What is the Lord’s recovery? It’s the recovery of the enjoyment of Christ and the practice of the church life

The primary and crucial aspect of the Lord’s recovery is to recover the dispensing of the Triune God as life (“Zoe” – the divine, eternal, incorruptible, indestructible, uncreated life of God) into His redeemed people in order that He may be fully expressed on the earth. In order to recover this God must have a recovery of life and a recovery of His expression.

The central matter in the Bible is not any doctrine or any practice but that God wants to be expressed. God desires to express Himself in humanity. God is invisible, yet He wants and desires to be expressed through the very man created by Him. Man and the entire universe were created for this purpose.

Through the course of church history this matter has been lost, misused, or corrupted. Simply put, in the eyes of God, recovery means to bring something back to its original condition. The regaining of His expression is the basic matter of the Lord’s recovery. Throughout the history of man we see that God plans and God accomplishes, then Satan destroys and God recovers.

The principle of recovery is seen in Matthew 19:3-8. When the Pharisees asked the Lord Jesus about divorce, He said that “at the beginning” God made them male and female and that a man would leave his father and mother, be joined to his wife, and that the two would become one flesh. The Lord further pointed out that what God had joined together man should not put asunder.

The Pharisees then inquired why Moses allowed a man to give a writing of divorce and put his wife away. To this the Lord replied: Moses, because of the hardness of your heart, allowed you to divorce your wives: but “from the beginning” it has not been so.

Notice the phrases “at the beginning” and “from the beginning.” These phrases imply that the Lord was standing with what God had ordained in the beginning and that He was seeking to bring the present situation regarding marriage back to what it was in the beginning. This is recovery.

Because the stubborn ones had become hard of heart, Moses allowed them to divorce their wives by writing a bill of divorce. But this was not God’s intention in the beginning.

In order for God to have His recovery, His people must have a heart to care for His intention from the beginning. If we are hard of heart, God may permit us to do certain things not in keeping with His original intention. But the hard of heart cannot fulfill God’s purpose, for they care only for the present situation or for the traditional practice, not for God’s original design.

Any one who has been used by the Lord in His recovery in the past have been those who cared, not for the present state of things, but for God’s standard as revealed in His Word. To be such ones we have to come to the Lord poor in spirit (Matt. 5:3) and pure in heart (Matt. 5:8). Then we will see that today the Lord is burdened to recover two things. The first is the enjoyment and experience of the riches of Christ, and the second is the practice of the church life. These things bring us back to God’s original intention in a practical way.

Praise the Lord we are here in the Lord’s recovery, in the church life, not for the recovery of certain doctrines or practices. We are here for the recovery of the divine expression of the Triune God. We are here for the central recovery of the divine life which we are possessing and enjoying and living by day by day.

God’s intention is to have a recovery purely and wholly of the Person of Christ, that this Person who is now the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor 15:45b) would be dispensed into His redeemed people, so that He would become their being, and that this would issue into the church life which would issue in God’s corporate expression. Praise the Lord for His recovery. [guest post: bro. Moh, London, UK]