When we truly see a vision of the Lord in His glory, we are enlightened and exposed regarding our uncleanness and we can apply the blood of Christ; the more we see the Lord, the more we abhor ourselves and the more we gain God!
The book of Jeremiah exposes what our condition is in our fallen being; we are not only sinful and fallen, but our heart is deceitful above all things and incurable, and our very nature is evil and unchangeable.
Just like the people of Israel in the Old Testament, we may pay lip-service to God yet our heart is far away from us.
And if our heart seems to be inclined toward God, in ourselves we have no power, desire, or ability to do the will of God, for we are fallen and sinful to the core, and there’s no way for us to change anything about ourselves.
In Rom. 7 we see a New Testament view of the fallen being of man both before and after regeneration: we will to do the good, but the evil is present with us, and the evil is always stronger than the good, always prevailing over us.
As believers in Christ we need to realize that in our fallen being our heart is deceitful and incurable, yet God can write His law of life on the tablet of our heart. Hallelujah!
It is not about changing our heart by seeing what God wants from us: it’s all about coming to the Lord, opening to Him, allowing Him to shine on us and in us, and having Him inscribed on our heart as the law of the Spirit of life.
When we received the Lord as our life and person, when He became our Savior and life by our calling on His name, He has written Himself on the tablet of our heart, and He is gradually transforming us from glory to glory into the same image as we behold Him and reflect Him.
May we give up any effort and struggle to improve or perfect ourselves, and may we come to the Lord to behold Him, enjoy Him, and have Him wrought into our being!
Even though our heart is deceitful and our nature is unchangeable, yet the Lord renews our heart and spirit whenever we come to Him!
When we return to Him as the fountain of living waters, He becomes the source of our being, the supply for our living, and the person who lives in us and is expressed through us.
Amen, Lord, may we come to You day by day to be infused with You, filled with You, and saturated with You!
Seeing the Lord, being Enlightened and Exposed of our Uncleanness, and Applying the Blood of Christ
In Isa. 6:1-7 we see the prophet’s response to the vision of Christ in glory; he exclaimed, “Woe is me, for I am finished! For I am a man of unclean lips, and in the midst of a people of unclean lips I dwell” (v. 5).
When we see the Lord, we are enlightened and exposed of our uncleanness, and we realize we are unclean.
Our lips are unclean – a great percentage of the words we speak are evil, for many of our words are gossip, criticism, and idle words.
Because of speaking such unclean things as gossip, murmuring, and reasoning, the church life is damaged and no longer sweet.
In Luke 5 Peter saw the Lord and realized that He is God when He told him to cast the net on the other side, therefore catching a lot of fish; his response was, Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, Lord (v. 8).
The more we see the Lord, the more we realize how unclean and sinful we are. How much we realize concerning ourselves depends on how much we see the Lord.
This is why we need a revival every morning; every morning we need to see the Lord, touch the Lord, and realize how unclean we are, how sinful we are, and how there’s nothing good within us.
Then, we can confess our sins, impurities, uncleanness, trespasses, and offenses, and He will cleanse us with His precious blood.
In Isaiah’s case, after he realised he was unclean, he was purged by one of the seraphim, signifying the holiness of God (Isa. 6:6), with an ember from the altar, signifying the effectiveness of Christ’s redemption accomplished on the cross.
Such a purging took away Isaiah’s iniquity and purged his sin.
When we see the Lord, we are enlightened and exposed of our uncleanness, and we confess and apply His precious blood to be cleansed and washed.
Even more, we need to go deeper and realize that we not only commit sins and make mistakes, but we are a totality of uncleanness.
In our experience, whether we are clean or unclean depends on the feeling of our conscience, and the feeling of our conscience depends on our seeing the Lord.
It is not our introspection or looking within to analyse what’s wrong or what mistakes we made that exposes our uncleanness, but our coming to the Lord to be enlightened and exposed by His divine light.
The more we see the Lord and are exposed, the more we are cleansed; when we agree with the Lord’s light and do not justify ourselves but say Amen to His exposing and enlightening, the blood of Christ cleanses us and we are washed and cleansed.
When our conscience is cleansed and is void of offense, we can contact God.
Then we realize that, as long as we remain in the old creation, we can never be completely clean; the old creation is unclean and defiling, and as long as we remain in it, we are also unclean.
It is only at the redemption of our body that we can be fully redeemed and released from uncleanness; until then, we need to come to the Lord, be enlightened and exposed by Him, apply His precious blood, and enjoy His life to be cleansed and washed.
May we be those who live in the divine light, being under God’s enlightenment, so that God may have a way to expose our sins, trespasses, failures, and defects, everything that contradicts His pure light, His perfect love, His absolute holiness, and His excelling righteousness.
As the Lord enlightens us and exposes all these matters in us, we sense the need of the cleansing of the redeeming blood of the Lord Jesus, and it cleanses us in our conscience from all our sins (1 John 1:7, 9).
When we experience the cleansing of the blood of Christ, our fellowship with God and with one another is restored and maintained.
Our relationship in life with God and with the saints can never be broken, but our fellowship can be interrupted.
May we learn to maintain our fellowship with the Lord by the constant cleansing of the Lord’s blood.
Lord Jesus, we come to You to see You and enjoy You; shine on us to enlighten us and expose us of any sin, trespass, failure, and defect. We choose to live in the divine light so that anything which contradicts Your pure light, perfect love, absolute holiness, and excelling righteousness would be exposed and removed. Oh Lord, we are unclean; our lips our unclean, our heart is unclean, and our entire being is unclean. Cleanse us with Your precious blood. Restore the fellowship between us and You and between us and the others. We want to maintain our fellowship with God and with others by the constant cleansing of the Lord’s blood. May our conscience be cleansed and void of offense so that we may contact God, see God, and be filled with God!
When we See God, we Gain God, we are Transformed into the Image of Christ, and we Abhor ourselves
In the New Testament sense, seeing God equals gaining God in our personal experience.
On the one hand we see God and are enlightened and exposed of our sins and trespasses, and the blood of Christ cleanses us.
On the other hand, when we see God we gain God, that is, we receive God in His element, life, and nature so that we may become God in life and in nature and not in the Godhead.
When Job saw God, he realized that until then he merely heard of Him by the hearing of the ear, but now his eye has seen Him, so he abhorred himself and repented in dust and ashes.
This indicates that until that time Job only had a general knowledge of God but he never saw God, but now he saw God and gained God in his personal experience, so he abhorred himself.
When we see God, we gain God (Matt. 5:8); when we see the Lord, we are infused with Him and we gain something of Him. What does it mean to “gain God”?
To gain God is to receive God in His element, in His life, and in His nature. This not only makes us one with God but makes us part of God, one with Him intrinsically, one with Him in life, nature, and constitution.
God doesn’t want to merely be seen by us so that He may expose us and show us how great He is and how sinful we are.
He wants us to see Him, be enlightened and exposed of our uncleanness, repent and apply the cleansing blood of Christ, and be infused with God so that we may gain something of God, that is, we would have something of God infused into our being.
Our destiny in the New Jerusalem is that, as God’s redeemed, sanctified, transformed, conformed, and glorified people, we will continually and forever see God’s face (Rev. 22:4).
Today in our experience our seeing God causes us to gain God. Seeing God transforms us; when we see God, when we behold His glorious face, we are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18).
As we see God, we receive God; a new element comes into us, and the old element is being discharged – this is a metabolic process of transformation.
Seeing God results in being transformed into the glorious image of Christ; this makes us one with God and even part of God as God is part of us, so that we may express God in His life and represent Him with His authority. Hallelujah!
On the positive side, seeing God equals gaining God, and on the negative side, seeing God results in us abhorring ourselves.
When we see God, we love Him and we hate ourselves and deny ourselves (Job 42:6; Matt. 16:24; Luke 9:23; 14:26).
The very God whom we look at today is the consummated Spirit, and we can look at Him in our spirit.
For example, in our morning time with the Lord, even if only for fifteen or twenty minutes, we have time to be with the Lord and remain in the Spirit; this causes us to love Him and be infused with Him.
We can pray-read the word of God, we can talk to the Lord, and we can pray to Him with short prayers; then we will have the sensation that we are receiving something of God’s element.
As we spend time with the Lord in the morning, we have the sensation that we are absorbing the riches of God into our being.
In this way we are under God’s divine transformation day by day; this is not of our own efforts or struggles but it is altogether by our looking at the very consummated God as the Spirit in our spirit. Amen, Hallelujah!
Lord Jesus, we want to see You, look at Your glorious face, and be infused with You so that we may gain You and be filled with You! Amen, Lord, we come to You to be enlightened and exposed of our uncleanness, we repent and confess, we apply Your precious blood, and we open to gain God! May our being be cleansed and open to receive God in His element, life, and nature, even as our old element is being discharged and eliminated! Keep us coming to You in Your word, Lord, and keep us opening to You, so that we may receive something of God’s element and absorb the riches of God in our being, thus being under the divine transformation day by day! Amen, Lord, the more we see You, the more we love You and the more we abhor and deny ourselves so that You may be everything to us and in us!
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 Job, msgs. 19, 21, 30-31 (by Witness Lee), as quoted in the Holy Word for Morning Revival on, Crystallization Study of Jeremiah and Lamentations, week 2, The Kernel of the Book of Jeremiah.
- Hymns on this topic:
– My lips are foul, my heart impure; / I’m a vile failure, utterly; / All my past hopes no more endure; / Lord, hast Thou yet some grace for me? / In holiness, self’s active yet; / When humble, I on self rely; / E’en the remorseful tears I shed, / These, too, Thy cleansing blood require. (Song on, Unclean Lips, Impure Heart)
– I am crucified with Jesus, / And He lives and dwells with me; / I have ceased from all my struggling, / ’Tis no longer I, but He. / All my will is yielding to Him, / And His Spirit reigns within; / And His precious blood each moment / Keeps me cleansed and free from sin. (Hymns #564)
– Walk in the light, and sin abhorred / Shall ne’er defile again; / The blood of Jesus Christ the Lord / Shall cleanse from every stain… / Walk in the light, thy path shall be / Serene and clear and bright; / For God, by grace, shall dwell in thee, / And God Himself is Light. (Hymns #658)
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