«　WEEK 6　DAY 5　»

　　Rom. 12:2 And do not be fashioned according to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind that you may prove what the will of God is…

　　2 Cor. 3:18 But we all with unveiled face, beholding and reflecting like a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord Spirit.

　　In this process of resurrection there are four aspects: sanctification, transformation, conformation, and glorification. In Romans 12:2 Paul speaks of transformation, saying that we should not be conformed to this age but that we should be transformed by the renewing of the mind. In 8:29 Paul speaks of conformation, and in the next verse, of glorification. Our future glorification will be the ultimate step of resurrection; it is resurrection as applied to the body.

　　Today our sonship is not yet full. However, it will get fuller and fuller until it reaches the peak at the time of our glorification, when we shall be fully resurrected and designated the sons of God in nature and in appearance. Both in name and in reality we shall be the sons of God in spirit, in soul, and in body. (Life-study of Romans, pp. 554, 556)

　　[God is] building Himself in Christ into our being through the metabolic process of transformation [cf. 2 Sam. 7:12-14a].

　　Because Christ is the Spirit, He can dwell in us, and we can fellowship with Him in our spirit. We should look to Him, behold Him, and reflect Him, opening to Him the three layers of our being—our spirit, our heart, and our mouth. Then we will spontaneously reflect Him as a mirror and gradually be transformed into His glorious image from glory to glory. As a result, we will have the same image that He has [cf. 2 Cor. 3:18]. In this way the Lord Jesus makes us like Him and even makes us Him. When we look unto Him, He impresses Himself into our being. Then we become His reflection.

　　Transformation is a metabolic process that changes us by adding some new element into our being and discharging the old element….God’s economy is just to work Himself into us that we may experience such a metabolic process of spiritual digestion and assimilation that produces a gradual, intrinsic change in life. God’s building Himself into our being is altogether an organic matter. In order for such a building to take place, we need to receive, digest, and assimilate an organic element. Our spiritual food and drink is the organic, pneumatic Christ (John 6:51, 57; 7:37-39), the Christ who is the life-giving Spirit. (Life-study of 1 & 2 Samuel, pp. 171-172)

　　As such a Spirit He enters into God’s chosen people to dispense, to build, Himself as life into their being to be their inner constitution. In this way He makes them God-men, the many sons of God (Heb. 2:10), the mass reproduction of Himself as the firstborn Son of God (Rom. 8:29; 1 John 3:2). Thus, they, the human seeds, become the sons of God with divinity through the metabolic process of transformation….This metabolic process is the building up of the church as the Body of Christ and the house of God…by the building of God into man and man into God, that is, by the constituting of the divine element into the human element and the human element into the divine element. This building will consummate in the New Jerusalem as a great, corporate God-man, the aggregate, the totality, of all the sons of God (Rev. 21:7). (2 Sam. 7:14, footnote 1)

　　On God’s side, the Triune God has been incarnated to be a man; on our side, we are being deified, constituted with the processed and consummated Triune God so that we may be made God in life and in nature to be His corporate expression for eternity. This is the highest truth, and this is the highest gospel. (Life-study of Job, p. 122)

　　Further Reading: Life-study of 1 & 2 Samuel, msg. 26; CWWL, 1984, vol. 2, “Elders’ Training, Book 2: The Vision of the Lord’s Recovery,” ch. 6