BUILDING UP THE CHURCH BY THE ANOINTING
OF THE COMPOUND SPIRIT
Do not think that I am burdened here to give a sermon on typology. My intention is to show us how we can have the church life. We can have the church life by being anointed with the compound Spirit. In 1 Corinthians there are the gifts, but 2 Corinthians speaks of the anointing. The building of God is established and built up by the anointing of the compound ointment, the compound Spirit.
Psalm 133 says, "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! It is like the precious ointment..." (vv. 1-2a, KJV). The ointment is the unity, the oneness. This is why Ephesians 4:3 speaks of the oneness of the Spirit. The Spirit as the compound ointment is not just the Spirit of God, possessing merely divinity; the Spirit as the ointment has been compounded with Christ’s divine and human natures, His death and its effectiveness, and His resurrection and its power.
Teachings and gifts alone cannot build up the church. The church, the Body of Christ, has been divided by teachings and gifts. Only the anointing of the Spirit of Jesus Christ as the compound ointment can build up the church. God is anointing us today with such an all-inclusive Spirit. In this ointment there is the effectiveness of Christ’s death to kill all the divisive germs and negative things within our being.
THE SPIRIT OF THE GLORIFIED JESUS
Now I would like to quote a portion of Andrew Murray’s masterpiece The Spirit of Christ. The following excerpts are taken from chapter five, which is entitled, "The Spirit of the Glorified Jesus."
We know how the Son, who had from eternity been with the Father, entered upon a new stage of existence when He became flesh. When He returned to Heaven, He was still the same only-begotten Son of God, and yet not altogether the same. For He was now also, as Son of Man, the first-begotten from the dead, clothed with that glorified humanity which He had perfected and sanctified for Himself. And just so the Spirit of God as poured out at Pentecost was indeed something new....When poured out at Pentecost, He came as the Spirit of the glorified Jesus, the Spirit of the Incarnate, crucified, and exalted Christ, the bearer and communicator to us, not of the life of God as such, but of that life as it had been interwoven into human nature in the person of Christ Jesus.
...From His nature, as it was glorified in the resurrection and ascension, His Spirit came forth as the Spirit of His human life, glorified into the union with the Divine, to make us partakers of all that He had personally wrought out and acquired, of Himself and His glorified life....And in virtue of His having perfected in Himself a new holy human nature on our behalf, He could now communicate what previously had no existence—a life at once human and Divine.
...And the Holy Spirit could come down as the Spirit of the God-man—most really the Spirit of God, and yet as truly the spirit of man.
Andrew Murray’s teaching shows that today the Spirit of God is the Spirit of the glorified Jesus. He is the Spirit not merely with divinity but the Spirit both of God and of man with a renewed, uplifted, developed, new holy human nature. We are under the anointing of such a wonderful Spirit for the building up of the church as the Body of Christ.
(The Experience of Christ as Life for the Building Up of the Church, Chapter 10, by Witness Lee)
