GOD’S NEW CREATION BECOMING GOD’S ORACLE FOR HIS DISPENSING AND SPREADING (1)
In this chapter we want to see that God’s new creation becomes His oracle for His dispensing and spreading. The word oracle refers to God’s speaking, to the persons who carry out God’s speaking, or to the place of God’s speaking. The ones who were used by the Lord to write the Bible were God’s oracle. Among them, Moses was great, and Paul was even greater.
As the constituents of the vital groups, we need to remember and realize that we are God’s regenerated new creation, united with Christ in His divine life, joined to Christ as one spirit (2 Cor. 5:17; 1 Cor. 6:17). We are not merely generated persons in the old creation. We have been generated twice. The first time was by our parents to be the old creation. We were generated to be the natural man, but one day we were regenerated.
We are being discipled from being a natural man to being a God-man, living the divine life by denying our natural life according to the model of Christ as the first God-man (Matt. 28:19)… We should live such a life according to the model of Christ as the first God-man. When Christ was on this earth, He denied His natural life, Himself. He said that whatever He spoke was not His word but the word of the Father who sent Him (John 14:24). He never did anything out of Himself (5:19, 30). He did everything out of and by the sending Father. He was not the Sender but the sent One. He did not live Himself; instead, He lived the Sender, the Father (6:57a). This is the model of the first God-man….The church life is a discipling life to disciple us from being a natural man to being a God-man. God does not care whether you are a good man or a bad man, because everything of your natural man, good or bad, must go to the cross. All the natural persons should be discipled to the cross because we have another person in us. We have another life and nature, both divine, according to which we must live.
By the Lord’s discipling we become the witnesses of Christ to magnify Him by living Him (Acts 1:8; Phil. 1:19-21a). Are we the real witnesses of Christ in our daily life? Many of the sisters are very concerned about their hairstyle and about the way their hair looks. They spend much time in front of the mirror to care for their hair. Is this the conduct of a witness of Christ? We must be His witnesses in our whole being.
Paul was such a witness….When people saw Paul, they saw Christ….Every day Paul was a demonstration, a display, of Christ to show and present the exalted Christ to others. In his living, Paul was Christ because to him to live was Christ. We have to be discipled to such an extent that we become such a living witness.(The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1994-1997, vol. 5, “The Vital Groups”, ch. 4, pp. 86-90)
The church in Zamboanga 