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My burden in this chapter concerns a new revival. We need a new revival, a revival that has never occurred in history. In the history of the church there have been a number of revivals. The Reformation at the time of Martin Luther can be considered a revival. However, that revival was a mixture. After the Reformation a number of small revivals took place. Out of these revivals the private churches, such as the Baptist Church, the Presbyterian Church, and the Methodist Church, were produced. In the eighteenth century a great revival was brought in by Count Zinzendorf with the Moravian Brothers. This revival included the practice of the proper church life to some extent. A century later the Brethren were raised up in Great Britain. The revival that they brought in was improved and greater than that under Zinzendorf. Watchman Nee considered the Brethren revival as a fulfillment of the church in Philadelphia in Revelation 3, and D. M. Panton, a student of Robert Govett, said that the influence of the Brethren revival was greater than that of Luther’s Reformation. The difference was that Luther’s Reformation was widely propagated, but the Brethren revival was the opposite. Not wanting to make a show, the Brethren preferred to conceal themselves. Among them were a number of great teachers, including John Nelson Darby and William Kelly. Today it is difficult to find a photograph of one of the Brethren teachers. The Brethren revival was nearly like the sun shining at noon, but it lasted only a relatively short time. The most prevailing time of the Brethren revival was around 1850. By the end of the First World War the Brethren were divided into more than one thousand divisions. At that time the sun had set on the Brethren revival. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Welsh revival took place. It was quite prevailing but only for a short time.
Then the Lord went to China. As Brother Nee said, to the Lord’s move China was a virgin land not touched fully by deformed Christianity. Brother Nee told me privately that the Lord was forced to go from Europe and America to China to take a virgin land to begin something new from the third decade of the present century. From China the Lord’s recovery has spread throughout the globe, and it is here with us today. What kind of revival is this? A revival is always the practice, the practicality, of the vision that people have seen. Martin Luther saw a vision concerning justification by faith, and he began to practice what he saw. The Reformation came out of that practice. Zinzendorf saw something of the oneness of the church, and he practiced what he saw. At his time a number of groups of believers were suffering persecution by the Catholic Church and the state churches in northern Europe. Many of these persecuted believers fled to Zinzendorf’s estate in Saxony in southern Germany, and Zinzendorf received them. After they arrived, they argued among themselves over their doctrinal differences. One Lord’s Day Zinzendorf called them together and convinced them to stop their arguments. They signed an agreement to keep the oneness among them and to lay aside their differences in doctrine and in their religious backgrounds. On that day, history tells us, while partaking of the Lord’s table, they experienced the outpouring of the Spirit. By this they all were revived. That should be considered as a kind of revival of the church life.
What kind of revival do we have today? In other words, what kind of model has been raised up among us? As a rule, a revival should always be the practice of the vision we have seen. However, from the time I came into the recovery I have been watching over the situation. From Brother Nee’s time until today, for seventy-two years, our practice has never come up to the standard of our vision that we have received of the Lord. Brother Nee stressed two things: Christ as life to produce the church and the church as the Body of Christ to express Christ. But, sorry to say, it was not only the outsiders who did not know these things; even among Brother Nee’s co-workers, who were my contemporaries, very few fully entered into the realization of these two matters. Not to mention the matter of the Body of Christ, they did not even see the matter of Christ as life to us. They stressed matters such as leaving the denominations, baptism by immersion, head covering, and the way to practice the Lord’s table. In 1934 a letter came to me from Brother Nee saying that our emphasis was not on leaving the denominations, on baptism by immersion, on head covering, or on the practice of the Lord’s table. He added that from that day forward, whoever preached and taught only those four things was not our co-worker. He said that the vision we had received from the Lord concerned Christ as our life to produce the church, not as an organization but as a Body, an organism, to express Christ. This, he said, is what we have seen, and this is what we should preach and teach. Brother Nee wrote these words twelve years after the beginning of the recovery in China in 1922.
From the time that I began my ministry until today, I have put out many books concerning the vision that we have seen. Through all the years, in mainland China, in Taiwan, in Southeast Asia, and in the West today, in our practice we have never come up to the standard of what we have seen.
In the past ten years the Lord has shown us His economy. According to my study of church history and the biographies of many saints, I would say that before 1984 God’s eternal economy as the very reality and the center of the Bible was never seen by God’s people so fully as it is among us today. To my knowledge, no other book has pointed out that God’s eternal economy has Christ as its center and reality, with His Body, the organic Body of Christ, as the organism of the Triune God.
Today we have come to this high peak of God’s divine revelation. I would even say that we have probably reached the highest peak of the divine revelation in the entire Bible. This is the divine revelation discovered by the believers through the past twenty centuries. According to my knowledge, the first divine revelation discovered by the church fathers was the revelation of the Triune God. In the first part of the Bible, the Old Testament held by the Jews, it is difficult to find out anything concerning the Triune God. The Old Testament uses the divine titles Elohim (Gen. 1:1, 26), Jehovah (2:4; Exo. 3:13-15), and Adonai (Gen. 15:2; Exo. 4:10) in referring to God. The Old Testament also mentions the Spirit of God (Gen. 1:2). Then in the New Testament there is One by the name of Jesus Christ (Matt. 1:1). Who is this One? Is He Jehovah? Is He God? If we say that Jesus Christ is God, the Jews will consider this blasphemy (John 10:33). How could a Nazarene be God? We may say that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. However, in the Old Testament we cannot find the divine title the Son of God. Although 2 Samuel 7:14 does say that God has a son, referring to Christ, the Jewish rabbis do not understand this word.
After the New Testament was written, the first group of Bible students after the apostles were the church fathers. They discovered that in the Bible there is such a thing as the Triune God, because in Matthew 28:19 the Lord Jesus told His disciples, “Go therefore and disciple all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The Lord Jesus did not tell His disciples to baptize people into the name of Elohim, or Jehovah, or Adonai, but into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Before that time the Lord could not speak such a word, because before His resurrection the Spirit was not yet (John 7:39); that is, the Spirit was not yet consummated. The Lord spoke the word in Matthew 28:19 after His resurrection, while He stayed with His disciples for forty days prior to His ascension. Before the Lord’s resurrection, not only was the Spirit not yet, but even the firstborn Son of God was not yet (Acts 13:33; Rom. 8:29). Before His resurrection the Lord Jesus was the only begotten Son (John 1:18; 3:16). Even this the Jews did not know. They had Isaiah 7:14 and 9:6 and no doubt had read these verses again and again, but none of the Jews understood them. Isaiah 7:14 says, “Behold, the virgin will conceive and will bear a son, and she will call his name Immanuel,” and 9:6 says, “A Son is given to us; / ...And His name will be called / ...Mighty God, / Eternal Father.” In Isaiah 9:6 both the Son and the Father are mentioned, but the Jews could not understand this. They could not put the pieces of the puzzle together. When the church fathers read all these things in the Scriptures, they considered them and eventually invented a word in Latin: triune. Tri means “three” and une means “one.” The phrase the Triune God means “the Three-one God.” God is the unique God (1 Cor. 8:4, 6; Rom. 3:30; 1 Tim. 2:5; Deut. 4:35, 39); thus, He is one. Yet He is the Father, the Son, and the Spirit; therefore, He is three. Hence, God is three-one, triune. The church fathers discovered this fact.
Centuries later, Martin Luther made a further discovery. Luther saw the matter of justification by faith (Rom. 3:28). He discovered that salvation is not by works but by faith. After this, many other students of the Bible made further discoveries. However, before us, no one ever discovered God’s economy with Christ as its centrality and universality and all its reality. It was not until the last ten years that we put all these things together to have a full picture of God’s economy. This is the highest peak of the divine revelation.
Since we have seen such a high peak of the divine revelation, we need to put into practice what we have seen. Our practice will have a success, and that success will be a new revival — the highest revival and probably the last revival before the Lord’s coming back. As I said in the previous chapter, we need a model. I do not mean that only some individuals should become a model. I mean that we need a corporate model, a Body, a people who live the life of a God-man. From today our practice should be to live the life of a God-man by realizing the power of the resurrection of Christ to take His cross as He did, to be crucified, to be conformed to His death, every day to live another One’s life (Phil. 3:10; 1:21; Gal. 2:20). Our life, our self, our flesh, our natural man, and our everything were already brought to the cross by Him. Now we are living Him, so we should remain in His crucifixion to be conformed to the mold of His death every moment in every part of our life. That will cause us to spontaneously live Him as the resurrection (John 11:25). This is the living of a God-man.
This should be and this must be our church practice from today onward. If not, we are practicing something in vain. Our practice is not merely to have a church life in which everything is according to the Bible, a church life in which we baptize people by immersion, forsake the denominations, practice head covering, and have the Lord’s table, absolutely according to the Bible. Some have come into the recovery because of these practices. They appreciate our family life, the church meetings, and the way we train our young people. However, these things should not be the goal of our practice. The goal of our practice should be to live the life of a God-man. This is the goal we should reach.
Our practice is not to live the life of any kind of natural man, good or bad. Our practice is to live the life of a God-man. A God-man is a man who is regenerated and transformed to be one with God, taking God as his life, his person, and his everything. Eventually, this one becomes God in His life and His nature but not in His Godhead. This is a God-man. In the recovery today we should practice to live the life of such a God-man. This life is a life of crucifixion by and in and with resurrection. It is a life in which I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live but He who lives in me (Gal. 2:20). Yet when He lives in me, He lives with me, with the result that I live with Him (John 14:19). He lives with me, and I live with Him. We two live together in the way of mingling, a mingling of God and man.
The highest family life, marriage life, and social life come out of such a life. This life is the life of the church and the life of the Body of Christ. Such a life is the reality of the Body of Christ. Such a life, like that of Jesus Christ in His thirty-three and a half years on the earth, saves us from all negative things, from small things and big things. In our marriage life it saves us from separation and divorce. In the church it saves us from opinion, division, despising, criticizing, and murmuring. In this life there is no criticism, no despising, no partiality, no division, no dissension, no opinion. In such a life we live the life of a God-man. With Him everything is new, everything is heavenly, and everything is divine, divinity mingled with humanity.
Wherever there is division, there is spiritual fornication, idolatry, self-glorification, and self-exaltation. Without self-exaltation there could be no division. Living the life of a God-man saves us from all these negative things. To live such a life is to live Christ (Phil. 1:21), the very model of the God-man life.
Dear saints, this is my burden. We all need to live such a life — the older ones and the young ones, the brothers and the sisters, the elders and the common saints. If we do, we are faithful to what we have heard. Then the Lord will have not a model only by individuals but a model by a group of us. This is the model that the Lord needs to show to today’s Christianity, a model of what His church should be.
If we live such a life, surely we will go out to contact people for the preaching of the gospel. A vital group is a group of this kind of people. The vital groups should not be practiced as a formality; they should be groups of people who live such a life. Our living the life of a God-man will save people, edify others, and build up the local churches even to the building up of the Body of Christ.
If we practice what we have heard, spontaneously a model will be built up. This model will be the greatest revival in the history of the church. I believe that this revival will bring the Lord back.
In conclusion, I would encourage you to try faithfully to practice living a God-man’s life by contacting Him through calling on His name, pray-reading His living word, praying unceasingly, not quenching the Spirit, and not despising prophesying. May the Lord bless us with Himself as the life-giving Spirit that we may touch Him in the mingled spirit by these life practices.
