Live Thyself, Lord Jesus, through me

In general, as long as people are not saying anything wrong or not saying something negative about other people, they speak whenever it pleases them. However, because we enjoy the Lord as life, we should return to our spirit and speak in our spirit whenever we speak. A person might lose his temper if his wife or a classmate makes him angry. If it would be embarrassing to lose his temper in a particular environment, he may exercise control but lose his temper later. What should we do if we are about to lose our temper, since we have Christ as life and enjoy Him as life? We should not lift up our eyes to heaven and say, "O Lord Jesus, if You want me to lose my temper, I will lose my temper, but if You do not want me to lose my temper, I will not lose my temper." Instead, we should turn to our spirit and touch the feeling in our spirit by fellow-shipping with the Lord, and say, "I am about to lose my temper, but what are You doing?" Stanza 1 of Hymns, #403 says, "Live Thyself, Lord Jesus, through me, / For my very life art Thou; / Thee I take to all my problems / As the full solution now." Whether or not we lose our temper is not for us to decide; the Lord Jesus should be our answer. If after asking Him in this way He is silent within us, we will not have any temper to lose. We can even ask Him if He wants to lose His temper. If we fellowship with Him in this way, we will have no strength to lose our temper. This is not a joke. This is the testimony of many believers. This is the way for us to enjoy the Lord as life.

God desires that Christ be expressed through human life. We see this in [Colossians] 3:18—4:1, a sister passage to Ephesians 5:22—6:9, regarding the believers' ethical relationships. In Ephesians the emphasis is on the need of spirit-filled ethical relationships for the expression of the Body in the normal church life. In Colossians the emphasis is that we should hold Christ as our Head and take Him as our life by having His rich word dwelling in us, that the highest ethical relationships, issuing not from our natural life but from Christ as our life, may be realized for His expression.

If we live in union with Christ, Christ will be expressed through our humanity. Christ is to he expressed in the human life, not in the angelic life. Angels cannot express Christ. The Father has ordained that we, His chosen ones, be the expression of His Son. "Live Thyself, Lord Jesus, through me," should be our prayer (see Hymns #403).

This hymn tells us that Christ is concealed within us, waiting to be manifested.

Even though Christ is concealed within us, this hidden glory cannot always remain covered and sometimes becomes manifest openly. I know that some parents are against their children's becoming Christians, especially in the Chinese families that accept the ideologies of Confucius and Mencius. Such parents always think that when their children believe in Jesus, they are believing in a foreign religion, which is not a glory but a shame to their ancestors for three generations. This is why parents oppose their children's believing in the Lord Jesus. Among the brothers and sisters here today, there is one who believed in the Lord and was saved under such a circumstance. This brother was saved in junior high school. Before he was saved, he was a naughty teenager, but after getting saved, his living changed completely. When people scolded him, he remained pleasant. His parents would beat him for believing in the Lord, but he would go meekly into his bedroom to kneel by his bed and pray to the Lord. Time after time, day after day the Lord Jesus would manifest His glory in this previously naughty teenager. His parents were so touched that eventually they also believed in the Lord. Many parents oppose when their children first believe in the Lord, but eventually they end up believing in the Lord also. Hallelujah! It is hard to find a family in which the parents do not follow their children to believe in the Lord. Everyone who is genuinely saved has the glory of the Lord Jesus manifested in him; this means that the invisible God is expressed through him.