Outline
Ⅱ
“Steadfastly...in the ministry of the word”—Acts 6:4:
A
Prayer should precede the ministry of the word, just as the apostles practiced—v. 4.
B
An example of the ministry of the word is Ephesians 3:17a: “That Christ may make His home in your hearts”:
１
When Christ spreads into our hearts, He becomes our person—v. 17a:
ａ
We need to take Christ not only as life in our spirit but also as the person in our hearts.
ｂ
The only way for Christ to be our person is for Him to make His home in our hearts.
ｃ
If we take Christ as our person in our hearts, the person living in our hearts will not be the self but Christ—Gal. 2:20.
Morning Nourishment
Acts 6:4 But we will continue steadfastly in prayer and in the ministry of the word.Eph. 3:16-17 That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit into the inner man, that Christ may make His home in your hearts through faith…
[In Ephesians 3:16] the inner man is our regenerated spirit, which has God’s life as its life. It is our spirit regenerated by the Spirit of God (John 3:6), indwelt by the Spirit of God (Rom. 8:11, 16), and mingled with the Spirit of God (1 Cor. 6:17). In order to experience Christ unto all the fullness of God, we need to be strengthened into our inner man. This implies that we need to be strengthened into our spirit through the Holy Spirit.
Because human beings are souls, not spirits, our personality, or our person, is in our soul. This is the reason the Bible refers to men as souls (Exo. 1:5; Acts 2:41)…As souls, we have an outward vessel, the body, and an inward vessel, the spirit…Before we were regenerated, there was no life in our spirit; we simply had our human life in our soul. But through regeneration we now have the divine life in our spirit. Therefore, our spirit is no longer merely a vessel; it has become our person with the life of God…The old person, the soul with the human life, has been crucified on the cross, and now our new person is the spirit with the divine life. Our spirit regenerated with the divine life is now our inner man. (Life-study of Ephesians, p. 267)
Today’s Reading
We need to be strengthened in order to stay in our spirit and not to be distracted by thoughts regarding so many things. In order to pray without being distracted, we need to be strengthened into our inner man…We need to be strengthened so that our whole being may come back to the inner man and stay there!Our heart is composed of all the parts of our soul—the mind, the emotion, and the will—plus our conscience, the main part of our spirit. These parts are the inward parts of our being. Through regeneration Christ came into our spirit (2 Tim. 4:22). After this, we should allow Him to spread Himself into every part of our heart. Our heart is the totality of all our inward parts and the center of our inward being; therefore, when Christ makes His home in our heart, He controls our entire inward being and supplies and strengthens every inward part with Himself.
When we were saved, Christ came into our spirit…As we are strengthened into the inner man, the door is opened for Christ to spread in us, to spread from our spirit to every part of our mind, emotion, and will. The more Christ spreads within us, the more He settles down in us and makes His home in us. This means that He occupies every part of our inner being, possessing all these parts and saturating them with Himself. As a result, not only do we receive the revelation, but we also are filled with Christ. Then wherever we may go, we will be the apostles, the sent ones, and the prophets, those who speak for Christ. (Life-study of Ephesians, pp. 268, 270)
If we take Christ as our person, allowing Him to spread into our heart, the person living in our heart will not be the self but Christ (Gal. 2:20). In a practical way our heart needs to become Christ’s home…He, not the self, must be the One who occupies our heart. The crucial question is who is living in our heart and who is the person taking up residence in our heart. As long as we are still the person living in our heart, our heart is the home of the self, not the home of Christ. For this reason, we need to pray for ourselves and for others to have the reality of taking Christ as our person in our daily living. Everything we do should be done not by the self but by Christ. His tastes and preferences need to become ours. Then Christ will be not only our life but also our person. The Lord will thus expand in our heart, take possession of our heart, and make His home in our heart in a full way. Eventually, He will saturate our whole being with Himself, and we will live no longer by the self but by Christ. (The Conclusion of the New Testament, pp. 3390-3391)
Further Reading: Life-study of Ephesians, msg. 32