The one life, Christ’s life, the eternal life, is for our salvation, and this is the one way of saving. Only this salvation is the way of saving.
Our salvation is based upon God’s love, the source of God’s grace, and God’s grace, the expression of God’s love (Eph. 2:4-5). The Father is the source. We are saved by His grace because of His great love. Our salvation is based on the First of the Trinity, the Father, in His love and grace.
The one salvation is through the death of Christ for God’s redemption (Rom. 3:24b), for God’s forgiveness of sins (Acts 10:43), for the believers’ reconciliation to God (Rom. 5:10), and for God’s justification (Rom. 3:24a).
This salvation is also through the life of Christ by the Spirit of life (Rom. 5:10; 8:2). Our salvation is from the Father as the base, through the Son, and by the Spirit.
The salvation by the Spirit begins from regenerating the believers with the divine element of Christ’s life (John 3:5; 1 Pet. 1:3). This salvation goes on through sanctifying the regenerated believers with the divine element of God’s holy nature (Rom. 6:19, 22). Regeneration is by God’s life, and sanctification is with the holy nature of God.
The Spirit of life also renews the sanctified believers with the newness of life (Titus 3:5; Rom. 6:4) and transforms the renewed believers with the glorious element of Christ’s life by the Lord Spirit (Rom. 12:2; 2 Cor. 3:18). Eventually, this life works to conform the transformed believers with the divine element of the life of the firstborn Son of God (Rom. 8:29).
The one salvation is unto the glorification of the conformed believers with the glory of God (Rom. 8:30).
Life is for salvation, salvation produces a living, and this living is the one manifestation of Christ.
First, this one kind of living is by the power of the resurrection of Christ to be conformed to His death (Phil. 3:10), dying to the self, the natural man, the old man, and the flesh (Matt. 16:24; Gal. 2:20; Rom. 6:6; Gal. 5:24) from the power of Satan, the world, and sin (Heb. 2:14; John 12:31; Rom. 6:2).
This one living is also by the bountiful supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ to live Christ and magnify Him (Phil. 1:19-21). To die to self, the natural man, the old man, and the flesh is by the power of resurrection. To magnify Christ is by the bountiful supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
We live to manifest Christ by the life of the God-man to live the overcomers’ life (Rev. 2:7, 11, 17, 26; 3:5, 12, 21). We are the God-men. We have a life which is the God-man life, by which we can live an overcoming life.
Finally, this one kind of living is by the growth in the life of Christ unto maturity for the building up of the Body of Christ (Eph. 4:15-16).
We praise the Lord for His mercy that through the last seventy-three years He has given us this inheritance of the truth which is based upon the interpretation of all the best of the Bible students and teachers throughout the past centuries. The church fathers saw the truth concerning the Triune God. Even though this fact is in the Bible, the word triune is not there. The church fathers saw that our God who is one, is triune, so they invented the word triune. Later, the Lord raised up some to see the inner life. William Law stressed the Spirit. Then Andrew Murray saw that in the Spirit of the glorified Jesus there is humanity. Jessie Penn-Lewis saw the subjective death of Christ, and Brother Austin-Sparks saw the principles of resurrection for the Body. Then Brother Watchman Nee saw something further and put all the foregoing things together as one package. I say this with tears. He passed on this package to me.
When I came to the United States, we invented many new terms to convey the fresh revelations we saw. In these past three years the Lord has brought us to the high peak of His divine revelation. Now we have a complete gift of the Recovery Version and the Life-study Messages. We should treasure this. This does not mean that we exalt Watchman Nee or Witness Lee. Instead, we exalt the Triune God who spoke through many interpreters throughout the centuries and who used two brothers to present the crystallization of the accumulated understanding of the divine revelation to us.
I know this is the end time. The Lord will close this age with all the truths conveyed in the Recovery Version and the Life-study Messages. Sooner or later all these truths will go out, and this will conquer the defective theology of Christianity.
(The Ten Great Critical 'Ones' for the Building Up of the Body of Christ, Chapter 5, by Witness Lee)