«　WEEK 1　DAY 3　»

　　John 15:4 "Abide in Me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me."

　　Gal. 2:20 "I am crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me…"

　　The significance of our blending is the reality of the Body of Christ. This reality is nothing but the group of God's redeemed who have all been made God, the God-men, by God. They live a life not by themselves but by another life, which is within them. This other life is the Triune God processed and consummated to enter into them and to take them as His abode, His dwelling place.

　　Ephesians 3:17 tells us that Christ is now making His home in our hearts. In John 14:23 the Lord said, “If anyone loves Me, …My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make an abode with him.” This word make is not a small word. To make is to build. The only way to make a home is by building. This building is not by anything physical but by the spiritual element and spiritual essence of the Divine Trinity. This building actually is a kind of organic constitution. The reality of the Body of Christ is a living by all the God-men united, joined, and constituted together with God by mingling humanity with divinity and divinity with humanity. (CWWL, 1994-1997, vol. 1, “The Practical Points concerning Blending, “pp. 119-120)

　　Every day remember that you are a God-man. You have God living in you, making His home in you. You and He, He and you, are mingled together as one. You should not live a life by your natural life, your natural man. You and I, the old man, the natural man, have been terminated on the cross, crucified by the Lord in His death (Gal. 2:20a). We must leave our natural man on the cross. This is what it means to bear the cross. By leaving your old man on the cross, you will be conformed to the death of Christ (Phil.3:10). The death of Christ means that when Christ lived on this earth, He was always rejecting Himself. He told us that He never did anything by Himself, but He did everything by the Father (John 6:57; 5:19; 4:34; 17:4; 14:10, 24; 5:30; 7:18). He had a very holy, pure human life, but He did not live that life. He put that life aside, put that life to death, and lived by the Father's life. That was a model to us. We should be the mass production of that model, the God-men who have both the human life uplifted in Christ's resurrection and the divine life. Even our human life has been uplifted in Christ's resurrection, but we should not live by that, by ourselves.

　　Paul says, “I am crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20a). This is not an exchange, because Paul goes on to say, “And the life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith of the Son of God” (v. 20b). Paul was a person living not by himself but by the pneumatic Christ, and this pneumatic Christ is the all-inclusive Spirit, who is the consummation of the processed and consummated Triune God. All of this is in resurrection. When you do not live by your natural life but live by the divine life within you, you are in resurrection. The issue of this is the Body of Christ. The reality of the divine life within us is the resurrection, which is the pneumatic Christ, the all-inclusive Spirit, and the processed and consummated Triune God.

　　What is it to be perfected? It is to be matured by continually exercising to reject the self and live by another life.…Paul lived by dying to live. He was dying to his natural man and living by his new man with the divine life. We should not live by ourselves. According to God's design in His economy, we were already put on the cross. We should not call ourselves back off the cross. To remain on the cross is to bear the cross and be under the cross. I have been crucified.…I am finished. I am through. But there is a new man with me. That is the resurrected God-created man uplifted with God's divinity in him. That man is actually God Himself. Now I live by that man. (CWWL, 1994-1997, vol. 1, “The Practical Points concerning Blending, “pp. 120-121, 129)

　　Further Reading: CWWL, 1994-1997, vol. 1, “The Practical Points concerning Blending, “chs. 3-4