Search
Scripture Reading: John 17:21-23; Eph. 4:3; Rom. 15:5-6; 1 Cor. 1:10-13; 11:19; Gal. 5:20; Titus 3:10
In the last chapter we have seen that the speciality of the church life is our Christian faith. Our Christian faith is composed of the beliefs concerning the Bible, God, Christ, the work of Christ, salvation, and the church. According to the Bible, these points constitute the fundamental and sound faith. We should not take anything away from this faith or add anything to it. If we take something away, we will surely be divisive, and if we add something to it, we will also be divisive. Christians are the same only in this faith. To keep us from being divisive, we must only hold this faith, nothing more.
Hence, our Christian faith is the ground of all the believers’ genuine oneness. The last night the Lord Jesus was on the earth, He offered a unique prayer (John 17). His prayer revealed the importance of the oneness of all His believers. Nothing is as important as the oneness. When the church is divided, this oneness is lost. Satan knows that oneness is the crucial thing, the strategic point. He also knows that as long as he can keep Christians divided, he is successful.
The early apostles ministered to the church what they had been commissioned by the Lord. However, it was not long before the things that they had passed on to the church began to be lost. At the beginning, the church received all the right things. But from the last part of the first century, the church gradually began to lose these things. On the one hand, by the fourteenth century nearly everything that God had given and committed to the Body had been lost. On the other hand, within those fourteen hundred years, the so-called church had picked up many heretical, dark, and sinful things. Whatever the church lost was something given by the Head, and whatever the church picked up was something injected from Satan. Thus, this period of time, as history shows us, was the darkest time.
Then, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Lord raised up Martin Luther. Before him some others had been raised up. (Actually, throughout the previous fourteen centuries, there were some faithful saints raised up by the Lord to recover the lost truths.) These paved the way for the Reformation. It was at this time that the Lord started His recovery and recovered the first item, justification by faith. Since that time many things have been recovered, such as sanctification by faith, holiness by faith, the living of a life by faith, victory by faith, and many other items.
In the 1700s some of the dear saints who were in the Lord’s recovery began to pay their attention to the church life. As a result, at this time in Europe, there were many kinds of Brethren meetings. In the eighteenth century, some brothers moved to Bohemia to be with Count Zinzendorf. Under his leadership, they began to practice the church life, and to some extent it was proper and also quite wonderful. John Wesley, after going to Bohemia and staying with these brethren for some time, said that if he had not been burdened for England, he would have stayed in Bohemia with them for the rest of his life.
The practice of the church life by the brothers in Bohemia was good, but in 1828 to 1829 some brothers from England under the leadership of John Nelson Darby began to meet. Their practice of the church life was a great improvement. D. M. Panton, a great writer fifty years ago, said that this movement was greater than the Reformation. It was quite powerful and extremely influential.
Before the Reformation, as history shows us, the Bible was shut up by the Roman Catholic Church. Through Martin Luther and the Reformation it was released. However, it was opened through these brothers. There were many great scholars and teachers of the Bible among them—John Nelson Darby, Benjamin Newton, C. H. Mackintosh, William Kelly, and others. Through these brothers the Bible became not only a released book but also an open book. Today’s fundamental theology is based mostly upon the Brethren teachings.
Because these brothers were so much for the teachings, the teachings became a source of many divisions. The first division occurred not long after their beginning in 1828. It happened because of the different concepts held by John Nelson Darby and Benjamin Newton. They had a big disputation mainly over the Lord’s second coming. Since that first division, hundreds of divisions have occurred among them. All of them were due to the different concepts regarding teachings.
At the beginning, the Brethren were very good in the matter of life, but later they were distracted from life to teachings. Due to this, as history shows us, the Lord was forced to react.
Due to the deadness of the Reformed churches and the Brethren, the Lord reacted in the following matters. First, the Lord raised up some dear saints in the matter of the inner life. One of them was Madame Guyon. She was among the Catholics and deep in the inner life. Then in the last century the Keswick Convention was founded, and all those in it were along the inner-life line. William Law, Andrew Murray, and Mrs. Penn-Lewis were also in this line.
In His reaction the Lord also raised up evangelists. Especially in the last century there were a good number of giant evangelists. In this country there were D. L. Moody, Charles Finney, and R. A. Torrey. In England there were C. H. Spurgeon and Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission. Also there was William Carey, who went to India. Many of the evangelists founded some kind of mission to send out the gospel. This all occurred outside the Brethren.
Besides the inner-life line and the line of evangelism, beginning in the middle part of the last century, also from England, there was the Pentecostal movement. Because the Brethren were so dogmatic and legal, there arose a group of people who did not care for any legality. Within the Pentecostal movement there were dancers, holy rollers, and holy laughers.
The Brethren might say that these things are not scriptural. But many were saved and revived through the Pentecostal movement. In China I saw one who had smoked opium for forty years. No one could help him get rid of his addiction. As a result of one time of jumping, he opened himself to the Lord and got saved. A robber who even the government could not stop fell down and rolled for five minutes. As a result, he also got saved. I personally talked to this one, and he told me the story. He was not helped by any eloquent preaching or a nice sermon but by the wild things. All these—the inner life, evangelism, and the Pentecostal movement—were the Lord’s reactions to the dead rituals and dead teachings.
Up to the beginning of the twentieth century, many things had been recovered: the Bible knowledge, the inner life, evangelism, and the Pentecostal gifts. However, there was still not a proper church life recovered in a full way. Then in 1920 the Lord did a marvelous thing to raise up the recovery of the proper church life in China, mainly through the leadership of Brother Watchman Nee. Since 1920 until today, fifty-one years have passed, and of this time I have been in it for forty-seven years. Day by day I have seen things happen, and what I am now passing on to you is something of my realization as a result of seeing all the things.
Please do not listen to any other talk about Brother Nee. I was with him throughout the years, and he had many long, heart-to-heart talks with me. Today people spread all kinds of rumors that Witness Lee is different from Watchman Nee, particularly concerning the church. Please do not listen to these rumors. They are lies.
I have documented every chapter of the book Further Talks on the Church Life, giving the day, the month, the year, and the place where Brother Nee gave the messages, because a rumor was spread that he changed his concept about the church life after the Second World War. But all those messages were given from and after 1948.
I have never met a man who was so much for the church. In 1932 he was invited by the Southern Baptists in my province to hold a summer conference. After that time until his arrest in 1952, he was never invited by any denomination in China to speak to them. Why? It was because of the matter of the church. His burden, his ministry, was so much for the church, but most of the missionaries, missions, and denominations could not tolerate him because his teachings annulled the divisive ground of all the denominations. Today many Christians read and appreciate Brother Nee’s books, but some Christian bookstores in this country will not carry any of his writings on the church. Yet Brother Nee’s burden was so much for the church.
I have contacted a good number of Christian leaders, and I have read a good number of books. However, I have never met a person or read the writings of any person who knew the Lord as deeply and who was for the church as much as Watchman Nee. This is the reason that I have been and am still one with him. I realized that he was the person raised up by the Lord for His specific purpose of recovering the proper church life.
The recovery of the proper church life, as was pointed out by Brother Nee, is the recovery of the unique oneness and the reality of the church. In the book Further Talks on the Church Life, he spent much effort to illustrate and show us the genuine oneness of the church. Chapter 4 of this book illustrates four kinds of unity, of which only one is the proper and genuine unity (oneness) of the church. This chapter is a classic. He also ministered very much of Christ as the reality and contents of the church.
God’s intention is to have a church, to have a Body for Christ. His intention is not just to have a number of saved people. Nor is it His intention merely to have a number of spiritual people or to have some fervent and godly Christians. God’s unique intention is to have a church, to have a Body. All the previous items of recovery are for this ultimate item. The recovery of the church life is basically dependent on the recovery of the oneness and reality of the church. This is why oneness is the ultimate recovery of the Lord. Without oneness there is no proper ground for the church life.
In the past the Lord used different people to recover many items, yet the sad thing is that nearly every item of the recovery caused a division. All the items of the recovery should be for the church, but the people who have been used by the Lord to recover the items built up some division with that respective item of recovery. Those opposing the recovery of the church are not indifferent Christians but they are so much for the knowledge of the Bible, so much for the inner life, so much for evangelism, and so much for Pentecostal, charismatic things.
The target of much of the opposition is the oneness as the ground of the church life. Satan always does his best to damage this oneness. All the arrows will turn toward one who is for this oneness. Today Satan, the subtle enemy, hardly attacks spirituality, holiness, or any kind of charismatic things; he mainly attacks one thing—the genuine oneness as the ground of the church, which is the recovery of the practical church life.
I do not oppose the Pentecostal gifts or the emphasis of certain teachings, yet I am not for either. I do not oppose anything that is genuine. Why then am I not for these things? Let me illustrate. Suppose a factory has a choice of different materials to be used to make its product. Each of the different materials may be good, but the foreman knows from experience which material will make the best product. In the same manner, as a result of experience, I can tell you that the best way to build up a local church is to help the saints realize their human spirit and exercise their spirit to contact the Lord. By this way they will experience and enjoy the Lord, have the growth in life, and be preserved in the oneness as the ground of the church life. This does not mean that there is not another way to build up the church. There are other ways, but none is as good and proper as this way.
A local church might be built up by teaching, but if you use it as the basic way to build up a local church, you will suffer some loss. Also, a church might be built up by the Pentecostal and charismatic things, but if you use them as the basic way to build up a local church, you will suffer even greater loss.
About thirty-seven years ago, a dear brother, who was very much for tongue-speaking, came and had a thorough talk with me. During our fellowship I pointed out to him the real situation in China. Among the Christians in China at that time, there were some prevailing ones, but none of the prevailing Christian preachers and ministers spoke in tongues. Watchman Nee never spoke in tongues. He definitely disagreed with the teaching that tongues are the unique manifestation of the baptism of the Spirit. Yet today Brother Nee’s teachings have become so prevailing, not only among Chinese-speaking Christians but also throughout the whole world. Another prevailing one in China, Dr. John Sung the evangelist, also never spoke in tongues. He was strongly against anything Pentecostal.
Then I fellowshipped a second point with him. At that time two counties in China were full of Christians. One county, located in the province of Chekiang, was strongly against Pentecostalism. The other county that was in my home province was very much for the Pentecostal things. However, at the time of our talk, that Pentecostal work was nearly dried up, and the work in Chekiang that was against anything Pentecostal was prevailing. I told the brother that I do not mean that Pentecostal things are useless, but this situation proves that there is something better.
Then finally I pointed out to the brother that his Pentecostal group in our town had been meeting for a number of years yet still did not have over a hundred people. Our meeting place was very close to theirs, yet our number had been increasing all the time. He was a faithful believer, and after I had spoken to him, he added that he also realized that the brothers and sisters with him lived a careless and worldly life, but the brothers and sisters with us were so much with the Lord.
Today in Taiwan no other work has become as prevailing as the work of the local churches. In Taiwan there are seminaries, people with doctor’s degrees, missionaries, fundamental people, and Pentecostal people, but no Christian work has ever become as prevailing as the local churches.
In the New Testament we see the gifts, but we have to consider the whole New Testament. In the book of Acts we see that Paul was powerful in divine healing during his early ministry (Acts 14:9-10; 19:11-12) though he did not stress it, but in his latter ministry, when his spiritual son, Timothy, had stomach trouble, he only told him not to drink water but to drink a little wine (1 Tim. 5:23). Also, Paul’s intention in writing 1 Corinthians was to restrict the saints a little, or at least to adjust them, that they might use the tongues properly (14:6-11, 18-19).
In Ephesians, the book on the church, Paul does not say anything about the miraculous gifts. In chapter 4 the gifts are persons. Paul knew that the best way to build up the church was not with teachings or with the gifts but by the Spirit with life.
In all his latter books—1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus—Paul did not say a word about the miraculous gifts. Furthermore, neither Peter nor John said anything in their books concerning the so-called Pentecostal gifts. Paul, Peter, and John were persons full of experience, yet none of them stressed the Pentecostal gifts.
The way of life by the Spirit is the profitable way. It goes very slow, but it is steady and steadfast. For the long run, nothing can beat this way. It goes on year after year, and it goes from place to place. It also becomes stronger and stronger, and it gets more and more solid. It is slow, but for the long run, it is the fastest way. It is like raising an orchard. The trees being grown for the production of fruit grow quite slowly, but for the long run, it is not slow. Eventually, the way of life by the Spirit produces something that nothing can shake or destroy.
We should not oppose anything that is genuinely of the Bible. The local churches must be all-inclusive. However, whether in teaching or practice, it is wise to use the things that are better. When we come to the generality and the practicality of the church life in the forthcoming chapters, this will become more and more clear. So many things are not within the circle of the speciality, our Christian faith, but in the realm of the practicality, which is for practice. An example is pray-reading. We do not insist on pray-reading, because it is not an item of our Christian faith. But it is something for our practice. I believe that by fellowshipping in this way we all will become clearer and clearer.
