This Perfecting Training is not a church meeting for any kind of edification, nor is it a ministry meeting for some kind of teaching. This is just an open fellowship with the seeking and experiencing saints. Originally I had no intention to publish our talk here, because I was concerned that these talks might be misused. I do not want our talk to be used in a wrong way, in an immature way. I do not believe that many Christians can comprehend what we are talking about here. I am even concerned that some of you are not up to the maturity that these words are really for you. The word given in the last meeting was so simple, yet unless a Christian has been seeking the Lord and experiencing the Lord for quite a definite period of time, that word may not help him. For that word to help you, you must have a certain experience, a certain seeking after the Lord, and you must have experienced a lot of failures, a lot of defeats, a lot of disappointments, and a lot of endeavor yet without result. If you have experienced something, not just in your mentality but in the real sphere of the spirit, then that word should have been precious to you.
This training does not serve all Christians in a general way. It has a definite purpose with a definite goal. I do not like to have so many in this Perfecting Training, but it is hard for us to draw the line as to who is up to the maturity and who is not. So I trust in the Lord very much for His decision. This does not mean that you would not get the benefit. You would. But it depends upon the measure of the stature that you have in life. Nothing can replace the measure of the stature. Even in physical life, if you are two years of age, you are just two years of age. If you are twelve years of age, you are twelve. Even if you try your best to imitate one who is seventy-five, you cannot do it. If you are twenty-five now, you have to wait for another fifty years. There is the matter of the measure of the stature in life. But if such a word could be sown into you and kept within you, it may be very helpful to you after a few years.
When you are young, you may pick up certain words in your vocabulary, but you do not understand what they mean. You pick them up, but they are not in your life because you do not have that measure of stature. Since we arrived at the matter of peculiarity in this training, I have had the deep sense that I should bear the burden to give messages again and again and again until you would be brought to zero, to nothing. I believe that in the past few months some of you have begun to realize that in your spiritual life and in your spiritual seeking you need to be nothing. But even today I am not sure whether you understand my word exactly.
Let me say it in this way: when we were far off from God in sin, in worldliness, or in a kind of indifference, we did not care for God. We would not talk about God, and we just had no interest in God. But one day when we received the mercy of the Lord, we repented, we believed in the Lord, we called on Him, and we received Him. From that moment we became very active. Some saints who were born with an aggressive disposition and character are very active. Whatever this kind of people do, they do aggressively. Once they turn to the Lord, this kind of character and disposition and practice becomes very precious to them. They would even boast and tell other people what kind of person they are. They are quick to tell people that formerly they were very strong not to love the Lord, but now they are very strong to love the Lord to the uttermost. I believe that Saul of Tarsus was such a person. If you are not this kind of person, you could never be spiritual. A jellyfish kind of person can never be spiritual. You must be a strong and aggressive person to be spiritual. When you cry, you must really cry. When you weep, you must really weep. If your teardrops are half-drops, you can never be spiritual. You need to be active; you need to be aggressive. You need to be very energetic.
But when you become aggressive and active, you are like the mare in Song of Songs. In Life and Building as Portrayed in the Song of Songs we pointed out how the Lord appraised His seeker. The Lord called His seeker a mare among Pharaoh’s chariots (1:9). Then the Lord said what He would do. Song of Songs 1:11 says, “We will make you plaits of gold / With studs of silver.” The indication here is that the horse needs some dealing. It is not to deal with the mistakes or the wrongdoings. It does not mean that a bridle is put on the horse to regulate it because it is too wild. Gold and silver here indicate strongly that the Lord is going to limit and reduce the horse. Right away the next figure after the horse is a dove (2:14). Which is more aggressive and active—a horse or a dove? When a horse becomes a dove, it really means that the horse has been very much reduced. If today you are a big horse and tomorrow morning you become a dove, surely this means that you have been limited and reduced. When some came into the church life at Elden hall, they were strong horses. Whenever they testified, that was a horse testimony. But although some may have been a strong horse at that time, today it is difficult for them to be a horse. This means that over the years they have been touched by the Lord, they have been reduced by the Lord, and they have been stopped by the Lord repeatedly. The horse wants to go a certain direction, but the Lord stops it. The horse wants to jump, but the Lord stops it.
Everybody likes to be on fire. Even I like to see a meeting that is on fire. But the strange thing is that, although we would like to be on fire, there is no fire. You surely long to go back to the time of Elden hall. But there is no fire. Why? Probably you all have passed through the horse stage. It is hard for you to go back.
Then you would ask, Is that good or bad? I would say it is wonderful to be on fire; it is excellent; it is very good, but it may not be for you. You have to realize that in seeking the Lord there is a narrow pathway, and once you pass through a certain stage of this narrow pathway, you have no way to get back. The most you can do is just stand there. You may stand still, but it is hard for you to go back. You may consider that you are backslidden because ten years ago at Elden hall you were having certain experiences, but you can never go back to that.
In the spiritual growth it is right to say that on the one hand you are growing, but on the other hand, while you are growing, you are being reduced all the time. From the day we came to the matter of peculiarity, I was burdened to speak messages to reduce, to reduce, to reduce. I hate that our human language is really short. Language is a kind of product of culture. If you do not have a certain kind of culture, you will not have a certain kind of language. In our culture we do not have what we are talking about here, so we are short of language. It is hard for me to utter something because of the lack in language.
You have to know that God has no intention for you to do something for Him. You must drop this. God’s intention surely is to entirely and thoroughly work Himself into you that He may really be your life. This is not a mere doctrine. This is what God wants to do. But we became fallen; we got away from Him. We did not have a heart toward Him, and we were very indifferent concerning Him. So He had to come to call us and to stir us up. But the problem is, after we got stirred up, we became so active. This is not wrong, but the more you are active and the more you are growing, the more you become a trouble to yourself. The more you are growing, the more you will pray, the more you will read the Bible, the more you will have the church life, the more you will have fellowship, the more you will have many spiritual things.
Eventually, every one of these things will become a trap to possess you, to occupy you, and to fill you up. Then in your capacity as a human being, there is no more vacancy for the Lord. The really experienced Christians after many years have learned one lesson: the Lord only wants you to have a heart. The Lord only wants you to have a desire. You need a heart to love Him, a desire to gain Him. That is good enough. Even to pray too much is a frustration. Believe me. The Lord just wants you to love Him and desire Him. The more you say, “Lord, I love You; Lord, I want You; Lord, I need You,” the more you need to stop your doing. But to stop your doing can never be effective by your stopping. The more you stop doing, the more you do. This depends upon the measure of stature in life. The more you grow in the Lord, the more your doing will be reduced. Gradually your doing will be reduced until one day you know that what the Lord wants of you is absolutely not your doing. He only wants you to love Him, to want Him, and to tell Him that you need Him. That is all—do not do anything. Even to live Christ becomes your doing. Sooner or later if you keep seeking, you will reach a point where you realize that you do not need to do anything.
Actually, the Lord is within you, the Lord is one with you, and He really is everything for you. What you need to do is just say, “Lord, thank You. You are one with me. I love You. I desire to have You. I just want You, and I need You.” That is good enough. Spontaneously, the Lord will act in you, He will live in you, He will do everything for you, and He will do everything with you. He lives, and you live by His living. Again, our human language is short. I just do not have the language to utter what I see. Not only am I short in the English language, but even in my mother tongue, Chinese, I could not utter what I see. But I do know that I have experienced this thing. You will eventually hit the point or the stage that the Lord lives in you and that you do not need to do anything. What you need to do is just to keep yourself open, telling the Lord that you want Him and that you need Him. You need to realize that your doing does not avail. Only the Lord avails. In a sense, not even just His presence or His anointing avails; only the Lord Himself avails.
By way of illustration, the Bible says that we need to love one another. You surely would like to love others, so you begin to love. You have to realize that it is you who love. Whether you can actually love or not makes no difference; it is you who are loving. Most of us have experienced the failures again and again. It will take you a long time to reach the point where you realize that you do not need to love, because the Lord lives in you. When you love by yourself, your loving frustrates His living in you. When your loving is stopped, you have no doing. You are calm, silent, and inactive, but not passive. Inactive does not mean that you are passive. The worldly people surely could not understand this. How could someone be inactive and yet not passive? To the worldly people, to be inactive is to be passive. But in our experience, inactive is altogether not passive. We are in a kind of inactive condition—very calm, very silent—yet we are very positive. Yet, we are not positive in ourselves or by ourselves. We are silent, we are calm, but He gets every inch of our inner room. He has every opportunity, every chance, to do everything. He lives. When we are calmed down, He has the opportunity to live.
This does not mean to be calmed down by way of an accident. Sometimes a very active person receives some chastisement from the Lord, and he becomes very calm. That kind of calm does not mean too much. You do not need to have some big blow from the Lord, like losing your job or losing your wife or having your house burn or having sickness, to calm you down. I have seen this a lot in the past, but I do not trust in this. I saw some persons stopped by the Lord in this way, but after a short time, that “horse” became even bigger. This kind of calm does not mean much. The kind of calm I mean is in the measure of your stature. In life you reach a stage where you become a calm person. You are not calm in the outward doings; in fact, you may be very active in outward doings. But your inward situation regarding your contact with the Lord is in a very calm situation. You do not try to love others; you do not even try to pray. You are very calm.
As a further illustration, I believe that when many brothers were married, they prayed that they would be a good husband, a nice man. They prayed that they would never have a long face toward their wives but that they would always be smiling and never lose their temper. I prayed this way. But eventually all the brothers have the experience to testify that on the whole earth there is not such a husband. Gradually, we struggled and prayed and fasted and read many books to find the way to be such a husband. Eventually, nothing worked. But while you are growing in the Lord, you will reach a point where you are calm. Do not be a bad husband or a good husband. Do not be anything. Do not be somebody, and even do not be nobody. Forget about the being or the not being. If you are really reaching this point, from deep within you will realize that the Lord is living in you. It is not a matter of whether you lose your temper or do not lose your temper. It is a matter of the Lord living in you. Then you could understand that it is no more I but Christ who lives in me (Gal. 2:20). I do not believe that any Christian could experience Galatians 2:20 in full in his early Christian life.
For over fifty years I have given messages on Galatians 2:20, but up to now I still feel I do not have that much thorough experience of no longer I but Christ living in me. How much Christ lives in us all depends upon how much our being is calmed down. It has to be calmed down not only in loving the world but even calmed down in prayer. Our being has to be calmed down from loving others. If you keep on this track, some day you will reach a point by the Lord’s growing within you that your being, your person, will be calmed down. Then the Lord will live in you but not in your sense. He just will live in you. When you reach this point, you will even realize that you do not need to pray that much. You need more prayer, but you do not need to pray that much. Right now you have little prayer, but you pray too much. Prayer means just to contact the Lord and to keep yourself in a very close and intimate contact with Him. Could you spend twenty minutes with the Lord without praying anything? Could you spend that much time just saying, “Lord, I love You. Lord, I need You. Lord, I like to be here with You; I like to look at You. I like to remain here in a precious, dear, and intimate contact with You”? Could you pray in this way? This is what I mean that you have a lot of prayer but you do not pray much. Many of you do not have this kind of prayer, yet you pray a lot. You spend a lot of time to pray concerning your need to be more spiritual, concerning your need to live Christ, concerning your need to practice the one spirit with the Lord, concerning your need for impact, concerning your need for the inner life. You pray for your wife, for your children, for so many things. This is what I mean that you have little prayer but you pray too much. You need to have a spacious prayer yet with nearly no praying. As you grow in life, you will reach a point that you may be in prayer for twenty minutes with the Lord but have nearly no prayer. Every experienced person would say the same thing. We are altogether too much in our doing. You pray very much, but that kind of praying is your doing.
We need to continue to speak in this way until we all are reduced. The Lord must reduce all your spiritual doings, your good doings, even your doings for the seeking after the Lord. The Lord will reduce all your doings to make you realize that He is living in you right now. You do not need to overcome sin or temper, and you do not need to strive to love others. You just need to say, “Lord, I am here. I love You. I would like to stay with You.” Spontaneously, He will be your life in a very actual way. It is not that you take Him as your life but that He is your life. He is just your life. At that time you will realize that you are really one with Him, and He is really one with you. He lives in you. You do not need to live Him; He lives in you. When you reach that point, you will fully realize what I am telling you now. At that time some probably will not love the Lord so much as you do, yet they are very active and aggressive. You are inactive but not passive. Actually, you will love the Lord more than they. It may seem at the time that you are not on fire, but actually you do have a thorough mingling of the Lord with you. You would not just feel or sense but fully realize that the Lord really lives in you. It is altogether not your doing. You are so inactive; you are so calm. You are not cold, yet you are very calm. You do not hate, you do not love, even you do not pray, and neither do you not pray. You enter into a stage that the Lord lives in you.
This stage is the goal of this training. Praise the Lord! Someday you will grow up. You cannot remain young. I do believe that at least the majority of us are seeking and are growing. We may be foolish, and we may waste a lot of time, but the Lord is not foolish, and He has never wasted our time. One day we will thank Him for His preservation and His recovery. The Lord’s recovery is not just to recover the one church in one city. The Lord’s recovery eventually is to recover Himself as our real experience. Then you may ask about our ups and downs. We have to leave these until later. For right now, we have to realize that, on the one hand, the Lord is growing within us, and on the other hand, He is reducing us. He is not killing us; He is reducing us. You must realize that you do not need to pray that much, you do not need to love people that much, and you do not need to endeavor that much. The Lord is adding Himself into you, and He is also reducing you. You had better come to Him and stay with Him; this is what we call the proper prayer. You do not need to endeavor to pray that much. You need reducing. But you cannot reduce yourself. This needs time. What you need right now is simply to tell Him all the time, “Lord, I love You. I want You. I need You. I like You. I want to get with You.” This is very active. Yet you do not do anything; this is passive. This is what I call active-passive. This is, “Be saved” (Acts 2:40).
In 2 Timothy 2:1 Paul says, “Be empowered.” The King James Version renders this verse in a very self-endeavoring, active way: “Be strong.” Be strong is very active, but Paul says, “Be empowered.” You do not need to be strong, and you cannot be strong. Even if you are strong, it means nothing, because John 15:5 says that apart from Him we can do nothing. We still can do a lot of things, but whatever we do does not count, so it means nothing. Apart from Him we can do nothing. But we need to be empowered. How could we be empowered? We have to be calmed down, and He has to replace us. Once we are calmed down and He comes in to replace us, we are empowered.
Likewise, the Bible does not tell us that we can sanctify ourselves. In the Old Testament we are told to be holy (Lev. 19:2). But you have to realize that according to the New Testament sense, it is not a matter of being holy but of being sanctified (John 17:19; Heb. 2:11). In principle, to be holy is just like to be strong, and to be sanctified is just like to be empowered. We cannot be holy, but we need to be sanctified. Someone is within us sanctifying all the time. We cannot be holy, but He can sanctify us. In the New Testament many points like this have either been translated in the wrong way or understood in the wrong way. Actually, in the New Testament we are told not to be something or to do something but to be saved (Acts 2:40), to be empowered (2 Tim. 2:1), that we may be sanctified. This means that on our side we are reduced, and we are calm. Then on the Lord’s side, He is active, He is living within us, He is living for us, and He is living with us. This is what He wants, and this is what will work.
We have to pray. We have to enter into the prayer, and then gradually we will be reduced, and He will be added in to replace us. But there is the need of some measure of life to bring us into this stage. At this point we will spontaneously realize something. This is to live Christ. To live Christ is not that we live Him, but it is actually to let Christ Himself live from within us. So we need the reducing. As long as you can pray so much, you had better pray that much. But one day you simply will not be able to pray that much. You cannot imitate me, nor can I imitate you. In the spiritual life you may have some pattern that gives you a principle. But if you imitate the pattern apart from the principle, it does not work. It does not mean that now you need to stop praying for your friends and for your relatives. If you can stop, you do not need to stop; you just do not pray. If you cannot stop, you just pray.
This is a matter of life. It is the same in the physical life with your children. Little ones can do certain things when they are two years of age. When they become five years of age, they can do something more. So there is the need of the measure of the stature in life. Do not imitate. If you are able to pray that much, just do it. But if you are not able to do it, spontaneously there is no need for me to say do not do it. You simply cannot do it. To portray the real experience of Christ in our life is somewhat strange. The only thing that can help us to realize it is to get into that stage. When I get into a certain stage, I will spontaneously understand the life matters in that stage. When I get to another stage, I will understand the matters of life in that stage. When we began this Perfecting Training, we realized that many of you have been in the experience of Christ for years. We surely realized that many of you are bothered because your old way of experiencing Christ in the past no longer works. Why? It is because you have reached another stage. I do not mean that all of us have reached another stage. It is like a big family. There are folks of all ages. You do not need to imitate others. You are in one stage of life, and others are in different stages of life. In the church life we cannot have separate grades to form classes as in a school.
Gradually, I believe the Lord will speak to us more and more. Then perhaps we will go on to another matter. It may be that the Lord will lead us to the matter of the Body. Actually, not many even among us know what is the real Body life. Why? Because the life is not that much here. But the real Body life is much closer than it was years ago. So it may be that we will turn eventually from the experience of Christ to the real Body life. We look to the Lord that He would surely lead us on. I believe many of you realize that in these few months what we have covered is higher, not in knowledge or doctrine but in our practical experience of Christ in life.
