«　WEEK 4　DAY 2　»

　　2 Cor. 11:3 But I fear lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your thoughts would be corrupted from the simplicity and the purity toward Christ.

　　1 Cor. 1:9 God is faithful, through whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

　　[In 2 Corinthians 11:3 simplicity refers] to the believers' single-hearted loyalty, single-minded faithfulness, toward Christ. In the garden of Eden, Eve, the wife of Adam, was deceived by the serpent, Satan, through his questioning and undermining of God's word, and was thus carried away to the tree of knowledge and distracted from the simplicity of eating the tree of life (Gen. 3:1-6)....The church in Corinth, the pure virgin betrothed to Christ, was being deceived by the Judaizers, the ministers of Satan (2 Cor. 11:15), who were undermining God's word by preaching another Jesus, a different spirit, and a different gospel (v. 4). Because of this undermining preaching, the apostle was fearful that the Corinthians would be distracted by the teachings of the Judaizers and would be separated from the genuine appreciation, love, and enjoyment of the precious person of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself as their life and their everything. (2 Cor. 11:3, footnote 2)

　　Eating the tree of life, that is, enjoying Christ as our life supply, should be the primary matter in the church life. The content of the church life depends on the enjoyment of Christ. The more we enjoy Him, the richer the content will be. But to enjoy Christ requires us to love Him with the first love. If we leave our first love toward the Lord, we will miss the enjoyment of Christ and lose the testimony of Jesus; consequently, the lampstand will be removed from us. (Rev. 2:7, footnote 6)

　　First Corinthians is a book on the enjoyment of the all-inclusive Christ (1:2, 9, 24, 30)....In this Christ there is an absolute, wonderful, excellent, and killing death. In the crucified and resurrected Christ there is the killing element that kills all our negative "germs."...If we eat Christ every day to enjoy Him, we will be nourished, and the negative elements within us will be killed.

　　The enjoyment of the all-inclusive Christ solves the problems in the church through the work of the cross (1:13a, 18, 23-24; 2:2). By "the cross" I mean the death of Christ, especially the subjective aspect of His death. The Christ whom we enjoy today is the all-inclusive One, and included in His being is the killing death. As long as we enjoy Him, we get killed, not in a negative way but in a positive way. When we enjoy Him every day, we get killed every day. One brother may be very offended by another brother and may even be full of hatred, but when this brother enjoys Christ, his germs of hatred toward the other brother are unconsciously killed. In marriage life the husbands offend the wives and the wives offend the husbands, but when the husbands and wives love the Lord and enjoy the Lord day after day, their bad feeling toward each other disappears. It is cleared up by the killing element within the very Christ whom they experienced. Inside of them there is a great change from hatred to love because of their enjoyment of Christ. Because there were so many problems among the Corinthians, Paul wrote to them concerning the enjoyment of Christ. This enjoyment solves our problems by killing the germs within us. (CWWL, 1988, vol. 4, "The Excelling Gift for the Building Up of the Church," pp. 444, 446-447)

　　This all-inclusive One, with the riches of at least twenty items [revealed in 1 Corinthians], God has given to us as our portion for our enjoyment. We should concentrate on Him, not on any persons, things, or matters other than Him. We should focus on Him as our unique center appointed by God, that all the problems among the believers may be solved. It is into the fellowship of such a One that we have been called by God. (1 Cor. 1:9, footnote 2)

　　Further Reading: CWWL, 1965, vol. 3, "The Enjoyment of Christ," ch. 1; CWWL, 1988, vol. 4, "The Excelling Gift for the Building Up of the Church," ch. 1; CWWL, 1985, vol. 3, "Elders' Training, Book 5: The Lord's Up-to-date Move," ch. 2