To come into the churchlife, each one of us went through a threshold. The threshold is very high. Just like the holy temple in Ezekiel, you have to reach that standard to enter in. The threshold is very high in the churchlife.
The testimony of the church is on the mountain. Everyone likes to go to the seaside, and few want to pay the high price to climb a mountain to reach the top. Yet the city and the lights are there on the mountain; the testimony is on the mountain. But what are we testifying after all? Are you testifying that Jesus Christ is your savior? That is not the biblical testimony. The cross is very high. What Calvary accomplished is not glorifying the Lord’s death.
Watchman Nee wrote that the cross is a non-redemptive act in The Glorious Church. This shatters the concepts of Christianity. Who doesn’t preach that Jesus died for you to save you from sins? Yet brother Nee wrote almost one hundred years ago that the cross is also a non-redemptive work.
So what is it then? The cross was to release the life of God, to bring forth the man-child. This is what brings forth the church as pure without blemish; this is what produces the overcomers. From the beginning of the church in the Book of Acts, we already began in ascension. Our standards as believers should be higher. The cross is not to impress Jesus’ pain and suffering upon you. Denying the self is not to promote suffering. To tell you the truth, denying the self is not difficult; denying the self is truly freeing. Individually speaking, the cross causes you to produce the sense of the spirit. If God did not become the living Spirit, how can we exercise our spirits? How can we live in the spirit? This is only on the individual scale.
But corporately speaking, the cross produces His Body. This transition describes the transformation from God’s only begotten Son to the Firstborn Son. All the saints can, through that one and eternal birth, become one organic Body. This Body is one and whole from the beginning. So the cross from the beginning is our corporate experience, and we have been together from the beginning. All who believed in Jesus shall receive eternal life. That eternal life is the corporate life from the very beginning. It can never be the life and love of one person to God. Our individualistic thought should be eradicated. Our seeing the church is everything. Our seeing the church is the point that sustains us.
When you see the church, you see Christ. If you see the church but you don’t see Christ, then that church must not be the church. Among us, it is imperative for us to pass through that vital and subjective threshold to live in the churchlife. Every man must experience this threshold to come in. From the beginning, our salvation, baptism, and experience of the cross should be corporate. In these corporate experiences, each one of us died. And together with the Lord, we also live again.
Here, there is a realm, and this realm has never been individual. When we come together, we move like an army. Whatever we do, it’s done completely, efficiently. Everyone’s cooperation is unbelievably precise. You won’t find this kind of unity in any company or religious organization. This is because we are not only leading each one’s heart, but also each one’s life. We are same-souled because we share the same Spirit. That’s just the way the church is produced.