The Lord
Jesus has set His suffering life before us as an underwriting for us to copy by
tracing that He may be reproduced in us [1 Pet. 2:20-21]. This is spiritual
xeroxing: Christ Himself is the original copy, the Spirit is the light, the
divine life is the ink, and we are the paper for Christ to be reproduced in us.
While we are bearing sorrows, suffering
unjustly, we experience the grace of God, enjoying the motivation of the divine
life within us and its expression in our life, that in our behavior we may
become a reproduction of Christ, suffering as He suffered and living as He
lived. This is God’s calling us to the suffering of Christ.
God has
called the believers not only unto the obtaining of the glory of the Lord Jesus
Christ but also into the eternal glory of God (1 Pet. 5:10). For this, the God
of all grace is ministering to us the riches of the bountiful supply of the
divine life in many aspects and in many steps of the divine operation on and in
us in God’s economy. The initial step is to call us, and the
consummate step is to glorify us. Between
these two steps are His loving care while He is disciplining us and His
perfecting, establishing, strengthening, and grounding work in us. In all
these divine acts, the bountiful supply of the divine life is ministered to us as
grace in varied experiences, that we may enter into His eternal glory and
express the God of all grace.
Before we were called we were outside the kingdom of
God, having nothing to do with God. However,
God called us to partake of His divine life and nature that we may enter into
the kingdom of God. Today we, the called ones, must live in the church that we
may grow and develop in the life of God unto full maturity. Thus, we shall
be richly and bountifully supplied with the entrance into the millennial kingdom
in the coming age and into the new heaven and new earth in eternity within the
kingdom of God, in which we shall reign as kings (Rev. 22:5b). (Truth
Lessons—Level One, vol. 3, pp. 35-38)
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