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Scripture Reading: John 15:5, 8, 16; 1 Thes. 2:19-20
Prayer: O Lord, we come back to You again. We believe we have been gathered by You into Your name. Lord, we have seen Your beauty and have been captivated. We love You, so we love the sinners. Because we love You, we have an interest in the sinners. Lord, You loved the world and came here to save the sinners. We also would have this same love and burden. We look unto You for this. Lord, attract us that we may run after You. Lord, defeat the enemy and rescue us from his usurping hand and from the deceiving world. Lord, we are here because You have been with us. We know You, and we love You. Amen.
In this message I will continue to share concerning the New Testament priesthood of the gospel. In John 15:5 the Lord said, “I am the vine; you are the branches. He who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit.” We must pay close attention to the words much fruit. Here the Lord does not refer just to fruit but much fruit. To bear only fruit is not adequate; we must bear much fruit. In verse 8 the Lord said, “In this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit.” To bear one fruit is not sufficient to glorify, or express, the Father. To express the Father, to glorify Him, we must bear much fruit.
This can be illustrated by a carnation plant. Before it blossoms, its beauty, its glory, is not expressed. But when it blossoms, the carnation is glorified, and its beauty is expressed. When Christ was crucified on the cross, all the opposing ones despised Him. He was put to death, but after three days He rose from the dead. In resurrection He appeared to Mary at the tomb and said, “Go to My brothers and say to them, I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God” (20:17). Through His death and in His resurrection He was glorified; and in the Son’s glorification the Father also was glorified. In His death and resurrection He bore much fruit; He brought forth His disciples as His many brothers to express and glorify the Father.
Today by choosing us and setting us, He is sending us to go forth and bear fruit. Yet to bear fruit requires the process of death and resurrection. The Lord Jesus went through this process; He cut the way. Today we should follow Him by letting ourselves be put to death. We cannot practice the New Testament priesthood of the gospel in a natural way; instead, we need to pass through the process of death and resurrection. When we hear about knocking on people’s doors for gospel preaching, we may consider that this is something easy or common and that anyone can do it. However, if we keep going out to visit people week after week, we will eventually have to pass through death.
To go out just once or twice, or even thirty or forty times, will not work. A fruit tree that bears much fruit has gone through many dealings and sufferings. It is not a simple or easy thing to go out to knock on people’s doors and tell them about the Lord Jesus. On the one hand, it is easy for a tree to bear fruit because the life within it produces fruit. On the other hand, a tree can produce fruit only once a year. For you to go out to knock on people’s doors for the gospel for three months might be easy. But for you to go out consistently for years might exhaust you. I do not believe that the Lord would charge you to go out every day; once a week would be enough. Also, you do not need to go out every month; ten months a year would be adequate. You may go out for five months and then rest for one month. Then you could go out again for five months. Even if you did this consistently, you might eventually get tired out and disappointed.
To bear fruit is not so easy. This is why the Lord compares our preaching of Him to fruit-bearing. Preaching is easy, but bearing fruit is not that easy. We should keep going out to preach the gospel for a complete year regardless of whether we bear fruit or not. We may go out for five months in the first half of the year and gain no one. Then in the second half of the year, after going out for four and a half months and gaining no one, we may feel hopeless and give up. We may say, “This way does not work. Forget about it. I have been wasting my time.” I have seen this happen many times.
I was saved in the spring of 1925. That year I began to go to the countryside with tracts that I had written myself. I did this again and again, yet I gained no fruit. Then my patience and endurance came to an end, and I simply gave up. I have encouraged you to go out to visit people and to find many different ways to do it. But what will you do if you go out for a whole year and still gain no fruit? I am afraid you may stay home and stop going out. You may lose your interest and confidence and say, “This way does not work.” However, if you go out for one year and gain nothing and still go out the next year, I am quite sure you will gain some fruit in the second year. Even if you would not gain anything the second year, you still have to go out for a third year. I am very concerned that some of you may become disappointed and stop going out.
I do not expect that you will gain one person every year, but I expect and have the full assurance that within three years you will gain at least one. If everyone will gain one within three years, we will have a thirty-three percent increase each year. This means that if we have ninety meeting together, after one year they will increase to one hundred twenty. Then after another year, this one hundred twenty will increase to one hundred sixty. According to Christian history, there has never been a church that has had a thirty-three percent increase every year. This may seem slow, but for each of us to gain one person every three years is really quite fast. If we do this for ten years, we will have the highest rate of increase in all of Christian history. If a church of two hundred fifty would increase by one-third each year, the entire population of the earth would be gained in less than sixty years.
These figures are accurate, but I do not have the same confidence in our practice because we do not have patience. We get disappointed so quickly and quit. We need to be earnest in our intention to bear fruit. If we will go out just once a week for only forty-four weeks a year for three full years, we could gain six as remaining fruit. I do not mean that you will baptize only six, but among all those whom you baptize, six will become remaining fruit. The Lord Jesus said, “I set you that you should...bear fruit and that your fruit should remain” (15:16). The Lord’s desire is for remaining fruit. The problem is that we have never built up a habit to labor persistently over a long period of time. We expect to learn the new way, practice it for two months, and gain a lot of fruit. Otherwise, we get disappointed. We must all learn to take the slow way of fruit-bearing.
I have studied and even experimented with the new way very much. I can assure all of the saints in the churches that they will be successful if they will be faithful to go out for two to three hours every week, week after week, for forty-four weeks a year. While the saints are practicing this, they will learn many things. In the past sixty years I did not learn many things from others. I learned simply by my practice. No one taught me how to write the footnotes. No one taught me how to write a poem, a song, or a hymn. Over sixty years ago I began to write; I wrote a tract on the wonderful way to save souls. That writing was somewhat childish, but I continued throughout the years to practice and practice and practice. Eventually, I wrote the hymn, “O glorious Christ, Savior mine” (Hymns, #501). If you will practice persistently, you will eventually learn the proper way.
I do not expect that all the saints will go out, but I do expect the elders to bear the burden to stir up at least one out of every three to practice the gospel preaching in this way. Let the others rest. Some are too old, some are too young, and some are too weak, but they are all dear brothers and sisters. We must love all the dear saints, the weaker ones as well as the stronger ones.
If the elders will be diligent, I have the assurance that they can stir up one-third of the saints to preach the gospel by reaching people. If you take this word, you do not need any more teaching. You need only to practice. To ride a bicycle, you do not need any teaching; you need only to practice again and again. Eventually, you will ride quite well. This is how I have learned, so I have the confidence that you do not need any more teaching; you simply need to practice. I assure you that if you continue to practice diligently, you can gain two solid new ones within one year. You might not need to go by teams; you could do this by yourself.
You must be so definite and persistent. If no one will go out with you, you should still go out for the Lord one day a week for two or three hours. There is no need of so many teachings. Just go! If there is a door, knock on it. If people are on the street, talk to them. Practice every way. In one year you can baptize at least ten, and out of these ten, two will be remaining fruit.
If the elders stir up just one-third of the saints, every year this one-third can triple. If fifty are stirred up, they may baptize over five hundred and bring at least one hundred into the church life as remaining fruit. However, to do this, these fifty must go out for two or three hours every week for ten months each year. Otherwise, we cannot expect any success. Today in the United States, it is easy for us to do this. We have so many “warm doors” to knock on, the doors of people we know. Through these “warm doors,” I believe that many more doors will be opened to us. One “warm door” will open up two more doors. We do not need to be concerned with how many people we baptize; we simply must labor, labor, labor!
When you go out to visit people, do not care for the number but care for the family. Our goal is not to get only one individual. Our goal is to get one family. When we talk to people, our talk must pave the way to get the whole family. If it is only a couple, we have to have the goal not merely to gain the wife or the husband but to gain both. If the mother is pregnant, we must have the intention that we will gain this child also. We should gain every member of the family.
This message is very practical. Simply go out and practice. Go out for ten months every year, once a week for two to three hours. Try this with patience. Do not be concerned with the numbers; simply pay attention to practicing continuously. I assure you that you will get ten baptized, and of the ten, two will remain. Do not worry about the other eight. Even though they may not come into the church life, they will be in the New Jerusalem.
When you go, always exercise to gain the whole family. If you are preaching the gospel to a seventeen-year-old young man, you have to consider his parents. By baptizing this young man, you may spoil your work on the whole family. You have to exercise your wisdom to decide whether you should baptize him or not. If you do not baptize him, this does not mean that you give him up. Rather, this is a kind of preparation for you to get his parents and to get his whole family. If you go out persistently, you can gain at least two solid families each year.
We must go out in a way that is according to the Bible. In the full-time training, we have formed the trainees into teams of three. We sent two teams each to about eight new cities and instructed them what to do. They must go there to knock on doors to get people saved and baptized but without an expectation that they will get a large number baptized. After sixteen weeks of labor these six saints can gain at least ten to twelve as remaining fruit. When they baptize one, they immediately have to give him some nourishment before leaving. Then they have to make an appointment with him to come back the next day or the day after. In not more than three days they must come back to visit him. They should immediately begin home meetings with all the newly baptized ones. They must go back regularly and frequently to have home meetings.
When the first Lord’s Day comes, they should bring the new ones from these new localities to the nearby church meetings to give them an impression of the church. Then on the next Lord’s Day they should meet with all these newly baptized ones in their new localities. The six trainees could meet together on the Lord’s Day to have the Lord’s table with the three or four newly saved and baptized ones in that new locality. In this way, after one or two weeks there will be a new church raised up. This does not mean that all the ones who will come to the Lord’s table with them will remain. On the one hand, the trainees will meet with the new ones in home meetings, in small group meetings, and on the Lord’s Day; on the other hand, they will still go out to get more new ones for the remainder of the sixteen weeks. Because the trainees go out at least three times a week, they can gain at least eight in their new city in sixteen weeks. Then when they go away at the end of the term, there can be a small church of eight to twelve in that city, and the nearby churches may spend some time to help them and teach them. In this way they can have contact with the nearby churches to have fellowship. After about two months we will have another term of training, and some new trainees can go to help them.
This is the practical way we are taking to form new local churches. After four months I expect to have seven or eight new small churches established in these nearby cities. The biblical way is for the local churches to be raised up from a small number. Not long after the day of Pentecost, persecution came upon the thousands of believers in Jerusalem and scattered them. Acts 8 tells us that, except for the apostles, all the saints in Jerusalem were scattered (v. 1). We do not know the details, but we are told that these thousands of saints “who were scattered went throughout the land announcing the word as the gospel” (v. 4). Wherever they went, they preached the gospel, and no doubt, churches were raised up by them. If you go out to a new city, and three or five begin meeting together with you, all of you are a local church. If you practice the God-ordained way, you will see the propagation of the churches. Eventually, every city can have a small church.
My burden in this message is that you who go out to practice the New Testament priesthood of the gospel would not bother or criticize those who do not go out. I would also ask those who do not go out to allow the others the liberty to go out and not to criticize them. Then the Lord will have a way. What I have been sharing with you is only one-fourth of the proper church life. We should go out in this way only once a week. This leaves many days for the remainder of the church life — the big meetings on the Lord’s Day, the prayer meeting, the small group meetings, etc. If we practice the New Testament priesthood of the gospel, the church will be like a vine continually propagating on the earth. We should be simple and take the biblical way, the God-ordained way. We should not try to do too much too quickly. We must be balanced and steady. We should go out faithfully once a week for about two or three hours. While we are practicing, we will learn how to discern people, how to say the right things, and how to prepare the way to gain the whole family.
As a young man or a young lady, you must have a proper bearing when you go to talk to people. Do not talk to people loosely or lightly. Even though you are young, you must have a certain dignity so that people will regard you with respect. Your speaking should win people’s respect. Then they will put their trust in you. Even though they are older and you are younger, they will respect and take whatever you say. You all have to learn this; it is very important. Do not say things lightly or quickly. If you build up trust with people, you can always go back to visit them.
Once you gain a person, do not forget that the goal is to gain the whole family. Therefore, in your wording, in your expression, and even in your tone of voice, you must learn to express gravity and dignity to win people’s confidence. Then you will always be able to go back to visit them. Never expect to have a quick work. Simply labor consistently and persistently, and while you are laboring, exercise your wisdom concerning how to labor. Every day’s work must prepare the way for the future. No farmer expects to sow today and reap tomorrow. This is against God’s ordained principle in nature. You have to be careful and diligent to do everything in the proper way so that your crop will grow. Eventually, you will reap a harvest.
The elders must try their best to stir up the saints to practice the New Testament priesthood of the gospel. They should be able to get at least one-third of the saints to do this. If more would rise up, that would be wonderful. But if the Lord can get one-third of the saints to practice the priesthood of the gospel, the results will be marvelous. We should not try to baptize too many in a quick way. We must preach the gospel and minister Christ to others with much discernment. Then gradually, the church will reap a harvest. After five years the practice of the New Testament priesthood of the gospel will become prevailing on the earth.
