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All the elders need to take the way of labor to bring all the saints into the truth and into their function in life for the Body of Christ. We should still meet at the same time on the same day, but before we go to any meetings, we need to get ourselves prepared. You may spend five days to get yourself prepared for one meeting. You should first pray, “Lord, I just present myself to You. I am one appointed by You and established by You to take the lead in this locality. I present myself to You. Show me what You want to do, and I present and offer the entire church to You. Especially, I give all the church meetings to You. Lead me and guide me that I may know what to do and how to render the proper ministry that is full of life and full of light to Your saints.” If you pray in such a way, I do believe that the Lord will lead you. He will lead you to present some crucial points in the book of 1 Corinthians, in the book of Romans, in the book of John, or in some other book of the Bible. The Lord’s leading you has very much to do with your daily fellowship with the Lord. If you are not one who fellowships with the Lord every day, regardless of how much you pray, your prayer may not work. There may not be an echo to your prayer. However, when you pray as one who fellowships with the Lord all the time, there will be an echo, and that echo is the Lord’s leading.
During the last two or three years, I have been very much concerned as to how we can use all the groceries of the Life-study messages. In some meetings of the church, a Life-study message is read in the meeting, testimonies are given concerning the contents of this message, and prayers or hymns are offered that are related to the message. Although this way of getting into the Life-studies works to a certain extent, it is not the best way. The best way is not to go through a book of the Bible verse by verse or to read the Life-study message from the first line to the last line. The best way is to pick out the crucial points and to get into these crucial points.
If you feel burdened from the Lord to study the book of 1 Corinthians, the Lord might lead you to begin by picking up one crucial point in chapter 1. Chapter 1 tells us that the Jews asked for signs and that the Greeks sought wisdom, but to us, the believers, Christ is God’s power and God’s wisdom (vv. 22-25). Christ was made “wisdom to us from God: both righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (v. 30). This is one crucial point in chapter 1 of 1 Corinthians for you to study and get yourself into. You should get yourself into this crucial point until you are mingled with it and constituted with it. Then when you go to the meetings, you can stress this crucial point in 1 Corinthians 1. Do not occupy the entire time of the meeting. Stress this point, but leave time for others to say something. You also have to make it clear that we are not just studying something for spiritual knowledge. We are studying the riches of Christ for our daily experience and enjoyment.
Encourage the saints to concentrate themselves on this crucial point during the week. They should concentrate themselves on Christ being God’s wisdom and power to us and God having put us into Christ, who became wisdom to us as our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. The saints should be encouraged to experience and enjoy this crucial point day by day and hour after hour during the week. Their assignment for the week would be to study, to learn, and to experience and enjoy this crucial point. When the saints come back to the next meeting, a number of them will have the experience of this crucial point. Many times in the past the saints gave testimonies merely of their experiences with seemingly nothing related to the Word. By experiencing, enjoying, and laboring on a crucial point of the truth for an entire week, the saints will give testimonies not merely of their experiences but of their experiences wrapped up with the divine revelation. Their testimonies will be a mingling of the divine Word with their experiences.
If we practiced in this way for one year, helping the saints to get into one crucial point a week, the result would be marvelous. Fifty-two crucial points will have been deposited into the saints. These crucial points are all deeper truths in the Scriptures. In 1 Corinthians the first deeper truth is Christ being given to us by God as our wisdom and power. We have been put into Him, so He is now our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. What a deeper truth this is! This truth will be worked into the saints. They will live this truth, they will enjoy this truth, and they will experience this truth. All of the saints will be getting into the deeper knowledge of the deeper truths week by week. In the Lord’s Day morning meeting and in the home meetings during that week, the saints should concentrate themselves on one crucial point of the truth. You do not need to be concerned about their repeating something. Peter spoke on the day of Pentecost, and in the homes all the believers repeated Peter’s speaking. We have to build up an atmosphere in the local churches where nobody feels shameful to repeat another’s word. Rather, we would all learn to speak the same thing (1 Cor. 1:10).
To practice in the way that we have described requires a much deeper exercise. For one crucial point, you may need to go to some lexicon to study the Greek word for wisdom. This kind of study is not for the mere knowing of the New Testament in the way of knowledge. But there is a need for us to find out the real denotation, or significance, of certain crucial words used in God’s holy Word. You may need to study the Greek words for wisdom, power, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. Then you will need to get the help from the Life-study messages on this particular crucial point. After half a year, twenty-six crucial points will have been put out. Some among you may pick up a burden to write a lesson book on these twenty-six crucial points. This lesson book could be used in your summer school of truth to teach the young people. This needs a lot of labor. Just by this one illustration, you could see how much labor you brothers need to exercise.
For the elders merely to make the schedule for the church meetings and expect somebody to speak when the church gathers together does not work. Everybody wants to speak, but no one has anything to speak about. By laboring in a crucial point of the truth, you create something for the saints to speak about. This is why I say again — do not take the easy, short-cut way. We all need to take the way of labor for the long run. If you practice like this week after week, month after month, and year after year, consider what the issue will be in your locality after four years. The issue will be something marvelous. After four years, two hundred and eight crucial points will have been covered. If you were to cover all the crucial points in 1 Corinthians in this way, this book would become transparent and clear to all the saints. You may decide to pick up just one crucial point in each chapter of 1 Corinthians. When you get through 1 Corinthians, even though you did not read it verse by verse and you did not read all the Life-studies line by line, you will have acquired a bird’s-eye view of this book, and this book will have been deposited into your being.
After fifteen years of this kind of study and endeavor, many of the young ones among us will have a rich deposit of the truth in them, and some of them will have been raised up by the Lord to be the proper leading ones. Regretfully, you do not have that much of a deposit of the truth in you because no one practiced in this way. You received only “the raw groceries” from the Life-studies, but you did not know how to cook the Life-studies in a proper way. If you were to go to the store and buy many groceries and pass them on to me, I would not know how to cook them. In like manner, we all have the divine groceries of the Life-study messages, but we all need to be trained to cook them.
The Lord has given us the Holy Bible, the Word, and His Holy Spirit always goes along with the Bible. When we preach the Word, the Spirit honors this. The Baptist denomination is the one that uses the Bible the most among all the big denominations. According to a 1984 statistic concerning American and Canadian churches, the Catholic Church has fifty-two million members, and the Baptists are second with twenty-five and a half million members. The Catholic Church has been on this earth for at least fifteen centuries, and the Baptists have been existing for about four centuries at the most. Despite this, the Baptists have nearly half the membership that the Catholic Church does in America and Canada. This statistic shows us the power of the Word. The third biggest group is the Methodists, with approximately thirteen million members. Especially in their earlier days, the Methodist denomination used the Bible very much. Based upon the foundation that John Wesley laid, the Methodist denomination used to use the Bible to the uttermost. Among all the churches of the Pentecostal movement, the one with the greatest number of members is the Assembly of God. The reason for this is that they used the Bible to establish their assemblies. These statistics show us that the best way for the Lord’s children to take is to use the Word.
If we brothers would be so faithful to use the Word as I have suggested to you in this chapter, after ten years all the teenagers among us will be good Bible teachers. We will have a younger generation filled up and saturated with all the divine truths in the local churches. It is altogether worthwhile for us to labor in this way. I assure you that this is the best way, not just to use the Bible in the way of knowledge but in the way of life. We can use the notes of the Recovery Version plus the Life-study messages in order to dive into the crucial points of the Scriptures. The notes of the Recovery Version and the Life-studies are a mine that requires much digging on your part. Going to these two sources will save you much time. If you get into these mines, you will see something more and something higher. Take the way of laboring on the crucial points of the truth. You should even take this way for the gospel preaching. Some of the brothers can testify that when they preach the gospel using the high, deeper truths, they have been warmly welcomed. This kind of preaching will capture the higher class, the highly educated, people on the college campuses.
I believe that what I have presented to you in this chapter is an endless way to get into the truths of God’s economy. You can drive on this highway in a free way, but you do have the heavenly white lines to restrain you. This is exactly what the Lord needs in order for Him to build up the church upon the high revelation of Christ Himself. If you were to pick up the crucial points from the book of 1 Corinthians, you would be occupied with this book at least sixteen weeks. Think about how high this would be. All the saints should be encouraged to speak these crucial points in their homes. We need to talk to our children, to our parents, to our relatives, neighbors, and colleagues concerning these crucial points of the truth. During the whole week we should concentrate our talking and speaking on this one crucial point. Then the next week we could go on to another crucial point. I believe that we all would see a tremendous improvement and change in the church life.
If you would pick up the crucial points of a certain chapter, all the rest of the verses would be clear. Do not forget, however, that to take this way will make you busy. You will have nearly no time to rest. If you labor in such a way, the Lord will send a blessing. Forget about all the problems in your church and go back to do this one thing. This one thing will swallow up all the death. You do not need to control the church, but these truths will control your church. Bring your church under this heavenly vision. When there is no vision, the people run wild. You must render the vision to the saints under your care.
To labor in this way, there is the need of full-time workers. In every church there is the need of some full-timers to spend more time on the Word. It would be hard to have a full-time job and bear the responsibility for the church meetings by laboring on the Word in this way to bring the saints into the crucial points of the truth. If we do go full time for the Lord, we may suffer poverty, but this is still worthwhile. All of us have to endeavor. If we will be so busy in the Lord’s interest, many saints will follow us to get into the Lord’s interest. If we take the shortcut, lazy way, the saints will also take this way. May the Lord grace us all to take the way of labor to get into the crucial points of the truth in the divine revelation.
