EXPERIENCING GOD’S DISPENSING IN A FINER WAY
Incarnation, death, resurrection, and regeneration are all clearly unveiled in the Gospel of John. However, this Gospel goes on to show us that Christ gives us Himself as the living water (John 4:10, 14), that He is the bread of life, good for eating (6:35), and that He has breathed Himself into us as the Holy Breath (20:22). From the time of our regeneration we need to always eat, drink, and breathe the Lord. To eat, drink, and breathe the Lord are finer steps in His dispensing. Trees need their roots, but without the root hairs, a tree will not be able to grow. The root hairs are the finer means for the tree to absorb all the riches from the soil for its growth. Regeneration has planted Christ as the "root" in our spirit, but we also need the "root hairs" of eating, drinking, and breathing the Lord. These are the finer means for God’s dispensing. We may say, "Hallelujah! God was incarnated for me, He died for me, He resurrected for me, and I have been regenerated!" However, we may still be superficial. Day by day we may not be breathing, drinking, and eating the Lord. Hymn #255 in Hymns speaks of our need to breathe in the Lord. We may sing this hymn, but do we breathe in the Lord day by day? Breathing in the Lord will make us another kind of person. Many Christians today are spiritually dead because they do not have the root hairs. All Christians know that God was incarnated and that Jesus died for us and our sins and was resurrected. However, many do not know what it is to eat and drink the Lord. Many of us in the Lord’s recovery do know how to eat, drink, and breathe the Lord, but we may not be practicing this in our daily life. We may not know the practicality of the Spirit spreading Himself with our spirit into our soul and saturating our body. We have the teachings of these matters, but we may not have the reality in our tripartite being.
KNOWING THE WORD AS THE BASIS
FOR OUR EXPERIENCE OF THE DISPENSING
Our experience of eating, drinking, and breathing the Lord should be built upon the foundation of the deposit of the holy Word. This is why Paul said, "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly" (Col. 3:16). We need a good deposit of the word of Christ dwelling in us. In 2 Timothy 1:14 Paul told Timothy, "Guard the good deposit through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us." Among the many who followed the apostles, Timothy was one of the most faithful. This was because he had a good deposit of the holy Word. We should not think that we know so much. Several thousand messages of this ministry have been published, but we are still discovering new light from the Word.
We all need to know more of the Word. For this purpose we must redeem our time. To redeem means to recover by paying something. We have to purchase back the time. We should not let our time be consumed so easily. Every day we should gain something of the Lord. We must eat well and rest well, and we should have the proper bodily exercise. After this, however, we should redeem our time from all meaningless waste. Telephone calls can be a meaningless waste of time for us. Likewise, we may need to read the newspaper for a certain time every day to know the world situation, but lingering in the many pages of the paper is also a waste of time. We should save our time for breathing, drinking, and eating the Lord and getting the Word into us. Any book or page of the written ministry among us will help us to gain something of the Lord. On every page there is light, life supply, and truth.
To eat the Lord is to spend more time in the Word in a proper way. There is no other way to eat the Lord but through the Word. John 6 stresses that the Lord is the bread of life. At the end of this chapter Peter says, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life" (v. 68). If we are going to enjoy the Lord as our food, we must enjoy the word of life. The Lord said, "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words which I have spoken unto you are spirit and are life" (v. 63). The words of the Lord are the life supply. Both the Spirit and the Lord Christ are embodied in the Word. Therefore, the Word is the living Word, the Word of life.
(Messages to the Trainees in Fall 1990, Chapter 10, by Witness Lee)
