Such a church is the issue, the coming out, of the organic Triune God. The Father has imparted His nature and life into our being as the basic substance. This is indicated in Ephesians 1 by His choosing us to be holy and predestinating us unto sonship (vv. 4-5). The Son in His redemption has become our element, by which we all have been made God’s divine inheritance (vv. 7-11). Do you think God would inherit sinful people? What God inherits surely must be something very precious. According to our natural, sinful, corrupt nature, our fallen being, we cannot be God’s inheritance. But Ephesians 1:11 tells us that in Christ we were made God’s inheritance. We became God’s treasure because we have the element of Christ, the element of the divine nature and the divine life, within us. This element makes us a precious treasure in the eyes of God. We become His inheritance because we have Christ as the element within us.
Ephesians 1 also tells us that the Spirit of God seals us (v. 13). When a piece of paper is stamped with a seal, the sealing ink saturates the paper. The essence of the sealing ink is imparted into the fiber of the paper. In the same way, the sealing of the Spirit saturates our being in a fine way. Even though I have been in Christ for over sixty years, I still feel today that the Spirit is sealing me. I am still being infused and transfused with the Spirit, making me full of the essence of Christ’s element, which is the very element of God’s holy nature and of His divine life. This sealing makes us absolutely and essentially one with the Triune God. This is the church life. We all need to live in this sealing. Then we will surely have a wonderful church life in the Lord’s recovery. This is included in the biography of Christ.
This wonderful One, who is the embodiment of the Father, and whose realization is the Spirit, is the constituent of the church. Our living through Him, with Him, by Him, and in Him is the constitution of the practical church life. Then He within us is every part of the new man. The church as the new man is constituted with Christ as the inner constituent. Christ is every member of the new man and is within every member. In the new man Christ is all and in all (Col. 3:10-11). This is not only His history but also our story. His biography becomes our history.
We are awaiting the day when we will be raptured and brought fully into Christ in glory. He will then become our glory in full. Today He is within us the hope of glory. In that day when we enter into the eternal part of His biography, we will live with Him, in Him, and through Him as one spirit with Him through the millennial kingdom and into eternity in the new heaven and new earth as the New Jerusalem, which is His ultimate consummation and ultimate enlargement.
In the first chapter of Genesis, God made man in His image, who is Christ, the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15). In the last chapter of Revelation, Christ is “the Spirit.” Revelation 22:17 speaks of “the Spirit and the bride.” The conclusion of the holy Word reveals that the organic Triune God becomes fully mingled with us, the transformed, tripartite human beings. His name at the consummation of the divine revelation is “the Spirit.” On the first page of the Bible He was the image of God, and on the last page of the Bible He has become “the Spirit” mingled with us, the transformed, tripartite man as His bride. He as the Husband and we as the bride become a universal couple. This couple is the coming New Jerusalem, and this will be the history, the story, the biography of Him with us for eternity. This biography began in eternity past and lasts without end through eternity future. In between eternity past and future, we are regenerated, renewed, sanctified, transformed, conformed, and glorified. We are in the process, in the way and on the way, of the biography of this wonderful One.
(Five Emphases in the Lord's Recovery, Chapter 2, by Witness Lee)