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In this chapter and in the next two chapters, we want to see some crucial points concerning the practice of meeting. There are a few points that we need to take care of when we speak in our meetings. We must always take care of others when we speak. We have to consider whether or not people can hear our voice. We should not speak too loud or too low. Nor should we speak too fast or too slow. Furthermore, when we speak, we should do our best not to overlap others’ speaking. While someone else is speaking, we should wait until they are finished before we speak. We do not need to strive or compete with others. Our speaking corporately should have a good continuation and maintain a proper order. We also need to avoid telling stories. When we share in the meetings, we are not giving a message. If a person is giving a message, he may use stories and illustrations; however, in the church meeting our time is limited, and we want many to share something. We need to limit our sharing to two or three minutes so that many others have the opportunity to speak. We come to the meeting to minister Christ to others. Our speaking in the meetings must be like a composition spoken by all the attendants.
Our desire is that the saints and the churches in the Lord’s recovery would be brought into a way of meeting that corresponds to the ordained way in the Bible. The practice of Christianity is traditional and follows the customs of the nations. The Bible tells us that when the church comes together, “each one has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation” (1 Cor. 14:26). If we enter into the genuine practice of meeting revealed in the New Testament, our entire meeting will cover some subject or subjects that will build up the saints, the local church, and the Body of Christ.
It is difficult for a family to move to another country and change their native language. But when a family has this language laid as a foundation, all the little children in the family will spontaneously speak this language without any accent. We need to hold a strong learning spirit to learn a “new language,” that is, to learn how to meet in the new way. We need to practice all the points of fellowship in this book so that our meetings can reach the goal of God’s economy to build up the church.
The Lord’s recovery has been among us for over sixty years, and during this time, we have learned two secrets. First, the thing that damages the meetings is our desire to “save our face” or to get some kind of glory. This is the most damaging thing, and it is also deadening. If we take care of our face, we are deadened. Second, pride is a great damage to the Lord’s recovery. Among us in the Lord’s recovery, there are not many capable persons. Most capable persons would not come the way of the Lord’s recovery because this is the way of the cross. It is a narrow and lowly way. Everyone who wants a name, a position, or a rank would not come this way. While the Lord Jesus was on the earth, He told the unbelieving Jews that He did not receive glory from men (John 5:41) and that they received glory from one another, but they did not seek God’s glory (v. 44). To seek man’s glory is to seek some kind of rank or position. When Paul wrote his first Epistle to the church in Corinth, he addressed this matter. Corinth was a great, luxurious city in Paul’s time, but Paul said that among them there were “not many wise according to flesh, not many powerful, not many wellborn” (1:26). It is the same with us today. The church of God is composed not mainly of the upper class but of the lowborn of the world and the despised. Once one is used by the Lord, pride can come in. Actually, pride is continually crouching there. If one is not a capable person, pride will not be crouching to possess him. Pride is crouching in order to gain and spoil the capable persons.
Thus, you have to put your face under your left foot and your pride under your right foot. Do not uplift your face or your pride. Put them under your feet. If these two things are under your feet, you are a victor, an overcomer. To be an overcomer, you have to overcome your face and your pride. Be careful. Once you are used and you become useful, pride is crouching there. Without the Lord’s mercy in the past fifty-five years, I would have been killed by pride many times.
We need to learn how to practice our meeting in a practical way. The Christian meeting is an exhibition of the Christian daily life. We need to prepare ourselves for the meetings by praying, dealing with sins, being filled with the Spirit, and abiding in the fellowship with the Lord. According to my learning and experience from the past, if we are going to meet according to the standard revealed in the Scriptures, we must be praying persons. A praying person is one who not only prays but who also has a praying spirit with a desire and an aspiration to pray. If we are this kind of person, then we are prepared to attend any kind of meeting. Whenever we are intending to go to a meeting, we must spend some time to pray for at least five to ten minutes. If we have the time, we can pray for fifteen or twenty minutes, but we should not pray too long. A longer prayer can exhaust our spirit. If I walk for two hours, my legs will become tired. Likewise, our spirit can become exhausted if we pray for too long a time before a meeting.
A proper member of a basketball team will always prepare himself for the game. He must eat properly and make sure to get enough rest. He also has to dress in the proper clothing for the game. No one would come to play in a basketball game dressed like a bank clerk. Just before the game, the player participates in certain warm-up exercises so that he is fully prepared when the game begins. In like manner, we need to be prepared for the meetings that we attend. Instead of being prepared for the church meetings, many of the saints come to the meetings in a loose way. Some even sleep in the meetings.
If a number of saints are sleeping in the meeting, that will deaden the entire meeting. Even one person who is sleeping in the meeting can frustrate the speaking spirit. If I am speaking and some of the saints are sleeping, my speaking spirit is deadened. I would not stop the meeting and ask a sleeping one to leave, but I may forget my point when I see someone sleeping and become delayed in my speaking.
When we come to the meeting, we should come to the front as fighting soldiers to conquer the enemy and as prepared athletes to win the game. If we are going to be prepared for the meetings, we must pray. I sympathize with the saints who are so busy. I am a very busy person, but I always pray before I speak. We all need such a praying spirit. We must learn to get ourselves prepared to speak in the meetings by praying.
When we pray, the Lord will show us all our faults, shortcomings, failures, defeats, wrongdoings, and mistakes. We must deal with our sins by confessing them to the Lord. We have to make a thorough confession of all our trespasses and offenses. If we would deal with our sins thoroughly, we will enjoy the filling of the Holy Spirit. To be filled with the Holy Spirit is so normal, yet it is altogether miraculous. It is a miraculous normality. If we pray and make a thorough confession of all our sins, we will spontaneously enjoy the filling of the Holy Spirit. We realize that we are filled with the Spirit by faith, not by our feelings.
Once you have prayed and dealt with your sins to be filled with the Holy Spirit, you must learn to abide in the fellowship with the Lord. When you have prayed, dealt with your sins, and are ready to come to the meeting, it is best not to receive a phone call. Sometimes one short phone call can deaden you. The enemy tries to frustrate us either from coming to the meeting or from coming to the meeting in a prepared state. If you do not have a meeting on a particular evening, no one may call you. But when you have a meeting, a phone call may come just before you leave for the meeting. According to my experience, most of these phone calls are calls with bad news. This bad news can kill you.
It is also helpful to be careful about when you open your mail on a meeting night. Your wife may have received the mail at noon, but she forgot to tell you about a letter for you until you are ready to go to the meeting. It is best for you to put this mail aside until after the meeting. Tell Satan, “Satan, you better read the mail. This is not my business now. I’ll come back after the meeting and read the mail.” Many times the mail that is given to us right before the meeting has bad news to bother and frustrate us.
The husbands even have to be exercised in how they deal with their wives before the meetings. We all need to be wise by redeeming our time to keep ourselves in a good condition to attend the meeting. I hope we see that attending the meetings of the church is not a light and easy matter. For the sake of the meetings, we must learn to abide in the fellowship with the Lord.
The proper starting of our meeting should not be in the meeting hall but in our homes. We should start the meeting by calling on the Lord’s name, praying, singing, praising, and speaking. While we are on the way to the meeting place and when we arrive, we can continue to enjoy the Lord in this way. If a number of the saints are already there practicing the meeting, we can join what they are already doing.
In our meetings we do not need to have a definite subject. To have a definite subject is wrong according to the revelation of 1 Corinthians 14:26, which says that whenever we come together, each one has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, or has an interpretation. Surely each attendant will not bring something to the meeting that covers the same subject. Hebrews 10:25 also implies this. This verse tells us that in our meetings we need to exhort one another. How could the meeting have a definite subject when we are exhorting one another? There is no need of a definite subject in our meetings. We need to keep the meeting open to any subject or subjects as the Lord leads through the attending saints. Our meetings do not need a prearranged program. We must have the faith to have our meetings with nothing prearranged. Having a program binds, annuls, and kills.
A rich feast is composed not only of one dish. The more courses of food there are and the more variety there is, the richer the feast is. Some leading ones have made some prior arrangements when the saints come together for a love feast. They assign certain saints to bring hot food, others to bring salad, others to bring bread, and others to bring potatoes. But this is not a real feast. A feast has more than just four courses. It should have at least twelve courses with many varieties of foods and tastes. Such a feast is a real enjoyment, and a rich meeting should be just like this. Each saint should bring a different “dish.” Our meetings need to be a real feast to both God and man. We all need to bring our topmost portion of the riches of Christ that we have enjoyed to the church meeting and present them for God’s satisfaction and the saints’ nourishment. I believe that the Lord’s recovery will arrive at the reality of 1 Corinthians 14:26 because this is the Lord’s Word. This is the heavenly and divine way revealed in the Scriptures. We must take care of what is said in the Holy Bible. First Corinthians 14:26 does tell us that whenever we come together, each one should have something. Throughout the years of the Lord’s recovery, some of us have tasted and experienced some meetings in the nature of what is revealed in 1 Corinthians 14:26. Now the Lord wants us to enter into the full reality of such a wonderful meeting life.
The goal of our meeting is to exhibit Christ, and the Christian meeting is an exhibition of the Christian daily life. The Christian daily life is just Christ. Paul says, “To me, to live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21a). Christ must be our daily life, and our meeting is an exhibition, a display, of our daily life. The center of this display is Christ Himself. Whatever we pray, speak, or sing must be with Christ as the center. We do not speak other things. We only speak Christ. We must learn to practice our meetings according to the scriptural way of meeting and serving. We cannot practice the new way according to our natural way. We must be trained in the spirit and with the Word.
The purpose of our meeting is to build up the saints for the building up of the Body of Christ. According to my observation, many Christian meetings, or so-called services, at the very most help only to edify the saints without building up the Body. To build up the Body of Christ as an organism, we need the meetings that are according to the Bible. The unscriptural, traditional way of meeting annuls, chokes, and deadens the living members of the Body of Christ.
One can build an article of furniture by arranging and attaching pieces of wood to one another in an organizational way. But to build up a person as an organism is a different matter. Whatever is put into a person to build him up must be something living, something of life. For a living person to be built up, he needs to take in some organic, living substance. Morticians make corpses look better by putting makeup on them. Although a corpse may look better outwardly, it is still full of death. The Lord’s way is not to change us only outwardly but to add His very life into our inward being to transform us and make us His living members.
Death is more defiling before God than sin (Lev. 11:24-25; Num. 6:6-7, 9). According to the Old Testament, if anyone sinned, he could be forgiven simply by offering the sin offering (Lev. 4:27-31). However, anyone who touched the dead body of a man had to wait seven days before he could be cleansed (Num. 19:11, 16). The traditional way of meeting is a way of death. We must practice the new way of meeting according to the Bible. We must stay away from any way that is deadening, annulling, or choking and take the way that supplies people with something organic and that builds up an organism, not an organization. The reason why the Lord has not come back yet is because there is not such a living organism on this earth to match Him.
There are hundreds of millions of Christians on this earth today, but where is the Body built up? There are thousands and thousands of assemblies and gatherings, but where can we see the organic Body? We cannot see the organic Body of Christ because the meetings in the traditional way cannot fulfill God’s purpose to build up the Body. Week after week many believers attend this kind of meeting, but at best they are only edified personally. Only the way to meet that is according to the Bible can build up the Body of Christ as a divine organism.
Whatever we do in the scriptural way of meeting requires the exercise of our spirit. If we speak, read, sing, or testify, we must exercise our spirit. When we exercise our spirit, the Spirit that is within our spirit operates, and the issue is something organic. This is why we should not behave, act, or move in the meeting according to anything natural. We must do everything according to our spirit under the anointing. Then something organic will come out to nourish us and others in order to build up the organic Body of Christ. In our meetings the saints are built up for the building up of the Body of Christ by four things: by our giving a testimony, speaking forth Christ, teaching the truth, and preaching the gospel. These are four categories of things that we can and should cover in our meetings.
Question: Could you give a little more explanation regarding not needing a prearranged program for our meetings?
Answer: Quite often in the church we need to call a special gathering. Every special gathering has a special purpose, and for that gathering we need a definite subject, a definite program, and even some prearrangement as to who will bear the burden for this meeting. But for the regular meetings of the church, there should not be a prearranged program or a definite subject. We should come together and leave the entire meeting to the guiding Spirit.
Question: Suppose some saints want to come together to go over a lesson in Truth Lessons. That is a definite subject. How does this fit in with what we are seeing regarding the meetings not needing to have a definite subject?
Answer: This is a very good question. All the saints need to learn the crucial truths in the Scriptures. For the long run, a local church must have a time, either weekly, bi-weekly, or at least monthly, to have a meeting for the teaching of the truth to the saints. This kind of teaching of the truth should not depend upon what we call regular church meetings. The publication that can help us learn the truths to the uttermost is Truth Lessons. In using the Truth Lessons we should not follow the traditional way. We must take the new way of practicing the learning of the Truth Lessons.
Even with this matter, we should not be too definite regarding what or how much we will cover in the meeting. We may have made a prior decision to cover a certain truth lesson in a meeting. But when we come together, we may realize that this lesson is too long. We may be able to cover this entire lesson in four meetings. Thus, when we come together, an instant decision may come out, and we may decide to cover only the first part or the first few pages.
Someone may even be burdened to cover the final fourth of the lesson. We should go along with this proposal. We may wonder how we could cover the fourth part when we have not covered the previous three parts. But quite often we can learn more this way. I am sharing this to impress us that it is better not to control, limit, or restrict the saints that much. It is always a profit to keep the meeting open and depend on the Lord’s instant leading. But on the other hand, we should not be too loose. If we are too loose, many opinions will come out.
A sister who was a medical doctor once came to me and told me that our church needed a hospital, and she encouraged me to promote this matter. Some people who are Ph.D.’s may feel that we need to establish some schools. These are opinions from the natural man. We should not be too loose in the meetings. Otherwise, the door will be open for many opinions. We have to learn to restrict and limit this element, but we should not be too strict or controlling. In other words, there are actually no regulations, but we are always under God’s guidance and leading.
Question: I have been in some localities that practice getting into a certain book of the Bible with the help of the Life-study messages. They come together for a meeting of fellowship, and the content of this meeting is usually what the saints have labored on with the Life-studies. What do you feel about this practice?
Answer: A lame person who wants to walk may need a cane to help him. When the strength and health of his legs are eventually recovered, though, he will no longer need this cane. Likewise, when we start to practice the new way, we may need a little help. But eventually, when everyone is regularly contacting the Lord and having enjoyment in the word, they will gain an accumulation of the experiences of Christ and a living storage of the living word of Christ. Thus, everyone will be rich. When we come together in this state, everyone will have something to present from the storehouse in his being.
Probably right now many of us do not have any “savings.” We have only a “checking account” with one dollar and fifty cents. If we practice the new way, however, we will eventually have some savings, perhaps even within six months. Then it will be easy for us to “write checks” in the meetings. Thus, we need to prepare. Because we may have only one dollar and fifty cents in our checking account now, we may need to borrow something by using the Life-studies, the Truth Lessons, or the Life Lessons in the regular church meetings. There is nothing wrong with this. But we must learn to bring the saints into a stage where they can drop all the “canes” and the helps because they have the accumulation of the experiences of Christ and the riches of the truth from the living word of Christ. If we continue to take the scriptural way, we will reach a stage where most of the saints are rich in the experience of Christ and in the enjoyment of the word. Then when we come together, it will be easy to have a rich feast with many courses. To use something like the Life-studies is not wrong, but be careful that the saints do not build up a habit of relying on this too much. Otherwise, they may not have a desire to contact the Lord in the morning to accumulate some riches. They may build up a habit of preparing only a little bit on the assigned pages of a certain book. That is not good for the long run and builds up a bad habit.
