In the days of the pandemic, our lives have been fundamentally changed. Before, when we spent most of our time in the world, maybe we had many excuses to remain immature and ignorant to the Word. Now, we don’t have an excuse. The Lord’s present speaking needs a landing ground, so we can no longer remain “children” in our understanding. While the whole world is in chaos, we should leave all our old struggles behind without regret, and use this opportunity to redeem our time, redeem our condition, and reconstitute and equip ourselves unto the truth. This is the timing to prove that we have the ministry. In the church, we say the word “ministry” all the time. But do we really know what the ministry is? And how do we become constituted by this ministry? Each one of us needs that maturity, that depth, and that constitution to be a person able to unlock the Lord’s speaking in our everyday human lives—in humanity. This is the key to the ministry: to understand and interpret the Lord’s present speaking in our humanity.
We cannot talk about ministry without talking about humanity. In the book of Acts, after twelve chapters covering Peter’s ministry, we see that Luke recorded Paul’s life. All of the details—the facts, people, locations, and records in Acts—actually unlock something fundamental about the relationship between humanity and ministry. When we come to the New Testament ministry lived out and propagated in humanity, there is no clearer example than Paul. How can we not love Paul? Paul is a beautiful person; his humanity is beautiful. Having a beautiful life doesn’t mean Paul uses beautiful words, or that he knows how to paint a beautiful picture. The Bible doesn’t present a presidential, sagacious, or “high culture” humanity. Rather, we are talking about the humanity related to the reconstitution and restoration of our beings; this is how humanity can carry out the ministry. Paul’s life demonstrates the qualification of the minister of the New Testament ministry; he lived out the propagation of this beautiful, transcendent, uplifted, extremely overcoming humanity in every circumstance.
This picture of Paul’s humanity is a continuation from the book of Luke. Luke wrote both the book of Luke and the book of Acts; we can consider Acts to be the “second” book of Luke. The “first” Luke talks about the humanity that the Lord Jesus carried on the earth for 33 and a half years, and from that One, many were propagated and multiplied forth, including Paul. Like two sides of a coin, Luke and Acts both talk about humanity. On one side of the coin, we have the Lord as the prototype, who embodied the perfect humanity. But we can only understand this conceptually because who can be Jesus? Nobody—not even Jesus’ own disciples could be perfect like Him. But the book of Luke was never finished when the Lord Jesus ascended. We realize that in Acts, we find the other side of the coin to this perfect prototype of humanity. Suddenly, this perfection has a continuation: it becomes a corporate person who is beautiful and carries the attributes and virtues of the beautiful humanity of the Lord Jesus. So it is with this definition that we say Paul is beautiful; the beauty comes from the virtues and attributes that were continued in him—that he lived out.
With this understanding, we see that the book of Acts is about propagation. What is propagation? The meaning of propagation, spiritually speaking, is about production—but not an industrial production; according to the biblical understanding, it is reproduction, meaning someone conceives a life and that life needs to be given birth to. Giving birth is the action—an economical action—to make something invisible visible. The most direct picture in the Bible is this: when Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit, that conceiving was considered a propagation. For some reason, our God desires to be propagated, or to be born—to be brought forth. And there is a brooding process, just like how the entire Bible begins; in the beginning, the Spirit of God is brooding (Gen 1:2). The Spirit has the essential nature of life with the tendency to reproduce, to multiply, to propagate; these are all the same word in the Bible. That brooding Spirit is a Spirit of reproduction. According to the sequence of the Bible, resurrection can also be considered as a kind of birth: when the Lord was crucified, seemingly everything was dark, just like the beginning of the Bible when everything was void and in the darkness (Gen 1:2), but suddenly there was a birth. That birth is propagation. In other words, through resurrection Christ’s life found a way to be reproduced. From all this, we see that the word propagation in the book of Acts is so deep yet so human, so essential yet so economical—or, in another way to put it, so “ministry.”
If resurrection is considered a kind of birth, then ascension can be considered a kind of establishing. When we talk about heaven, Christians often quote the Lord’s famous prayer: “Lord, may Your kingdom come, may Your will be done.” But this prayer carries a secret: it is a tangible entrance into the divine being in the heavenlies. When the “Word became flesh,” it was reproducing and “tabernacling among us” (John 1:14). This means that the sphere of God’s existence was no more just in the heavenlies—in the past eternity, an untouchable sphere. Suddenly, a being came out of the past eternity into time, into an experiential, expressed field, and that tangible being is established in us and is able to be felt, to be powerful on the earth, and to be completely human yet still divine. Through humanity, God is empowered in the sense that His divinity can come into being—be manifested—in this sphere, in reality. As in John, the Word became flesh, tabernacling among us full of grace, full of reality—or, equally, full of God, full of truth. Grace is nothing but God; reality is nothing but the truth. Many Christians can pray this prayer, yet they don’t have the ministry of Christ being birthed and established in them. If we don’t have the ministry, we don’t have that being—the constitution of Christ in our humanity. Actually, this divinity dwelling in our humanity is exactly that reproduction process—Christ saturating us and conforming us to His image so that we can express and represent Him.
Among the hidden keys in the book of Acts, we also find that this reproduction in humanity today is altogether a corporate expression. We see this in the details, in the human names, locations, and even simple phrases or interactions—in humanity. Paul’s life gives an important example. Paul could live such an overcoming, propagating, attractive life, because his humanity was being constituted by Christ, and it had impact in a corporate way. The book of Acts records this beautiful human being; he had company and people could enjoy his tangible being. Whosoever lived with Paul, or was coworking with Paul, would be very familiar with Paul’s humanity—how he was firm to live out the ministry. These people didn’t see him just as a coworker or an acquaintance; they lived and died for Paul, and they owned Paul to the utmost. Luke was such a companion. Who is qualified to be inspired by the Holy Spirit to write something about Paul? Only a person who knows, loves and truly owns him. Paul’s life was a “ministerized” life in a corporate setting on the earth, and this living was spreading and reproducing in those around him.
The key of propagation is how this humanity is fully “ministerized”—how it is being constituted. So when we come to the churching from the early days in the first twelve chapters, some may prefer Paul’s ministry because it was to the Gentiles, and discount Peter’s ministry since it was for the Jews. But the focus should not be on individual men, but rather on the work of Christ with the heavenly sphere and reality that is overcoming on the earth. If we look at the early days of the church, no matter what they did, the church life was carried out in an absolute, pure, overcoming condition. The church was established by the heavenly administration; there was the Word of Christ. It doesn’t matter if it was executed or lived among the Jews or the Gentiles. It was the nature of the ministry: the propagation of Christ among His people—a heavenly life being lived out on the earth.
Indeed, the book of Acts opens not just with a scene in the heavens, but with a group of people with a heavenly condition. The Lord has His work on the earth, yet it carries an atmosphere of the heavenlies. It is a work of ascension, yet on the earth. If we look at Acts chapter 2, a group of people came together to live and they prayed steadfastly; the way they prayed is nothing like the way we often pray today as a matter of formality before religious gatherings. The prayer in chapter 2 of the book of Acts is absolutely the propagation of the work of Christ with the heavenly sphere and reality; it is overcoming on the earth. Consider even the way that they were steadfastly following the apostle’s teaching. “Steadfastly” in this passage is not a training full of slogans to us; it’s not a practice of adhering to a set of rules or sayings to follow brother Paul in centuries past or to follow brother so-and-so in today’s era. If we look at the true reality of what is recorded in the book of Acts, there’s humanity, yet the humanity is so “ministerized,” or constituted, that no matter what they did, everything was in the nature of and unto the ministry. That is, they carried this heavenly ministry, which was being constituted, established, and propagated through their humanity. They prayed, they sang, they ate, they laughed, they cried, they helped each other, they dealt with the same problems that we are dealing with together today. And yet all their praying, singing, eating, laughing, crying, helping, and dealing was governed by the ministry, by the being—Christ—that is birthed, established, and propagated in the humanity of the church.
What does that look like today? How do we know whether it is the Lord’s speaking or man’s speaking? How do we know if our gathering is man’s meeting or God’s meeting? If we don’t have this ministry—this specific constitution of humanity—how could we even experience it? Because we have been brought into a dispensational change, we should be a group of people who carry that maturity, that capacity, that kind of depth, that kind of revelation—that kind of being—to understand, to interpret, even to experience and own this dispensational change. We, too, need to be constituted or “ministerized” by the ministry, by the Lord’s speaking so the Word can become flesh in us. We need to mature to see where the Lord is leading this generation into the next, to usher in and establish a reality that is not yet, except in the church. We don’t need to uphold a practice; we need to be able to identify, interpret, bring forward and carry that genealogy or that intrinsic line.
Paul was one on that line, living out a beautiful humanity and propagating as he went. Although he may not have been perfect or easy to deal with, and had a very peculiar character, yet, for some reason, those who journeyed with him loved him to death. This was not a political or moral following; this is about the work of Christ in His divine establishing. There is a man established through the Lord’s own birth in His resurrection and ascension. This is not about Paul’s work, or anybody’s work. This is all about the ministry. The ministry is nothing but the reality of the truth—the constituted truth, the personified truth—on the earth, having the very same economical move recorded in detail in this book. God has His propagation and reproduction through the saints, and the book of Acts is filled with fingerprints of those individuals, the real and tangible human beings, who lived out such vivid lives. These are all hiding in the book of Acts. It’s not a textbook or a theological book. This is the book written for us to have the perfect, complete understanding of having the ministry among us.
(Above is part 1 of a series compiled from notes of fellowship taken from a gathering on 4/24/2020, not reviewed by the speaker. Read part 2 here.)