Our God has one unique work in the whole universe and throughout the ages, which is to work Himself in Christ into His chosen people that He may obtain a corporate expression in humanity.
Throughout the generations and both in the Old and the New Testament time, this is the only thing that God desires to do, to work Himself into man and make Himself one with man and man one with Him (see Gal. 1:15-16; 2:20; 4:19; Eph. 3:17).
For Him to do this in us, we need to open to Him and allow Him access to our entire inward being.
God wants to work Himself into our mind, filling us with His thoughts. He wants to saturate our emotion so that we love what He loves and dislike what He dislikes. He wants to soften our will and make it one with His so that He may be expressed through us.
As the life-giving Spirit in our spirit, Christ wants to spread into every part of our inner being and fill us, saturate us, until He is lived out of us. This is what He is after!
God’s Intention is to Work Himself Into Us
The main thing that God does and what He desires from us is not just to save us and have us work for Him, for His kingdom.
God’s unique work in the universe and throughout the ages and generations is to simply work Himself into His chosen people and mingle Himself with them so that He may have an expression in humanity.
For this God became a man, lived a perfect human life on earth, passed through death and entered into resurrection and ascension. For this, Christ became the life-giving Spirit ready to come into us and mingle Himself with our spirit to regenerate our spirit.
Now from our spirit God works in us to increase Himself in us, grow in us, constitute us with Himself, and build Himself into us.
God has no intention to “correct your mistakes”, to “improve your character”, or to “make you a better person”.
What He wants is to just work Himself into you and fill you up to the brim, so that day by day, week by week, and year after year He would grow in you and be ripened in you to be expressed in you.
If we don’t see this, we miss the mark. If we don’t see what God desires to do today, our Christian life is meaningless.
We may want God to give us peace, joy, comfort, and rest – but God is not interested in “giving us things”. God gives us Christ: He wants to work Himself in Christ into our being to be our peace, our blessing, our rest, our joy, our comfort, and everything that we need!
God Works Himself Into Our Inward Parts
In Acts 9:1 we see Saul (who later became Paul) having murder in his inward parts and breathing out murder toward the Christians. But later in Phil. 1:8 we see that Paul longed for the saints in the inward parts of Christ.
Something happened in the meantime: Paul allowed God to come in and saturate his inward being with Himself. He gave the Lord access to his inner parts. For God to get what He desires today He needs to have access in our inward being.
We need to ask the Lord in our personal time with Him,
Lord, up to this point in my relationship with You, how much ground did I give You to be my inward element? How much did I allow You to spread into my inward parts? Lord, what is there deep in me that hinders You from spreading in me?
And when the Lord shines on us and exposes us of our situation and of our cold heart toward Him, we can pray,
Lord, You know my heart! You know that I love You and I believe into You. Lord, I just open to You – don’t allow any inward part to be uninhabited by You! I don’t want to go on until tonight, the end of this week, or the end of this year without allowing You more access in my being! Lord, I don’t want to avoid the deeper transactions with You which will allow You to spread further in my inward being!
By opening to the Lord in such a way, we can allow Him to spread Himself into our innermost parts, in all our inner being.
What is Your Priority?
We all tend to be busy people: we may be busy at school, at work, at university, at home, and even in God’s work. We may have to do so many things, and especially in the morning, we tend to brush off our time with the Lord or to shorten it “because we are busy”.
We might learn something from Martin Luther who once said something like, “Lord, I am so busy today – so I must pray more!”
What is our priority? Is our priority to take care of all these seemingly urgent and pressing matters? Is your priority to serve the house of God?
When we read the Bible we see that the Lord Jesus and the Apostle Paul had their priorities straight: they cared more for God’s unique work than for anything else.
Will the Lord witness concerning us, This man’s priority every day – no matter how many things he needs to do – is for Me to work Myself into him!
We may desire, like David, to build a house for God and to do many things for God. But the proper priority is not for us to work for God but for God to work Himself into us (Eph. 2:10; Phil. 2:13). We then will work, yet not us but the grace of God! We will do things, but we will do them in Christ who empowers us!
When we open to the Lord and allow Him access to our inner being that He may work Himself into us, He will build Himself into us and He will make His abode with us (John 14:23).
Christ builds up the church (Matt. 16:18) by coming into our spirit and then spreading Himself from our spirit into our mind, emotion, and will, to occupy our entire soul!
This church – the corporate entity of this kind of people – is God’s habitation and our habitation, consummating in the New Jerusalem!
God desires to work Himself into a group of open human beings and to saturate them with Himself, making them His corporate expression for His glorification! What a privilege that we can be part of God’s expression in the universe!
Lord, You are our priority. Nothing else and no one else is more important than You. We love You, Lord, and we give You the first place. We want to firstly spend time with You and allow You to work Yourself into us. Make Your home in us, Lord, and break through in our being.
References and Further Reading
- Sharing inspired from brother Ron Kangas’ sharing in this message and portions in, Messages Given during the Resumption of Watchman Nee’s Ministry (vol. 1, pp. 122, 107), and, Life-study of 1 & 2 Samuel (by Witness Lee, msg. 25), as quoted in the Holy Word for Morning Revival on, The Unique Work in the Lord’s Recovery, week 1 (entitled, Knowing the Work of God—the Unique Work in the Lord’s Recovery).
- Hymns on this topic:
# Lord Jesus, I love You! / I give You the preeminence in what I do. / Enjoying You is the overcoming way. / Thank You for Your recovery; Your Word we will obey.
# God’s economy is His plan to dispense Himself / Into His chosen, predestinated and redeemed people / As their life / Their life supply / And their everything.
# Lord, transform us to Thine image / In emotion, mind, and will; / Saturate us with Thy Spirit, / All our being wholly fill. - Picture credit: Phil. 2:13 (edited by a friend on facebook for the blog).
Throughout the ages, God has only one work, and that is to work Himself into man….Why did God create the universe? Why did He create man? Why did He create you? What is God trying to accomplish? This is an important question. If God wants to do something, and you do not know about it, your Christian life is meaningless. You may think that God’s intention is for you to have joy and peace. It is true that God wants you to have joy and peace, but these things are not God’s center. God is not merely giving you peace, blessings, forgiveness, eternal life, and so forth; His central thought is to work Himself into man. What is the ultimate goal of God in the old creation as well as in the new? It is to work Himself into man. This is God’s goal….I cannot tell you why God wants to do this. But I do know that this is His desire; He wants to work Himself into man. (Messages Given during the Resumption of Watchman Nee’s Ministry, vol. 1, pp. 122, 107)