In late November 2016, I had the privilege of being introduced to Henry Hon, the author of this book in review, by Jon Zens, also an author, public speaker, New Testament Scholar and editor of Searching Together, a quarterly Christian magazine since 1972. A week or so after meeting Henry, I purposefully engaged myself into his ministry's recommended 20-week action group initiative on the site of ONE Body Life (www.onebody.life). Upon embarking upon such a tenure, I was honoured to have received some practical counsel and an insightful vision throughout our mentoring relationship together. In such a way, I was able to drench myself in the experiential knowledge and wisdom that Henry himself had practically lived out in real life within the context of a practical expression of Christ for some three to four decades.
Since each mentoring session had the objective of practically reviewing each chapter of this entire book, sharing our experiences of Christ together and seeing Him alone in all the things between the sessions, I believe that I had encountered a pure-hearted testimony of Henry's life into Christ, an incremental revelation and a crystal clear vision of how he had seen this glorious Lord Jesus Christ and His gorgeous counterpart, His very own body. In addition, I believe that I had indeed experienced an on-the-job-training course in living by Christ's indwelling life, while pursuing a Christ-centred congregational life with all other believers from multiple institutional denominations and absorbing an exhaustive heavenly vision in accordance with God's eternal purpose from house to house – all at the same time.
During our mentoring relationship, we shared something of the unsearchable riches of Christ together each week – based on me reading, including researching the context of all the passages cited from the Scriptures, doing so until we had run the entire course of the book together. From an experiential perspective, the mentoring relationship, coupled with the content of the book and the mutual sharing of the uncreated life, nature, expression and character of Christ together, infused within me a staggering revelation of His all-inclusive and all-expansive existence and glory. It also infused within me an unrelenting vision for all believers from multiple institutional denominations to receive spiritual sight in their spirit for the preservation and the reality of the existing and intrinsic oneness in Christ Himself and in Him alone it was that they had possessed in their spirit all along!
Just as the apostle Paul was factually brought to the ground by the appearance of a bright light when he received a heavenly vision while travelling to Damascus with others, so too did I receive a consistent and crystal clear vision of God's eternal purpose from house to house in my spirit during the tenure of our mentoring relationship and absorbing the content of the book.
Another highlight of our mentoring relationship throughout the tenure of absorbing the content of the book were the instances where it mentions within the New Covenant Scriptures that the believers who were written to had already received their inheritance in Christ Himself – that which had previously been kept secret as a mystery throughout the ages until the time came for all the saints to receive the Spirit and be fellow heirs with Christ into eternity.
Many institutional churches in our present time make the assertion that believers will more than likely only receive their inheritance sometime after they have been either raptured into the sky or simply resurrected before entering heaven itself – far away from either a great tribulation on the earth or even a totally burned up earth itself. Since my former heritage rigidly taught a combination of one such a belief as a non-negotiable teaching, it was enormously liberating for me to be released even more so than before from the bondage of a teaching that supplied no real intrinsic life in Christ whatsoever.
Our mentoring relationship was an insightful experience of the spiritually eating and drinking of Christ and had also sparked a glimmering vision for me to work towards writing a book narrating my own spiritual journey into Jesus the Christ - a journey traversing much religiosity that I had succumbed to and then receiving a staggering revelation of a glorious Christ in all the things of life itself in each moment-by-moment experience of each day that I breathe on the earth.
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Philip van Djik writes from Holland