Book Description

This issue of The Ministry of the Word contains the first eight messages given during the spring 2019 term of the full-time training in Anaheim, California. The general subject of this series of messages is "The Wonderful Christ in the Canon of the New Testament." Christ is wonderful, glorious, excellent, supereminent, all-inclusive, invaluable, incomprehensible, and inexhaustible! The desire of God's heart is that the reality in Jesus, the God-man living of Jesus as recorded in the four Gospels, would be duplicated in the many members of Christ's Body by the Spirit of reality to become the reality of the Body of Christ, the highest peak in God's economy. In the four Gospels we see that Jesus lived a life in which He did everything in God, with God, for God, through God, and by God. God was in His living, and He was one with God. The Lord wants the actual condition of His life to be duplicated in us, repeated in us, and wrought into us so that the actual condition of His life in the four Gospels becomes the actual condition of our life. In the Gospel of Matthew we see the wonderful Christ as the great light; as the One who has authority because He lived absolutely under the ruling of the divine life of the Father; as the King of the heavenly kingdom who ministered as the Physician; as the Bridegroom; as the unfulled cloth made into a new garment to cover us as our righteousness before God; and as our new wine, as the inward exciting life, put into fresh wineskins, the church life. We need to live in the reality of the Body of Christ according to the bird's-eye view of the reality in Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, which unveils a full picture of the Slave-Savior serving fallen sinners as a collective person with Himself as their all-inclusive salvation. The Gospel of Luke is a revelation of the God-man who lived a human life filled with the divine life as its content, thereby expressing God in humanity. In the Gospel of John we see that in the Godhead Christ is the Word; that is, He is God defined, explained, and expressed. In redemption Christ is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the human race and who satisfies the requirements of God's righteousness, holiness, and glory; and in resurrection Christ as the consummated Spirit is the breath as everything to us in living the Christian life and in being an overcomer. The intrinsic focus of Romans is on the wonderful person--Christ-- who, as the Spirit living within the believers, is higher and more subjective than the Christ presented in the Gospels. As the life-giving Spirit, the pneumatic Christ now indwells His believers as their subjective Savior. This wonderful One fully saturated Paul and permeated everything he spoke and wrote in this book, which presents the gospel of God. The deep thought in Romans is that God became man so that, in God's complete salvation, sinners may be redeemed, regenerated, sanctified, renewed, transformed, conformed, and glorified to become the sons of God, who are the same as God in life and nature, to be the members of the Body of Christ expressed as local churches. The Announcements section at the end of this issue contains a list of upcoming conferences and trainings hosted by Living Stream Ministry and a website link for information related to similar events in Europe.