I.　Because the church has become degraded through the many centuries of its history, it needs to be restored according to God's original intention and standard as revealed in the Scriptures—cf. 2 Kings 22:8; Ezra 1:3-11; Neh. 2:11, 17; Matt. 19:8; Rev. 18:4:

A.　Recovery means the restoration or return to a normal condition after a damage or a loss has been incurred.

B.　After Satan's destruction, God came in to redo the things that He had done before; this redoing is His recovery, which is to bring back whatever has been lost and destroyed by God's enemy, Satan—1 John 3:8b.

C.　Satan's authority of darkness shall not prevail against the will of God to build up His church for His corporate expression—Matt. 16:18.

II.　God's original intention is that man may receive His divine life and divine nature and thereby become God's expression—Gen. 1:26; 2:7-9:

A.　In creating man, God made a duplicate, a copy, of Himself (1:26); all the other living things were created according to their kind (vv. 11-12, 21, 24-25), but man was created according to God's kind (cf. Acts 17:28-29a).

B.　God created man in His image (Gen. 1:26), and Christ is the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15; 2 Cor. 4:4); thus, Adam was created in the image of Christ (Gen. 1:26):

1.　This shows that God intended that Christ would enter into man and be expressed through man—2:9; John 10:10b; Phil. 1:20-21a; Eph. 5:27.

2.　Created man is a vessel, a container, to contain and express Christ—Rom. 9:21, 23; 2 Cor. 4:7.

III.　The Lord's recovery is to recover the expression of God:

A.　God's desire is to have a recovery purely and wholly of the person of Christ:

1.　The Lord's desire is to "Christify" every believer until they have a total "Christification"—Gal. 1:15-16a; 2:20; 4:19; 1 Thes. 5:23; Rom. 8:10, 6, 11.

2.　This "Christification" is the expression of God, which is the fullness of Christ and the fullness of God—Phil. 1:19-21a; Eph. 1:22-23; 3:16-21.

B.　Satan's strategy is versus the Lord's recovery—Isa. 14:12-15; Ezek. 28:12-19; John 14:30; Matt. 16:18; Eph. 6:10-11:

1.　Satan has a strategy to spoil and damage the expression of God—2 Thes. 2:7; cf. 1 Tim. 3:15-16a:

a.　The first category of Satan's activity is to produce many substitutes for Christ, such as human philosophy (Col. 2:8; cf. 1:12), Judaism (Heb. 8:6; 9:23; 10:5-10), the law (Gal. 3:1-3, 24; 1:15-16a; 2:20; 4:10), and gifts, signs, and human wisdom (1 Cor. 1:22-23; 12:31).

b.　The second category of Satan's work is to divide the Body of Christ; the sects, denominations, and divisions in the Body wipe out the corporate expression of Christ—1:10-13a; Gal. 5:19-20.

c.　The third category of Satan's work is to kill the function of all the members of Christ's Body by the clergy-laity system; we need to have the Lord's hate for the works of the Nicolaitans—Rev. 2:6; 1:5b-6; 1 Pet. 2:5, 9.

2.　The Lord has a recovery to fulfill His consummate prayer for the full expression of God, the glory of God—John 17:21-23:

a.　The Lord's recovery is the recovery of Christ as our center, reality, life, and everything—Col. 1:18b; Rev. 2:4, 7, 17; 3:20.

b.　The Lord's recovery is the recovery of the oneness of the Body of Christ—John 17:11, 21; Eph. 4:3-4a; Rev. 1:11.

c.　The Lord's recovery is the recovery of the function of all the members of the Body of Christ—Eph. 4:15-16; 1 Cor. 14:4b, 26, 31.

IV.　In order for the Triune God to gain His corporate expression in the building up of the Body of Christ, the self must be condemned, denied, rejected, and renounced—Matt. 16:21-26; Luke 9:23-25:

A.　The self is the soul declaring independence from God; the self is the independent "I," the independent "me."

B.　The enemy of the Body is the self; the greatest problem, the greatest frus-tration and opposition, to the Body is the self—Matt. 16:18; cf. vv. 23-26.

C.　In the oneness of the divine glory for the corporate expression of God, the believers' self has been fully denied—John 17:22:

1.　If we live by our life and our nature to express ourselves, there will be no glory of God; in the expression of ourselves there is no oneness but only division—cf. 3 John 9.

2.　Only when the self is renounced will we have the Body and be genuine members of the Body.

D.　In the type of the cleansing of the leper, shaving the hair means dealing with the difficulties of our own self—Lev. 14:9:

1.　The hair of the head signifies man's glory in self-display; the beard, man's self-assumed honor; the eyebrows, man's excellencies, merits, and virtues issuing from his natural birth; and all the hair of the body, man's natural strength and ability.

2.　All the aspects of the self must be daily "shaved with a razor," which means that they must be dealt with by the cross—Luke 9:23; 1 Cor. 15:31.

E.　The blending of the Body requires the self to be crossed out; blending requires us to be by the Spirit to dispense Christ and to do everything for the sake of His Body so that God may have His corporate expression—12:24.