THE DISPENSING OF THE SPIRIT
First Corinthians 15:45b shows us the life-giving Spirit for the divine dispensing. The consummated Triune God is the life-giving Spirit. Life-giving means life-imparting, and life-imparting means dispensing. The consummated Spirit of the Triune God is dispensing the divine life into us all day long. The Spirit gives life (2 Cor. 3:6).
The Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from among the dead gives life to our mortal bodies (Rom. 8:11). The life-giving Spirit first gives life to our spirit (v. 10). Then from our spirit He spreads the divine life into our soul to transform us (v. 6). Eventually, He gives life to our mortal body. We do not need to wait for this. Even today when we are sick, we can exercise our faith to say, "Lord, send Your Spirit from my spirit into my body to enliven it. My body is now weak and sick. It may even be dying. But Lord, I ask You to dispense Your life through the life-giving Spirit into my mortal and dying body. I need Your divine life." We need to exercise our faith to live not by ourselves but by Him. We live by Jesus. We have a dying life, but He is not dying. The Spirit of the One who raised Jesus from among the dead gives life to our dying body. This is dispensing.
The bountiful supply of the Spirit is for us to live and magnify Christ (Phil. 1:19-21). God has prepared such a bountiful supply for dispensing. Furthermore, the Spirit is the flow of the life supply as the river of water of life that we might drink Him (Rev. 22:1; 1 Cor. 12:13; 10:4). Eating and drinking are for dispensing. In 1965 we had a conference with a training on eating and drinking Jesus. This truth is seen throughout the entire Bible. In Genesis 2 is the eating of the tree of life. In Exodus is the eating of the lamb in Egypt and the eating of manna and drinking of the water that flowed out of the cleft rock in the wilderness. When the people of Israel entered into the good land, they ate the produce of that land. The offerings in Leviticus are for God’s eating and our eating. This is all the eating of Jesus in typology. Then in the New Testament, Jesus Himself tells us that He is the heavenly bread and that we need to eat Him (John 6:51, 57).
In Matthew 15 there is a story of the Lord’s encounter with a Canaanite woman. When she asked the Lord to help her, He replied, "It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs" (v. 26). Then she said, "Yes, Lord; for even the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table" (v. 27). The Canaanite woman, not offended by the Lord’s word, but rather admitting that she was a heathen dog, considered that at that time Christ, after being rejected by the children, the Jews, became crumbs under the table as a portion to the Gentiles. The holy land of Israel was the table on which Christ, the heavenly bread, came as a portion to the children of Israel. But they threw Him off the table to the ground, the Gentile country, so that He became broken crumbs as a portion to the Gentiles. This shows us again that God is for our eating so that He can dispense Himself into us and mingle Himself with us that He and we may become one.
(Living In and With the Divine Trinity, Chapter 3, by Witness Lee)
