As I reflect back on my history with the Lord, I feel that in some way it parallels that of the children of Israel.
At a very young age, through the prayers of my godly mother who prayed daily for her three sons, I being the youngest received the Lord as my Passover Lamb, Whose blood was shed for me.
After that, in a limited but increasing way, I enjoyed the Lord as my daily manna. I enjoyed memorizing the Scripture verses and more and more I found that He is my daily food supply. He is truly the living bread of which I need to eat every day (John 6:51, 54-58). What we eat of is what we grow by. He is the Word of God. The prophet Jeremiah (15:16) said, “Your words were found and I ate them.” And, as Matthew (4:4) says, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out through the mouth of God.” The Bible is the Word of God of which we need to daily eat as our food supply. Peter speaks in a similar way, we need “the word in order that by it [we] may grow…” (1 Peter 2:2).
The third “parallel” experience that I have had is the enjoyment of Christ as my “good land with all His unsearchable riches in the church life” (Lee, Witness, The Visions of Ezekiel, 93). When I first touched the church life in Los Angeles in 1962, from then on it was truly the enjoyment of Christ in His unsearchable riches which has been my experience up to the present in the church in Chicago. “Israel, God’s chosen people, were living in the good land with the temple [God’s house] and the city [God’s kingdom]” (Lee, Visions, p. 93). We, God’s people today, need the experience of what Paul describes in Ephesians 2:23, “In whom you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in spirit. Paul also adds in Ephesians 4:12,13a, [Christians] unto the work of the ministry, unto the building up of the Body of Christ. Until we all arrive at the oneness of the faith and of the full knowledge of the Son of God, at a full-grown man….” In December 21-31, 1962, I was privileged to attend the All-Inclusive Christ conference in Los Angeles where Brother Witness Lee spoke to us of the land of Canaan as a type of the riches of the all-inclusive Christ out of which the church is built.
James Reetzke (December 2016)