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EXPERIENCING CHRIST
AS THE MILK AND THE STONE

According to verse 4, we need to come to Christ as the living stone. But what is the way to come to Him? We come to the Lord by drinking the milk of the word. Have you ever realized that when you are drinking milk from the word, that is your coming to the Lord? What is the milk in the word? That milk is the Lord Himself. Therefore, when we drink the milk, we come to the Lord. Do you have some other way of coming to the food you eat? What is your way of coming to the food? Do you not come to it by eating it? We all come to the food by eating it. The same is true with respect to coming to Christ as the living stone. In verse 4 the word "coming" is equal to drinking. Therefore, when we drink the milk, we come to the Lord.

We have pointed out that Peter seems to leap from the milk-Christ to the stone-Christ. This implies that the milk becomes the stone. How can this be? With us, this is impossible, but it is not impossible with the Lord, because He is all-inclusive. As the all-inclusive One, Christ is milk, and He is also the stone. We are not able to exhaust all the aspects of Christ. He is the milk, He is the bread, and now we see that He is the stone. According to 2:6-8, Christ is not only the stone for building, but also the stone for stumbling and grinding. Even as the stone Christ is all inclusive: He can build us, or He can cause us to stumble, and even grind us.

We need more experience of Christ as the milk and the stone. In the morning we should drink Christ as milk from the Word. Then during the day the process of transformation should take place within us. In the evening we should come to the church meetings and fellowship with the saints. This is building. Here we see that in the morning Christ is milk, and in the evening He becomes the stone. During the day the milk does a transforming work within us to produce a stone.

Those who do not experience Christ as milk may like to be scattered or independent. The elders may visit them and encourage them to come to the meetings. However, these saints do not want to attend the meetings. One such brother once said, "As long as certain persons are in the meeting, I do not want to attend. I don't want to see their faces. I don't like to attend the meetings simply because they are present." But after a time the Lord did something in this case. This brother repented of his attitude toward the particular ones involved. Then he began to have a desire to drink the milk of the word. Because of his drinking the milk, he longed to come to the church meetings. Eventually he was fully reconciled with the saints for the sake of the building.

First the Lord is milk to nourish us. Through the nourishment in the milk of the word, transformation takes place. Then we have the building, where the Lord Himself is the stone. This is the reason that in chapter two we first have the milk and then the stone.