When the Lord did not want to go, they were puzzled, and when the Lord was about to go, they thought that it was not necessary to go. Once the Lord expressed His desire to go and see Lazarus, all of the disciples expressed their opinions.

The brother, Lazarus, became seriously ill, and the sisters sent a message to the Lord, which means that they prayed to Him (11:3). There is nothing wrong with prayer. If you are in trouble, you must send a message to the Lord. At any time you can send a word to Him.

The Spirit and the Word will bring us into the principle of life in resurrection. If we take Him in the Spirit and through the Word, we shall then be satisfied, enlightened, freed, and resurrected.

It simply means that the resurrection life will raise up a situation through which God’s scattered people may be gathered together in order to be built up for God’s dwelling on earth.

Lord never comes to improve you or to regulate your behavior. He always comes to enliven you. The Lord’s only intention is to impart Himself to you as the enlivening life.

The Lord has the resurrection life, the resurrection power, but it needs our cooperation. It needs our submission. What is our submission? It is simply the giving up of our opinion. You must forsake your opinion and allow the Lord to speak.

He did not groan over the death of Lazarus, but over the fact that not one of the sorrowful ones knew that He was the present resurrection, and He was troubled by this.  At this juncture, the Lord wept in sympathy with their sorrow over Lazarus’s death.

One day, though we all may die, we will all be resurrected. Throughout the whole universe this will be the greatest victory, the victory that will testify that the Lord is the resurrection. However, even in our daily life we may have the foretaste of the ultimate victory of that resurrection.

When the Lord came, Martha was the first one to meet Him (11:20). But before the Lord could say anything, Martha opened her mouth and gave forth another opinion:

Here we see the case of a man who had died, who had been buried for four days, and who had begun to stink. Nevertheless, he was resurrected.