Where does the consciousness for the Body of Christ come from?
Yesterday we saw that we need to exercise and cultivate the inward sense of the divine life that we may have the sense of the Body – and we do this by spending time with the Lord!
Our inner sense is being developed as we fellowship more with the Lord – and if we obey the inner sense as the Lord speaks to us practically in our daily life, our inner sense will become keener and richer.
This inner sense is the sense of the Body of Christ – and it needs to be cultivated, developed, exercised, and used! We are one Body in Christ – having an organic union with Him!
We were born in Adam, grafted in the un-cultivated tree, but when we believed into the Lord He transplanted us into Christ, the cultivated olive tree (Rom. 12)! By regeneration we have been brought into an organic union with the Lord – and now we are one with Him in spirit (1 Cor. 6:17)!
We are a part of Christ – one with Him in His Body, part of the corporate Christ today! To be in the Body in an organic way means to be organically united with Christ and abide in this organic union! This is how we have the consciousness of the Body and the sense of the Body – it all starts with our organic union with the Lord!
The Body of Christ is a matter of life – the church as the Body of Christ is not an organization but an organism constituted with the Triune God mingling Himself with the believers.
For us to be in the Body of Christ and to have the sense of the Body implies that we need to remain in the organic union with the Lord. When we remain in the organic union, we are in the Body; when we’re not in the organic union with the Lord, we are practically and experientially out of the Body.
Just like the Lord said in John 15, we are the many branches in Christ the vine – now we need to abide in Him! To remain in the organic union is to abide in the Lord, to abide in the vine – which is to remain in our mingled spirit!
The Body is held together in the organic union with Christ – for us to realize the Body of Christ, we need to experience the organic union with Christ with a thorough realization that we are organically one with Christ in life!
We have been grafted into Christ – we have been made one with Him in our spirit, and now we need to remain in our spirit all the time! In all the practical things in our daily life – both the big things and the small things – we need to learn to remain in our spirit, to be one with the Lord!
If we would live in the reality of the Body of Christ, we need to live a grafted life – in this grafted life, we no longer live by ourselves but we allow the pneumatic Christ to live in us, and He causes us to become conscious of the Body of Christ (Eph. 6:5; Gal. 2:20)!
[sharing inspired from the Conclusion of the New Testament msg. 305, as quoted in the Morning Revival on The Central Line of the Bible]
Lord, keep us in the organic union with You today! Thank You for putting us into You – we have been grafted into Christ! Now we are one spirit with the Lord! How we love this organic union with You, Lord! Today keep us abiding in You – keep us in our spirit! We want to remain in this oneness with You! In all the things we need to do, with all the people we meet and talk to – keep us turning to You in our spirit! We treasure this organic union with You, Lord! This union brings us the sense of the Body and a consciousness of the Body!
