God as the Life of the Body 703
what spiritual warfare is and how to wrestle in the spirit with the
enemy, he will begin to realize the preciousness of the Lord Jesus as
life to his body.
Every Christian ought to see the reality of his union with the Lord.
He is the vine and we the branches. As branches are united with the
trunk, so are we united with the Lord. Through union with the trunk
the branches receive the flow of life. Does not our union with the
Lord produce the same results? If we restrict this union to the spirit,
faith will rise up to protest. Since the Lord calls us to demonstrate the
reality of our union with Him, He wishes us to believe and to receive
the flow of His life to our spirit, soul, and body. Should our
fellowship be cut off, the spirit most assuredly will lose its peace, but
so will the body be denied its health. Constant abiding signifies that
His life continually is filling our spirit and flowing to our body.
Apart from a participation in the life of the Lord Jesus there can be
neither healing nor health. The call of God today is for His children
to experience a deeper union with the Lord Jesus.
Let us therefore recognize that, though phenomena do occur to us
in the body, they are in truth spiritual matters. To receive divine
healing and to have our strength increased are spiritual and not
purely physical experiences, although they do take place in the body.
Such experiences are nothing less than the life of the Lord Jesus
being manifested in our mortal frame. As in the past the life of the
Lord caused this dead spirit of ours to be resurrected, so now it make
alive this mortal body. God wants us to learn how to let the
resurrected, glorious and all-victorious life of Christ be expressed in
every portion of our being. He calls us to renew our vigor daily and
hourly by Him. This is precisely our true life. Even though our body
is still animated by our natural soul life, we no longer live by it
because we have trusted in the life of the Son of God Who infuses
energy into our members far more abundantly than all which the soul
life could impart. We lay great stress on this “life.” In all our spiritual
experiences this mysterious yet wonderful “life” enters into us