Gene Edwards – The Eternal Purpose – UCLA 1969

And what is the life of this new man? The life of the old man is the life of Adam, and it has within it the image of division, and the image of the mind being taken all out of shape, the image of thinking and rationalizing, the image of scheming. And what is the image of the new man? It is the Spirit of the life of Christ. It is Christ Himself. He is impregnated into you, and now God wants you to learn how to live by this life that there might grow up as life grows up, that there might grow up a body simply formed together. Not a big ear and a big tongue and a big place to sit down, but an arm and a foot and a finger and an eye and an ear and a leg all simply joined together. The new Man, the body of Christ upon this earth. Friends, he had it. He had it. After his death, he had some people who had been crushed and built together into unity.

Let me just stop here, and I have got to share this with you, for some of you are thinking in these terms. Bless God if you don’t want to. And bless God, friend, if you don’t have the absolute, irrevocable urge to do this. Don’t do it. If you cannot go this way, don’t. Some of you have no choice. But when you come together, you’re going to be tested on this matter of unity. There’s going to be human life that wants to be built up there. Somebody is going to start standing up, talking about predestination. And there’s going to be somebody in there who doesn’t believe it. Somebody else who is going to be talking about foot washing, and somebody else doesn’t believe in it. Somebody else wants wine, somebody else wants grape juice. Somebody believes in falling from grace and the insecurity of the believer. And somebody else believes in eternal security. And you got this doctrine here and that doctrine here, and look, I’m going to shake you like you’ve never been shook before. Please don’t go to sleep for the next three minutes; I urge you,  don’t go to sleep and listen with your spirit, not with your brain.

Brother, eternal security is a man­made system. Hold on. Don’t leave. Don’t go away. I don’t believe Paul had the biggest idea of what it was. You say, Look at Romans 8. I’m looking at Romans 8; it’s about the spirit of life and Christ, and he’s going to have to suffer a little bit to be built up. But God gives grace, and he gives peace, and he’s not going to let anything get hold of you. And that great and glorious hallelujah praise God. Eternal security? Yeah, that means that you can’t lose your salvation. Salvation I can’t lose? You remember the illustration of the two windows? “Don’t throw a rock through this window over here…”

Alright, eternal security. Boy, you’ve got it, and you can’t lose it. You tell a man that. And immediately, he begins to doubt his salvation; that’s a rule. So, what is then? I’ll tell you what it is. Christ is life. And you say to a man that Jesus Christ lives in you, and his life is eternal, and it is indestructible, and it is impregnated in you, and you live by that life that is eternal, and you take Him as your everything, and that we all live by Jesus, and man, you won’t have any problems. And if you say eternal security, you’ll put them in bondage. Christ is eternal security. Preach Christ. Live Christ. Eat Christ. Live by Him.

You believe in foot watching? Listen. Jesus came and bowed down before a disciple to wash his feet, and the disciple said, Lord, I will never let you do this, and He said, If I don’t wash you, you’ll never be whole.” Peter said, “Lord, wash all of me,” and he said, “I’ll just wash your feet. That’s all that needs washing.”

So, what’s foot washing? I’ll tell you what foot washing is: It’s Jesus Christ. Who washed the feet? Jesus. What is it, except the humility of Jesus Christ? It is Christ himself. And friend, if you just take Christ and forget all your systems and forget all your manmade doctrines and live by Him and take Him in the church, then there will be foot washing that is real.

Witness Lee came to talk one night to Watchman Nee with his notebook. I love this story. I’ve heard it told now three or four times, but I just can’t stand it. It’s so good. And Witness Lee, being a young brother who wanted to learn everything, came with his big notebook, and he went down there to ask a lot of questions, and I know what it was like because I’ve been there. I mean, in the same kind of situation. He’d say, now what about Romans 7, this marriage here at the beginning of the chapter? And Brother Nee said, hmm, hmm, hmm. And Brother Lee said, Well, what about eternal security? Hmm, hmm. Finally, after about a few minutes of this, Brother Nee said to Brother Lee, Brother, what is patience? Brother Lee said he was real scared to answer this because, real trepidatious to answer it, because he knew that, you know, well, it’s tranquility and peace, you know, in here, and you’re not disturbed because, oh, there’s a catch here somewhere. So, Brother Lee said, I don’t know what it is. Brother Nee said, Patience is Christ. Patience is Christ. Everything else is a shadow. Real patience is just Jesus.

It’s, yeah, I know, you don’t catch that. I didn’t either. The church of God lives only by the source of a life, and that life is Christ. And the church has to learn to live by Christ. And Christ is patience. Patience is Jesus Christ. And peace is Christ. And eternal security is just Christ. And the church has got to get to this thing of just Christ being everything among the believers. Just taking Him, and nothing else. As they come together, brothers, there isn’t a so-called doctrine in the Scripture, but it is simply Jesus Christ.

You believe in immersion? Somebody else believes in sprinkling. And what are you going to do? Are you going to throw out the immersionist or the sprinklingist? Then you are going to build a man’s system built on human life, but you just say, Oh, brother, I saw that I have been put into Jesus, that I am in Him, that He was dead and rose again, and I have died and rose again. He was down in the grave, the death water, and He came back up out of it. Hallelujah, I saw this. Jesus Christ has risen from the grave, and I am in Him, and I have been put into Him, I have been baptized into Him, and some new believers are going to shout, Hallelujah, where’s the water? Because Christ is the real baptism. Brother, we have been so systematized in a theological, manmade concept of the Bible that we cannot see that we have been robbed blind of the preciousness of the reality of Jesus Christ. Brothers and sisters come together, and there is something within you down here. Live by it when you come together.

Now listen, and this is it. God lost the land. There was upon this earth a group of people who lived by Christ and had his life, and they subdued the enemy; and they reflected the image of Him, and when people came into their meetings, there was no human head. The unbeliever says that God is among you, and it didn’t look like the world system. But the battle goes on. There was no division, no division over doctrine, or gifts, or man, or anything else. They just were brothers and sisters who were simple and lived by another life. But the system of man that bears the image of man with its division came in.

In this city, there is a chopped-up, decimated body of Christ. But God will call back some to take the land, the earth, who will drop everything on earth. They will drop the farms, and will drop the loons, and will know nothing but the headship of Christ and come together again, and live by Him, and not be, but to simply represent the body of Christ for all the believers in that city, and say, though they can’t all, and they all will not, we will come here and take the land, and we will be built up together in life, and we won’t split. I don’t care whether I agree with you or not; you’re my brother. And you got the life of Jesus in you, and split don’t come from theology.

The church in Corinth was just about to split. And Paul said, “Why? It’s because of your soulishness, because of your Adam life. You see Apollos, Peter, Paul, and Jesus as four different groups among you. No, we will not eat of THAT tree. We will eat Jesus Christ, we will take Him as our life, we’ll take the tree of Life and eat it. We will have nothing but Him in primitive simplicity, and by God’s grace upon us, without rules and without form, we will meet together as brothers and sisters, and we will just have Him, and when we get mad, alright, we’ll get mad and we’ll cry and weep, and then we will know what it means to go back and live with one another again, and God’s life will grow, and then will come, gradually, the love of the brethren, that the world says is the proof, the proof that we are His. Christ will be the Head, and there will be the cloud and the pillar of fire, and men will come in, and they will see no human leader, but they will see one and then another being led by the Holy Spirit to speak and to share, whatever the Spirit of God decides to do.