THE GREAT COMMISSION OF CHRIST IN RESURRECTION (3)
After Christ entered into His resurrection from the stage of His incarnation into the stage of His inclusion, He remained among His apostles for forty days to prepare them for carrying out His heavenly ministry in His resurrection (Acts 1:2-3).
We may think that Christ’s great commission was given only to the eleven apostles and not to us. But the eleven apostles received the great commission of Christ not only as apostles but also as disciples (v. 16). When the apostles received this great commission, they were not in their status as apostles. They were in their status as disciples, which is our status. We do not have the apostolic status, but we do have the disciples’ status. As disciples, we are qualified to receive Christ’s great commission.
The great commission that the Lord gave us is for us to disciple the nations and teach them the teachings of Christ (vv. 19-20)… Christ commissioned us to proclaim repentance for forgiveness of sins (Luke 24:47). We must have the proper experience of this if we are going to proclaim it. Everyone who is seeking after the Lord needs to have a full repentance and make a thorough confession of his sins to the Lord. In 1935 Brother Nee was in my hometown holding a conference on living Christ as our victorious life. One day during that conference, I went to the meeting hall when no one was there to spend some time with the Lord. I had a thorough repentance and made a thorough confession of my sins to the Lord for more than two hours. After that confession I felt that I was fully released and buoyant. If we do not confess our past sins to receive the cleansing of the Lord’s blood with His forgiveness, we will be heavily burdened. The way to be released from this burden is to make a thorough confession of our sins to the Lord. When we experience such a repentance for the forgiveness of our sins, we will be able to effectively proclaim this to others.
The Lord has also charged us to witness a resurrected Christ appointed by God to be the Lord and Christ (Messiah), the anointed One of God, and to be the Leader and Savior… To witness Christ is to magnify Christ, to display Christ (22:15). When people saw Paul, they saw Christ. Paul says that it was no longer he who lived, but it was Christ who lived in him (Gal. 2:20a). To him, to live was Christ (Phil. 1:21a). When Paul lived, he was Christ. Our witnessing is to witness that we are the very Christ whom we minister to others. When we are living Christ, all the negative things are gone, and all that people see is Christ. This is a life lived in humanity but expressing a divine Christ. This is to live Christ, to magnify Christ, to display Christ, to show people Christ.
To carry out the great commission of Christ in resurrection, we must live the divine life in our human life. We live in the human life, but we do not live the human life. Instead, we live the divine life in the human life. Resurrection means that our natural life has been crucified, has been conformed to the death of Christ. (The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1994-1997, vol. 5, “The Vital Groups”, ch. 5, pp. 100-101)
The church in Zamboanga 