the course is realized in the Spirit as the transmission. God the Father is a Spirit (John 4:24), and God the Son, as the last Adam, became a life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45). All is in God the Spirit, which is the Holy Spirit revealed in the New Testament. This Holy Spirit today, with the fullness of the Father in the riches of the Son, has come into our human spirit and dwells there to impart all that God is into our very being. This is God’s economy, the divine dispensation. The Holy Spirit of God, dwelling in our human spirit to dispense all that God is in Christ into our being, is the focus, the very mark of this mysterious distribution of the Triune God. This is the battleground of the spiritual warfare. Oh, how much the subtle enemy has been and still is distracting the saints of God, even the seeking ones, from this mark of God’s economy by so many good and even scriptural things! In such a time of confusion, as in the time when the Epistles to Timothy were written, we must be narrowed down and even zeroed in to the all-inclusive divine Spirit in our human spirit that we may be kept from missing the mark of the divine economy. Therefore, the returning to, the abiding in, and the exercising of our spirit to realize the Spirit of God is basically necessary today. It is by so doing that we may partake of all the fullness of God by enjoying the unsearchable riches of Christ. May the Lord grant us grace that we may be brought into such a realization and that we may practice it in our daily life and in all that we do.
For a proper application and better result, all the chapters in this book need to be read with a praying spirit. It will be more profitable to pray-read all the quotations of the Scriptures in every chapter and always accompany the reading with prayer. May the Lord’s presence with His sweet anointing within be realized by all the readers in their reading of these messages in the spirit.
Witness Lee
Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
January 11, 1968
