Fifty-one messages given by Brother Witness Lee during 1984 in Stuttgart, Germany and several localities in the United States constitute the content of this book of forty-four chapters. Brother Lee has told us that what is presented in this volume is the consummation of what the Lord has shown us in His recovery and that the chart on pages 12 and 13 is the extract and final reaping of his fifty-nine years of studying the New Testament.
Through the ministry of our brother as he has opened the Word to us in the United States since 1962, we have been helped to realize that the one thing that should be focused on, stressed, and ministered in the Lord’s recovery is God’s New Testament economy. We have seen that God’s oikonomia, economy (1 Tim. 1:4), is God’s household administration, His household management, His plan to distribute or dispense Himself into His chosen, redeemed, and regenerated people as their life and everything to produce a unique thing in the universe, the Body of Christ, which is His corporate expression as the golden lampstands in this age and ultimately as the New Jerusalem for eternity. The Triune God dispenses Himself in His entirety into us, His Body, by the Father being embodied in the Son and the Son being realized and consummated as the Spirit, reaching us through seven major steps, for our experience, enjoyment, and building up. The content of this divine economy is a wonderful, all-inclusive Person. This Person is the processed and consummated Triune God—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The New Testament is a full record of the marvelous revelation of God’s New Testament economy.
May the Lord richly supply us with His grace that we might see, possess, and minister such a revelation. May the Lord also preserve us from any teachings or practices, however “scriptural,” that might distract us from this basic, crucial, and central matter—the New Testament economy of God.
Benson Phillips
February 1986
Irving, Texas
