THE VISION, PRACTICE, AND BUILDING UP OF THE CHURCH AS THE BODY OF CHRIST
Scripture Reading:Eph.1:3-6;Heb.2:10-11;1 Thes.5:23
I. There are three main items of God's purpose for the church:
A. The church must have the full sonship—Eph. 1:4-5.
B. Through the church God's multifarious wisdom is made known to the enemy; the church thus becomes God's poem, His wise exhibition of all that Christ is—3:10; 2:10; 1 Cor. 1:30.
C. God's purpose is to head up all things in Christ through the church—Eph. 1:10, 19-23.
II. The eternal purpose of God in His intention according to His heart's desire is to have many sons; God desires to have many sons to be His expression in a corporate way—vv. 3-6; 3:11; Rom. 8:28-29; John 1:12-13; Rev. 21:7:
A. Romans 8:19 tells us that the whole creation is waiting for the revelation and the glorification of the sons of God, and Hebrews 2:10 says that Christ is leading many sons into glory; Christ is doing one thing today: He is bringing us into glory—2 Cor. 3:18; 4:16-18.
B. At present the creation is enslaved under the law of decay and corruption; its only hope is to be freed from the slavery of corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God when the sons of God are revealed, manifested— Rom. 8:17-21.
III. The choosing of God's people for them to be holy is for the purpose of their being made sons of God, participating in the divine sonship; in eternity past God the Father "chose us…to be holy…unto sonship"—Eph. 1:4-5:
A. Holy means not only sanctified, separated unto God, but also different, distinct, from everything that is common; only God is different, distinct, from all things; hence, He is holy, and holiness is His nature:
1. God chose us that we should be holy; He makes us holy by imparting Him-self, the Holy One, into our being, that our whole being may be permeated and saturated with His holy nature.
2. For us, God's chosen ones, to be holy is to partake of God's divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4) and to have our whole being permeated with God Himself.
B. The divine sonship is accomplished by our being mingled with God (the Holy One as the Holy Spirit) unto full sanctification—Eph. 4:30; 1 Pet. 1:15-16:
1. God is working Himself into us and mingling Himself with us so that we may be holy, absolutely sanctified by Him, in Him, and with Him; every bit of our human nature will be mingled with the divine nature—cf. Lev. 2:4-5.
2. In the Old Testament type, every part of the boards of the tabernacle was overlaid with gold; in the fulfillment of the type, God mingles Himself with the church so that we may be brought into the full sonship—Exo. 26:28-30.
3. According to the teaching of the New Testament, sonship means:
a. That we are born of God to have God as our life and nature—John 1:12-13; 3:6; 1 John 5:11-12; 2 Pet. 1:4.
b. That we grow up with God and are in God, growing up into Christ, the Head, in all things and growing with the growth of God—Eph. 1:6, 10; 4:15-16; Col. 2:19.
c. That we are absolutely mingled with God; every part of our being will be permeated, saturated, and overlaid with God—Lev. 2:4-5; 1 Thes. 5:23.
d. That we are qualified to inherit all that God is, all that God has, and all that God has purposed—Eph. 1:14; Rom. 8:17.
e. That we eventually are absolutely holy and divine—Eph. 1:4; Rev. 21:2, 10.
C. God's chosen ones are made His sons by His sanctifying Spirit(Rom. 15:16; Gal. 4:6); this is why Ephesians 1:3 calls this a spiritual blessing, a blessing by the Spirit:
1. Sanctification for sonship is still going on; day by day, however, we may not live in our sonship because we may not care for the sanctifying Spirit speaking and working in our spirit—Rom. 15:16; 8:4; Eph. 5:26.
2. Today we must learn to live by the Spirit, to serve by the Spirit, to act according to the Spirit, and to have our being altogether by the Spirit, with the Spirit, and according to the Spirit all day long—Rom. 1:1, 9; 8:4; Phil. 3:3; Zech. 4:6.
3. Then we need to grow in the life of Christ with the proper nourishment in the Spirit; we can be nourished in three ways: by reading the holy Word, by listening to the spiritual speaking, and by coming to the meetings—John 8:31-32; Eph. 5:26; Rev. 2:7; Psa. 73:16-17, 22-26; 77:13.
D. God's chosen ones become holy and without blemish before Him and are predestinated unto sonship "in love"—Eph. 1:4; cf. 3:17; 4:2, 15-16; 5:2; 6:24; Rev. 2:4:
1. Love in Ephesians 1:4 refers to the love with which God loves His chosen ones and His chosen ones love Him; it is in this love, in such a love, that God's chosen ones become holy and without blemish before Him.
2. First, God loved us; then this divine love inspires us to love Him in return; in such a condition and atmosphere of love, we are saturated with God to be holy and without blemish, just as He is—1 John 4:19; Psa. 31:23a; 116:1; Mark 12:30.
IV. Christ as the Captain of salvation leads God's many sons into glory, the corporate expression of God, by saving them organically through sanctification; sanctification is God's "sonizing"—Heb. 2:10-11; Eph. 1:4-5; 1 Thes. 5:23; Rom. 5:10:
A. Hebrews 2:10 says that the Lord as the Captain of God's salvation will lead many sons into glory; then verse 11 speaks of the One who sanctifies and those who are being sanctified; this shows that sanctification is for sonship.
B. This brings us into a fuller understanding of Ephesians 1:4-5; verse 4 says, "To be holy," and verse5says, "Unto sonship"; to be holy…unto sonship shows us again that sanctification is for sonship.
C. The divine sanctification for the divine sonship is the center of the divine economy and the central thought of the revelation in the New Testament; sanctification is the hinge of God's carrying out His eternal economy.
D. The divine sanctification is the holding line in the carrying out of the divine economy to "sonize" us divinely, making us sons of God that we may become the same as God in His life and in His nature (but not in His Godhead), so that we may be God's expression; we say that sanctification is the holding line because every step of God's economy in His work with us is to make us holy:
1. The seeking sanctification, the initial sanctification, is unto repentance to bring us back to God; our repentance and believing were due to the seeking Spirit, the convicting Spirit—1 Pet. 1:2; Luke 15:8-10, 17-21; John 16:8-11.
2. The redeeming sanctification, the positional sanctification, is by the blood of Christ to transfer us from Adam to Christ—Heb. 13:12.
3. The regenerating sanctification, the beginning of dispositional sanctification, renews us from our spirit to make us, the sinners, sons of God to form an organism for God's corporate expression, which is the organic Body of Christ, the church—2 Cor. 5:17; John 1:12-13; 3:5-6, 8; 1 Pet. 1:3; Titus 3:5.
4. The renewing sanctification, the continuation of dispositional sanctification, renews our soul from our mind through all the parts of our soul to make our soul a part of God's new creation—Rom. 12:2b; Eph. 4:23; 2 Cor. 4:16; Gal. 6:15.
5. The transforming sanctification, the daily sanctification, reconstitutes us with the element of Christ metabolically to make us a new constitution as a part of the organic Body of Christ—1 Cor. 3:12; 2 Cor. 3:16-18; Rom. 12:1-2; Psa. 68:19.
6. The conforming sanctification, the shaping sanctification, shapes us in the image of the glorious Christ to make us the expression of Christ—Rom. 8:29; Phil. 3:10.
7. The glorifying sanctification, the consummating sanctification, redeems our body by transfiguring it to make us Christ's expression in full and in glory so that we may be fully and wholly sanctified in our spirit, soul, and body to be a consummated incorporation of God's many sons who are matured in the processed Triune God as their life that they may express God as the New Jerusalem for eternity—v. 21; Rom. 8:23; 1 Thes. 5:23; Rev. 21:2-3, 7, 9-11, 22.