16. Gestation
Paul said, My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is formed in you (Galatians 4:19). Our present Christian experience is very much the gestation of Christ in the womb of the Church. To know what is happening to us, we must understand gestation.God is preparing a body for Himself, a visible form through which He can show Himself inside His creation. That body is the Church, many together as one.
How, then, does God form us as His Body? The truth is, the New Testament is filled with instruction regarding this process, even though most hardly notice.
At the same time, the metaphor of the conception and development of a child in the womb is the primary picture God uses throughout the entire Bible to show us how we are formed together as Christ in the womb of the Church.
Lesson 16.1 Conception goes back to another aspect of the nature of life, that is, how God conceives His life inside of us and inside of the Church. We are born of God and our mother is the Jerusalem above, the woman clothed with the sun, the Church.
Lesson 16. 2 Together With ties Paul's frequent use of syn/sym, the many ways in which we are "together with" the Lord Jesus Christ and with one another, into the metaphor of the development of a child in the womb.
Lesson 16.3 Being Fitted Together then focuses on those incredible verses in which God in which God is building us together as a House in which He can reveal Himself. This is the primary work of God in the Holy Place turned around.
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