PARENTHOOD
a divine stewardship

Being Renewed Day By Day With The Divine Element Through Sufferings

We may be good saints in the church who have been kept and preserved by the Lord, but have we been renewed with the divine element? Is there some renewing going on with us, or are we remaining the same day by day and year after year? It would be tragic if we would pass through many sufferings and still remain the same. In order to consummate His renewing work in us and with us, God becomes our life and nature within. In addition to this, God as the sovereign Lord controls the entire universe in order to renew us. God uses the environment in order to work His life and nature into us. Without the environment, we could never be renewed. We would remain the same.

According to our view and consideration, we always base our judgment of things upon whether something is good or bad. We deal with things too much according to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and not according to the tree of life. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the tree of good and bad. The tree of life does not have anything to do with good or bad. Only life, which is God Himself, constitutes the tree of life. Our view and consideration is most of the time based upon whether something is good or bad and right or wrong, but God does not consider things in this realm.

We may say that God punishes us by chastising and correcting us because we are so wrong. In a sense, this is correct. There are verses, from the Bible that support this understanding, but if we know the Bible in its principle, we can see that God desires to renew us. God cares for whether we are still in the old creation or whether we are being renewed. We may be the most right persons and still be the most old persons. We may be strong in our habit and strong in what we are. God's intention is not merely to chastise or correct us, but to use the outward environment to trouble us, to remind us, and to wake us up to realize that we have God as our nature, yet we do not live Him according to His nature. We possess Him for our enjoyment, but we do not live Him as our nature.

Do we discipline our children according to God's nature? We may discipline them according to our disposition, our being, and our habit. God, therefore, uses the environment to put us into "prison." Then we are reminded to pray and the eventual outcome of our prayer is not merely that we get corrected but that we get renewed. Then when we are going to discipline our children, we will consider whether we are disciplining them in ourselves or with God and through God. Formerly, we disciplined our children with ourselves, by ourselves, and in ourselves. We did not have God in us as our life and nature while we were disciplining -our children. Now God is in our disciplining of our children, and our disciplining them becomes a human divine disciplining. The father is doing the disciplining, yet his disciplining is the divine disciplining because it is full of God. God is in it. God uses the outward environment in which we suffer to renew us.

…We are renewed by the addition of God into our being, by having more of the divine element added into our being. I have been living the Christian life for over sixty years, and I can testify concerning what the real Christian life is. The real Christian life is to have God added into us morning and evening and day by day.

We may discipline our children without God, only according to our likes or dislikes. When we hear this fellowship, we may think that God does not want us to discipline our children. This is also wrong. We are not saying that God does not want us to discipline our children. What we need to see is that God wants us to discipline our children with Him. This is a difficult lesson for all of us to learn.

Very few of today's Christian teachings would point out that the Christian life is not a matter of what we do or do not do. The problem today is that people do everything without God. What God cares for is that His chosen ones would learn to cooperate with Him by allowing Him to be added into them day by day. God is daily being added to us for the purpose of metabolically transforming us. The new element of God is coming into us to replace the old element. This new element is God Himself and the old element is us. We need to be replaced with God as the new element.

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