Without any doubt, the riches of our Lord Jesus Christ are truly immeasurable, boundless, and eternal. The past Winter Video Training focusing on the book of Isaiah proved that even more. In my whole experience as a Christian, I can admit that it is only now, after this video training, that I began to understand these amazing visions in the Bible.
I am not a writer or a speaker but deep down in my heart, there’s a feeling of uneasiness if I will not share what I have enjoyed during the training. It is the Spirit of Christ within me that wants me to speak!
The whole training comprises of twelve long messages which are interrelated to one another and beautifully arranged into a sequence. I will just share the important points and matters which touched me the most.
[this is the first part of sister Rona’s sharing from the video training we just had on the Crystallization-Study of Isaiah(2)]
The first message started with the announcing of the All-inclusive Christ, Jehovah the Savior, as the Glad Tidings. Hallelujah for God’s name which is – I Am! He is the One who is self-existing, the One whose being depends on nothing apart from Himself! Apart from God, all else is nothing; He is the only One who is, the only One who has the reality of being (Isa. 40:12-18).
It’s so moving to see that we the believers of Christ as human beings are like withering grass, and our glory is like the falling flower of grass, but the living and abiding word of the Lord has changed our nature, making us living and abiding forever.
The more we realize that apart from Christ we are nothing, emptiness, and vanity, the more we will appreciate Christ, treasure Christ, and seek to be filled, saturated, and permeated with Christ!
Thus, we are now living in the reality of the new creation. In order for the age to be changed from the Old Testament to the New Testament in our experience, we must deal with our flesh by the Spirit of Life, give up the world and turn to God by the love of the Father, defeat Satan through the Word of Son, and pass through death to die to the self by the power of resurrection for the Body of Christ.
Praise the Lord for Isaiah 40:28-31 where it says,
Do you not know, or have you not heard, that the eternal God Jehovah, the Creator of the ends of the earth, does not faint and does not become weary? There is no searching out of His understanding. He gives power to the faint, and to those who have no vigor He multiplies strength. Although youths will faint and become weary, and young men will collapse exhausted; yet those who wait on Jehovah will renew their strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles; they will run not faint; they will walk and will not become weary.
Furthermore, the matter of Christ as the Servant of Jehovah touched me so much. His humility is exceptional. His obedience is irrefutable. His divine love is incomparable. As the Servant of Jehovah, Christ would not break a bruised reed or quench dimly burning flax.
This simply means that He was full of mercy; no matter how much He was opposed, He kept the door of mercy and grace open. Christ trusted in God and set His face like a flint in fulfilling God’s purpose.
As the Lord Jesus was walking in God’s way to fulfill God’s will, His face was like a hard stone – even while He was walking towards being crucified. This was His obedience to God unto death according to the counsel of God, for the fulfillment of God’s redemptive plan. God intends to reproduce this Christ in us and make us the same as He is.
The Lord served us by dying as a grain of wheat and producing us in His crucifixion and resurrection as the many grains of wheat – so that we may become the corporate servant of Jehovah today. What a wonderful Christ we have!
The messages regarding the All-inclusive Christ in His four stages according to God’s New Testament Economy were an eye-opener – in His incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. The purpose of God’s move in Christ in the stage of incarnation is to bring God into man and to express the bountiful God in His rich attributes through His aromatic virtues.
In order to carry out God’s ministry, Lord Jesus underwent a lot of sufferings and persecutions. As a perfect man, the Lord Jesus lived a lowly and sorrowful human life. He grew up like a tender plant before Jehovah and like a root out of dry ground.
The Lord being likened to “a root of a dry ground” means that His environment did not render Him any help at all. Everything that He had was from God; He did not receive or expect anything from His surroundings that would encourage, support, or comfort Him. He was satisfied with God plus nothing!
Our Lord was never discouraged; He had no hope toward the world and did not expect to receive anything from it; His only hope was God, and His only satisfaction was God.
Those who take God as their satisfaction will never be disappointed. The brother asked us in his message, why are we always thirsty? Two simple answers were (1) because it is human to be thirsty and (2) everyone who drinks this world’s water shall thirst again(see John 4). So we need to drink the water of life. The highest enjoyment is to drink God. John 4:13-14,
Jesus answered and said to her, Everyone who drinks of this water shall thirst again, But whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall by no means thirst forever; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into eternal life.
Furthermore, Christ is revealed as the crucified Redeemer who sacrificed Himself for our trespasses to accomplish Jehovah’s redemption that the believers in Christ may be redeemed, justified, and reconciled to God.
This results in the life union with Christ in His resurrection (the reality of which is the life-giving Spirit). In resurrection, He produced a seed for His satisfaction and for the Father’s pleasure.
The seed produced by Christ in His resurrection is His believers for the building up of His Body as His continuation. The Father is pleased with the Body of Christ, which is constituted with the corporate seed brought forth by Christ as the life-giving Spirit.
This is the intrinsic significance of Christ’s resurrection – we as the corporate seed live today as the continuation of Christ on the earth for the pleasure of Jehovah.
The intrinsic significance of Christ’s ascension is that as the Body we may proclaim His victory in His crucifixion and resurrection and participation in the work of God for His new creation, the constitution of the New Jerusalem.
Saints, now that Christ has died and has been raised from the dead, it is impossible for God to change His mind about forgiving us because He is bound to His righteousness to forgive us! God is satisfied!
Praise the Lord for giving Christ to us as our righteousness! We are no longer in “a suspense mode” salvation! We have the taxed, non-fraudulent righteously paid salvation! Words are not enough to express how great God is!
And not only that, Christ has also been called by Jehovah to be a covenant for us. This covenant is the legal agreement between God and His people; through the death of Christ, the covenant became a testament. Christ enacted the new covenant with His blood according to God’s righteousness through His redeeming death.
Now Christ as God’s sure mercies is the reality of all that God is and all that God has given to us; God’s salvation, God’s righteousness, God’s justification, God’s forgiveness, God’s redemption, God’s riches, and all God has and will do have been covenanted to us. Thank You, Lord, for the irrevocable salvation! What an inheritance we have!
[soon: part two of this sharing from the recent Crystallization-study of Isaiah(2)]
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