According to the new covenant, God is our God and we are His people (He is our inheritance and we are His inheritance), and we can know God subjectively (by living according to the sense of life in our spirit). How wonderful and rich is the new covenant!
May we know the bequests of the new covenant, and may we allow the Spirit to lead us in the enjoyment and experience of all these bequests! God made a new covenant with us, His believers, those who have His life; He has covenanted a lot of rich, wonderful, and amazing things to us.
First of all, because we are fallen and sinful, He promised to be propitious to our unrighteousnesses, forgive us of our sins, and forget them – that is, remember them no more.
Hallelujah, through the Lord Jesus’ coming to die for us and accomplish redemption for us, we can now be in the proper standing before God.
When we repent and believe into the Lord, the precious blood of Christ washes us of all our sins, and God cleanses, forgives, and forgets our sins. Wow!
Based on the blood of Christ, we can come forward to enjoy God, we can be saturated with God, we can have God wrought into our being, and we can even be made the same as God.
The blood of Christ is our only standing before God; we have no merit in ourselves, but Christ has accomplished an eternally effective redemption for us, and we can enter into the enjoyment of all that God is, for when we confess our sins and apply the blood, we are qualified to enjoy God and partake of all that He is, has, and has accomplished in Christ. Praise the Lord!
The second blessing of the new covenant is the imparting of the law of life by the imparting of the divine life into us.
God not only made sure we’re in the proper place, have the proper standing, and are right before Him; He imparts His own life into us, and by means of this life, He comes into us as a spontaneous, automatic, and effortless law of life to accomplish God’s purpose in us.
Just as a human being has the human life with its law, and this law of the human life causes a child to grow, develop, and become a mature man, so the law of the divine life in us imparts to us the element of God, regulates our inward parts and shapes us to the image of Christ as the firstborn Son of God.
The more we turn to our spirit, set our mind on the spirit, and contact the Lord, even remaining in the touch with Him, the more the divine life in us operates – it operates as a law, without us doing anything but saying Amen.
The divine life in us with its law frees us from the law of sin and of death, causes us to grow in life, and gives us an inward knowledge of God; the result of the operation of the law of life is that we are conformed to the image of Christ to become His duplication and reproduction for God’s corporate expression! Hallelujah!
According to the New Covenant, God is our Inheritance and we are God’s Inheritance for us to Enjoy Him for Eternity!
According to the new covenant, God promises to be God to us, and we would be a people to Him (Heb. 8:10; Jer. 31:33).
What does it mean for God to be our God and for us to be His people? For God to be our God means that He is our inheritance (Eph. 1:14).
He created us as a vessel to contain Him (Gen. 1:26-27; Rom. 9:23-24); He wants to come into our vessel and fill us with Himself, so that He may be our content.
God’s intention in creating us as vessels is that we would contain Him, so that He may be our possession, just as the content of a vessel is its possession.
God is our inheritance, our possession, our treasure, and also the portion of our cup for our enjoyment (Psa. 16:5).
When we are saved, we are not only rescued from God’s judgment – even more, we come back to God and enjoy Him anew as our possession.
This is signified by a man’s returning to his possession in the jubilee (see Lev. 25:10; Luke 4:18-19; 15:17-24; Acts 26:18; Col. 1:12); this is how we return to God to enjoy Him, experience Him, be filled with Him, and have Him as our inheritance.
So God gave us the Spirit as the guarantee and the pledge of our inheritance so that we may enjoy and drink of the Spirit, having a foretaste of the full taste we will enjoy and inherit for eternity of God (2 Cor. 1:22).
As we turn to the spirit, read the word with much prayer, and enjoy the Lord in our fellowship with Him, we enjoy the Spirit as the pledge of our inheritance; this pledging adds more of God into us little by little until we enter into eternity and have God as our full enjoyment! Hallelujah!
As children of God, we are heirs of God to inherit God as our everything (Rom. 8:17).
Before God obtained a people who have His life and nature, He was childless; before we received God as our life, we were poor and dead in sins and offenses.
But praise the Lord, God dispensed Himself into us, and He is constantly dispensing Himself into us to become our enjoyment and our portion, and He is our life, our portion, our person, and our inheritance!
And as we enjoy God, we become constituted with God, and He as our inheritance becomes us; the result is that we are God’s people, that is, we are God’s inheritance (Eph. 1:11, 14, 18; 3:21).
For us to be God’s people means that we’re His inheritance; we not only inherit God as our inheritance for our enjoyment, but we also become God’s inheritance for His enjoyment.
In our fallen and sinful state, we can never be enjoyed or inherited by God; however, as we enjoy God and have Him wrought into our being day by day, we are being constituted into God’s inheritance.
Through the process of transformation and subjective sanctification, we become something that God can enjoy and inherit for eternity. How wonderful!
God put His Holy Spirit into us as a seal (v. 13) to mark us out, indicating that we belong to God; this seal is living, and it works within us to permeate us and transform us with God’s divine element until the redemption of our body! Hallelujah!
For eternity, we and God will enjoy one another and inherit one another; the mutual inheritance of God and man becomes God’s inheritance in the saints for eternity (Eph. 1:18). This will be His eternal expression to the uttermost universally and eternally (Rev. 21:11). Hallelujah!
Thank You Lord for creating us as vessels to contain You and be filled with You; thank You for coming into us to be our inheritance, our life, our person, and the portion of our cup for our enjoyment! Hallelujah, we have returned to God as our possession – we have returned to the enjoyment of God, and the Spirit is the pledge of our inheritance, a foretaste of what we will inherit of God for eternity! Amen, Lord, thank You for working Yourself into us day by day, little by little, to make us God’s inheritance! Wow, by having God wrought into us we are being constituted into God’s inheritance, for through transformation and subjective sanctification, we become God’s inheritance. Amen, Lord, thank You for such a bequest of the new covenant!
As we Live according to the Sense of Life in the Principle of Life, we know God in the Inward way of Life!
The fourth blessing of the new covenant is that we will know God in the way of life; no one needs to teach his fellow citizen or brother, Know the Lord, for all will know God, from the little one to the great one among us (Heb. 8:11; Jer. 31:34).
What does it mean, and how can we experience this? In the new covenant, we receive the divine life, and the divine life enables us inwardly to know God subjectively; in the old covenant, the people of Israel knew God according to the outward law of letters with the ordinances, but in the new covenant we know God inwardly, according to the inner life.
This means that the divine life we have received through regeneration has a law of life that shapes us in the image of Christ, and there’s a sense of life that causes us to know God in the way of life.
God’s relationship with us is based on the law of life, it is a relationship in life, and we don’t need to do something outwardly according to certain rules or laws – we simply need to live according to the sense of life, the consciousness of the inner life.
The function of the divine life enables us to know God in the inward way of life; we can know God subjectively, from within, by the sense of life (Rom. 8:6; Eph. 4:18-19; Phil. 3:10a).
The sense of life is the feeling, the consciousness, of the divine life within us. This sense of life comes from the divine life (Eph. 4:18), the law of life, and the anointing of the Spirit (1 John 2:27).
On one hand, the sense of life is negative – it gives us the feeling of death and unrest when we do or say something; on the other hand, positively this sense gives us the feeling of life and peace (Rom. 8:6; Isa. 26:3).
The sense of life is a sense of satisfaction; it causes us to feel satisfied, strengthened, refreshed, watered, enlightened, and anointed.
When we follow the sense of life, we have inner peace, comfort, harmony, watering, anointing, and joy.
However, on the negative side, the sense of life can be a sense of death, giving us a warning. When we set our mind on the things of the flesh, when we mind the worldly things, we have a feeling of death, inner dissatisfaction, emptiness, oldness, dryness, darkness, depression, strife, discord, discomfort, restlessness, pain, bondage, and grief.
When we have such a feeling within, we need to turn to our spirit and enjoy the sense of life and peace!
We should live not according to the principle of right and wrong, the principle of good and evil/bad (which is the principle of death), but according to the sense of life in the principle of life. If we get offended by someone in the church life, we should simply come to the Lord in His word and pray-read the word until our offense is killed.
When something is in our conscience bothering us, we need to confess it, and we may have to confess to our fellow brothers and sisters also.
May we be saved from merely doing the right thing (versus doing the wrong thing); may we be brought into living according to the sense of life and peace!
When we live according to the sense of life in the principle of life, we live according to the principle of the tree of life, and not according to the principle of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:9).
Amen, the sense of life makes us know whether we are living in the natural life or in the divine life and whether we live in the flesh or in the spirit.
May we learn to stay away from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and turn to the tree of life to enjoy God as life and live according to the sense of life in the principle of life so that our life and work remain in the New Jerusalem! Amen!
Ultimately, our enjoyment of the indwelling Spirit as the automatic law of the divine life, the law of the Spirit of life, is in the Body of Christ and for the Body of Christ with the goal of making us God in life, nature, and expression but not in the Godhead to accomplish the goal of His eternal economy — the New Jerusalem — (Rom. 8:2, 28-29; 12:1-2; 11:36; 16:27; Phil. 1:19; cf. Gal. 4:26-28, 31). Hallelujah!
Lord, we choose to live according to the sense of life in the principle of life, and not according to the principle of right and wrong! Thank You for giving us Your divine life with the sense of life to know You inwardly, subjectively, intimately, in the way of life. We want to follow the sense of life and enjoy life and peace. We confess everything that the light exposes, and we set our mind on our spirit. Amen, Lord, we choose to follow the inner sense of life from the divine life in our spirit, so that we may know You inwardly, be led by You, have Your fresh inward anointing, and touch the tree of life. May our life and work remain in the New Jerusalem by our living according to the sense of life in the principle of life, and may the law of the Spirit of life operate in us in the sphere of the Body to make us God in life, nature, and expresion, but not in the Godhead to accomplish God’s goal in His economy, the New Jerusalem!
References and Hymns on this Topic
- Sources of inspiration: the Word of God, my enjoyment in the ministry, the message by Ed Marks for this week, and portions from, Life-study of Hebrews, pp. 412-413 (by Witness Lee), as quoted in the Holy Word for Morning Revival on, Crystallization Study of Jeremiah and Lamentations, week 12, Experiencing and Enjoying the Contents of the New Covenant according to Our Spiritual Experience for the Accomplishment of God’s Economy.
- Hymns on this topic:
– We’re being sonized now; / The life within will do / The deep transforming work / Of making us anew. / In ages past, the work was done— / Now prayer is over—praise the Son! (Hymns #1187)
– The Holy Spirit is the seal, / The foretaste, earnest, and the pledge. / He designates us as God’s own / And guarantees our heritage. / ’Tis by this Spirit God does spread / Into our mind, emotion, will; / By sealing every inward part, / He will our very being fill. (Hymns #1120)
– Tis by this sense that God we know, / The sense of inner life; / ’Tis pow’rful and spontaneous, / And not of any strife. / The greater is our growth in life, / The keener is this sense; / The more we walk and act in life, / The more it is intense. (Hymns #738)
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