God’s Dispensation Accomplishes the Heading up in Christ unto the Fullness of Times

The heading up of all things is according to God’s dispensation, for God is dispensing Himself into man to head up all things in Christ, and in the New Jerusalem He will gain a fully headed up universe! Hallelujah!

This week in our morning revival we come to the topic of, Knowing and Participating in God’s Great and Lofty Will to Head Up All Things in Christ.

Our God has a great and lofty will, which is to head up all things in Christ.

What does it mean to hold the Head, how can we hold the Head, and how are we headed up in Christ?

To hold the Head is first to acknowledge that only Christ is the Head and to come absolutely under His authority.

No one else is the Head; only Christ is the Head, and we aspire to come absolutely under His authority in our spirit, soul, and body.

We want Him to rule in us, reign in us, and we want Him to be our Lord subjectively, practically, and experientially.

Christ is our unique Head; as the Head, He decides our pathway – we don’t have any ground for our own choice.

We may have tried to make our own choice in our Christian life, but thank the Lord, He has conquered us and His will was done in us.

Our only duty as the Body of Christ is obedience and submission without any opinion, idea, or proposal. We only need to obey and submit.

However, when we hear this, we may ask ourselves, How can we just submit to the Lord as the Head, and how can we just obey Him?

In ourselves we don’t want to obey and submit, and even if we want to, we can’t. But praise the Lord, Jesus Christ was submissive and obedient to the Father throughout His whole life.

When He dispensed Himself into us as the life-giving Spirit, He gave us His life of submission and obedience. The divine life we have in us, Christ Himself, is a life of submission and a life of obedience.

Whenever we genuinely enjoy the Lord in our spirit, we enjoy Him as our submission and obedience to the Father.

The Lord Jesus learned obedience through suffering (Heb. 5:8); suffering brought obedience to Him. True obedience is found when there’s obedience in spite of suffering.

A man’s usefulness is not whether he has suffered, but whether he has learned obedience in suffering. Only those who are obedient to God are useful; this means that we need to take Christ as our obedience to God.

If our heart is not softened, the suffering will not go away. Our way today is the way of manifold sufferings.

If we yearn for ease and enjoyment, we are of no use to the Lord; we all must learn to be obedient in sufferings.

When the Lord Jesus came to the earth, He didn’t bring obedience with Him; rather, He learned obedience through sufferings.

This learned obedience is now in us! When we were saved we were not only forgiven, washed, regenerated, and brought into the kingdom of God; we were also brought into submission to God.

If we only care for our joy, our experiences are not abundant, but when we’re submissive to God, we will experience the fullness of salvation.

The Lord became the source of our salvation through obedience; God saved us with the hope that we would submit to His will.

When we meet God’s authority, submission is a simple matter; when we meet God’s authority, knowing God’s will is a simple matter, for the Lord – who was submissive throughout His life – has already given us His life of submission.

When we hold the Head, Christ, we will not dare to please ourselves or others; we seek only to please Him alone. When He is our Head, we are determined to gain the honor of being well-pleasing to Him (2 Cor. 5:9).

Being Headed up in Christ by the Dispensing of the Abundant Life Supply of the Triune God

God’s desire is to head up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens and the things on the earth, in Him (Eph. 1:9-10); this is the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Himself.

When man fell, he didn’t just disobey God so he was disciplined by Him; it’s worse than this – Satan, the power of death, injected himself into man, and Satan became death and darkness to man.

Man was brought into corruption, darkness, confusion, and eventually death. Satan’s goal was just to corrupt God’s creation, cause confusion, and bring in death.

But praise the Lord, God came in to enliven, impart life, and cause life to abound! Death ruins, but life heals; darkness brings in confusion, but light brings in the proper order.

For God to head up all things in Christ, He first needs to head us up in Him.

Every day we need to take Christ as our Head, asking Him to head up our spirit, our soul, our heart, our body, our environment, our circumstances, and everything about us.

The enemy is always looking for opportunities to damage and waste our time; we need to be watchful, redeeming our time by being filled with Christ as the Spirit!

The economy of God, God’s dispensation, is to head up all things in Christ at the fullness of the times; this is what God planned and purposed in Himself according to His desire.

God heads up all things in Christ through the dispensing of the abundant life supply of the Triune God as the life factor into all the members of the church so that they may rise from the death situation and be attached to the Body.

The whole universe is in a heap of collapse; all we see around us is confusion, disorder, no divine light shining and no divine life being dispensed.

When the divine life is dispensed, we are being headed up; when the divine light shines into us, it controls us and regulates us, and it ultimately heads us up.

Every day we need to realize that God’s one goal is to dispense Himself into us day by day; this is how He carries out His economy.

The way God heads all things up is through the church; He heads up the church by the dispensing of the abundant life supply of the Triune God as the life factor into us, so that we as the many members of the Body may rise up from the death situation and be headed up in Christ as the Body.

It is good to pray concerning this before the Lord, opening to Him and asking Him to head us up in Him by dispensing His abundant life supply in us.

In ourselves we are not able to be headed up; our whole natural being rises up when it comes to being headed up, and we are in rebellion toward God.

But we can cooperate with Him in prayer; we can open to Him and tell Him,

Lord Jesus, head up our whole being in You! We want to enjoy the dispensing of the abundant life supply of the Triune God as the life factor into us so that we may rise up from any death situation and be attached to the Body. Lord, we take You as our Head. May Your divine light shine in us to control and regulate us, and may the divine life be dispensed into us to head us up in Christ. Amen, Lord, head up all the saints in all the churches in Christ, so that through the church You may head up all things in Christ!

God’s Dispensation accomplishes the Heading up of all things in Christ until the Fullness of the Times

God’s will is to head up all things in Christ in the fullness of the times; the times refers to the ages, and the fullness of the times will be when the new heaven and new earth appear after all the dispensations of God in all the ages have been completed.

What is a “dispensation”? The Brethren pointed out that there are seven dispensations, and in their understanding a dispensation is a way that God deals with His people at a certain time.

Our understanding or application of the word “dispensation” relates to the center of God’s good pleasure, His heart’s desire.

A dispensation is the act or instance of dispensing, referring to God’s dispensing of Himself into His chosen people.

God’s dispensation – the dispensing of God into man – is what accomplishes the heading up of all things in Christ; we need the element of God with His life and nature to be wrought into our being.

Altogether there are four ages: the age of sin (Adam), the age of the law (Moses), the age of grace (Christ), and the age of the kingdom (the millennium).

God dispensed Himself into Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with Joseph; He had even a greater dispensation with Moses and, of course, with the Lord Jesus.

God has always been dispensing Himself into man; though the words “dispensation” or “dispensing” cannot be found in the Old Testament, yet God has been dispensing Himself into man again and again.

How could have Abel offered the proper sacrifice to God to be pleasing to God without God dispensing Himself into him? He could not have done that.

Enosh was the first one recorded in the Bible to call on the name of Jehovah; he realized he is frail and mortal, and he began to call on the name of Jehovah. He couldn’t just come up with that – he experienced God’s dispensing!

In the same way with Enoch, who walked with God for three hundred years, taking God as his center and everything, doing everything according to God’s revelation and leading; he couldn’t have done it without God’s dispensing of Himself into him.

Noah not only walked with God but also worked together with God; he couldn’t have done this without experiencing something of God’s dispensing.

It is the same with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; they experienced God and enjoyed the dispensing of God, and Jacob with Joseph became greater than the Pharaoh when he blessed him.

As we receive and enjoy the dispensing of the abundant supply of the grace of Christ, which is the enjoyment of Christ, we reign in life.

The divine dispensing continued in the New Testament Epistles; God’s dispensation today is even greater than it was at the time of the apostle Paul (Eph. 3:2; 1 Pet. 4:10).

Today we enjoy a deeper, higher, and wider dispensation of the grace of God, and we are being headed up in Christ.

According to the truth of the Word, God’s dispensation – His active dispensing of Himself into man – is getting bigger and bigger until it comes to the fullness of the times, the greatest time of dispensing!

God’s dispensation will continue through the millennium until the fullness of the times; the ultimate, the consummate, dispensation will be the dispensing of the triune God into the whole city of the new Jerusalem (Rev. 22:1-2).

In the New Jerusalem we see the Father being in the Son on the throne, shining through the Lamb as the Lamp, and the Spirit flows as the river of water of life with the Son as the tree of life along both its sides.

We enjoy a miniature of this consummate dispensation in the church life today; as we enjoy the Spirit as the living water and eat Christ as the tree of life in the church life, we await the consummate dispensation, in which we will be fully saturated with the Triune God (1 Cor. 10:3-4; 12:13; Rev. 2:7; 22:2, 14; John 6:57).

Where life is, there light is also (John 1:4; 8:12); because the New Jerusalem is saturated with light, it has no need of the light of the sun, for the glory of the Triune God will be our shining and controlling light (Rev. 21:23).

May we allow the Lord to shine as light in all the parts of our inner being, so that we may have no dark parts but our have our whole being full of light, as with a lamp with its rays illumining it!

In the New Jerusalem there will be no night, no death, and no darkness; instead, there will be life and light, causing everything to rise up and be in good order and thus be fully headed up in Christ (Rev. 21:24; Eph. 1:10). Amen!

When we are fully headed up in Christ in the New Jerusalem, that will be God’s eternal administration and economy.

Today we live in the church life as the miniature of the New Jerusalem drinking the river of water of life and eating the tree of life, being headed up in Christ, and we are under God’s dispensation; we are living for that day, the fullness of the times!

Today we are working out the New Jerusalem by receiving the divine dispensing every day, and we are building the New Jerusalem when we cooperate with the Lord to dispense Him into others!

Thank You Lord for bringing us under the dispensation of God, the active dispensing of the Triune God as the abundant life supply into us to be our everything and to head us up in Christ! Hallelujah, our God is constantly dispensing Himself into us, His chosen people, so that we may enjoy Him and be filled with Him unto the heading up of all things in Christ! Amen Lord Jesus, we want to live in the church life as a miniature of the consummate dispensation of God, enjoying the Spirit as the living water and eating Christ as the tree of life! Yes, Lord, we await the consummate dispensation in the New Jerusalem, in which we will be fully saturated with the Triune God!

References and Hymns on this Topic

• Inspiration: the Word of God, my enjoyment in the ministry, the message by Ed Marks for this week, and portions from, Life-study of Ephesians, msgs. 8-10 (by Witness Lee), as quoted in the Holy Word for Morning Revival on, The Will of God (2020 spring ITERO), week 2, Knowing and Participating in God’s Great and Lofty Will to Head Up All Things in Christ.
• Hymns on this topic:
  – Thou art the hope of glory, / Thou art the mystery, / The center and the focus / Of God’s economy; / The secret of the ages, / Veiled from eternity, / The hidden dispensation, / The Triune God in me! (Song on, Christ in Colossians)
  – A mighty flowing-out is God, / He flows throughout the ages. / And so to flow Himself to man / He is in many stages; / Yet still one God is He, / One flow eternally; / His stages pave the way / To flow through man today, / And now He flows within us! (Hymns #1198)
  – In our daily life and all we are and do and think and say, / How we need a deeper mingling just to gain the Lord each day; / Lord, we give ourselves completely just to take the mingled way. / Yes, mingling is the way. (Hymns #1199)