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Scripture Reading: Matt. 18:20; Acts 4:31; 1 Cor. 12:8; Col. 3:16; Eph. 5:18-19; John 6:63b; Eph. 6:17-18a
In Acts 4:31 four things are covered concerning the proper way to meet. First, the apostles with the saints prayed. Second, they spoke the word of God. Third, they were filled with the Holy Spirit. These three things—prayer, the Word, and the Spirit—compose a fourth item—their meeting. This one short verse unveils to us a clear and full picture concerning the way we need to take for our meeting. We need the Word and the Spirit for the meetings, but without prayer the Word is not so real to us, and without prayer the Spirit is not so living to us. We need to exercise our prayer to receive the Word and to apply the Spirit for the meetings.
Generally speaking, the way that Christians meet today is against the few principles revealed in Acts 4:31. Throughout the many centuries of its history, the church became degraded. In nearly all of the things related to the practice of the church, the church degraded from taking the divine way to taking the human way. Concerning the matter of how to meet, in particular, the church degraded to the human, worldly way.
The first verse in the New Testament that tells us something concerning how the believers in Christ should meet is Matthew 18:20: “Where there are two or three gathered into My name, there am I in their midst.” This verse unveils to us that the basic number for a local church meeting is two or three. Two or three are gathered into the name, not two or three thousand or even twenty or thirty.
In Matthew 16 and 18 the universal church and the local church are unveiled, not in a doctrinal way but in a very experiential, practical way. In Matthew 16 the Lord unveiled the universal church by saying that He would build His church upon the rock of the divine revelation concerning Christ (vv. 16-18). Then in Matthew 18 the Lord unveiled the local church in an experiential way by telling us how to recover a backsliding or sinful brother. In His fellowship concerning how to recover a backsliding brother, the Lord opened a little window for us to see how we believers in the local church should meet.
I do not believe that many of us have ever thought that the basic way to meet with the saints in the local church is by two or three. You could never have a meeting just by yourself; you need someone else to meet with. Due to tradition and to our environment we do not consider a gathering of two believers as a Christian meeting or as a church meeting. However, the Lord’s word shows that a local church should have meetings by two or three.
In Matthew 18:20 the Lord does not say that the two or three meet together in His name but that these two or three are gathered. The verb in this verse is in the passive voice, which indicates that the two or three are gathered by Someone. The meeting is not initiated by the meeting ones but by the unseen Lord who gathered them. Every time we meet, our meeting should not be from us but from Him. He motivates, He initiates, and He gathers us. The meetings related to a local church should be something started from Christ. He has to be the Initiator. He has to call us, invite us, and even somewhat “push us.” Whenever we meet, there are a number among us who have been pushed to the meeting. Without the Lord’s pushing, many of us would not meet together. Our meeting is not initiated by us but by “the Pusher.” The Lord Himself is the Gatherer. He pushes us and brings us together to meet.
The proper translation of Matthew 18:20 is not that two or three are gathered together “in My name” but “into My name.” The Lord does not mean that we just gather together in His name or that we just meet in His name. To meet in His name is much different from being gathered together into His name. We are not gathered together into a physical meeting place, but we are gathered together into the name. Because the name always denotes the person, we are gathered into the person of Jesus Christ. We are gathered and even somewhat pushed by the Lord into His name.
For us to be brought into something also means that we are coming out of something else. Actually, the Lord’s pushing is always a rescue. He rescues us from so many things in our environment. Sometimes your tiredness would not allow you to come to the meeting. The Lord, however, did a lot of pushing to rescue you out of your tiredness and bring you into Himself with the other saints in the meeting. In order to gather us into His name, many times the Lord rescues us out of our homes and out of our families. Sometimes the Lord may rescue a sister out of her husband and children or a brother out of his wife and into His name. Every day there are many things frustrating us and holding us back from coming to the meeting. To come to the meeting is a fight. You have to fight to come to the meeting, but actually the Lord Jesus is fighting within you to pull you out from so many things in your environment and gather you into His name. Matthew 18:20 also tells us that where two or three are gathered into the Lord’s name, He is in their midst. Since we all have been rescued and brought into the Lord’s name, surely He is with us.
Once we are gathered together into His name, we need to speak. In Ephesians 5:19 and in Colossians 3:16 the psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs are not mainly for singing but for speaking. In addition to singing the psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, we need to speak them. Due to our background, we do not have the habit of speaking the hymns and songs. We must pick up this habit and forget about our background, what we have learned in the past, and about our present environment. We must come back to the pure word in the Bible concerning how to meet. The New Testament reveals that the unique thing we have to do in the meeting is to speak. We need to speak with the Lord’s word, with psalms, with hymns, and with spiritual songs. We all must learn to speak.
When many Christians come together to meet, they are there to be dumb, to be silent. Many of the ones meeting together hire a speaker. They do not realize, however, that their function to speak is killed by that one speaker.
Many of us do not get ourselves prepared to come to the meeting and speak. Instead, we merely come to the meeting to sit and listen. We are not used to “bringing our mouth” to the meeting. To come to the meeting merely to hear what another person would say is wrong. When we come to the meeting, we should get ourselves prepared to speak. The reason why the situation among many Christians today is so weak, poor, low, cold, and far off is altogether due to the lack of speaking. If we all would learn to revolt against this kind of silence and speak for Christ, speak forth Christ, and speak Christ, immediately revival would come in.
When I come to a meeting for ministry and everybody is silent, this silence nearly quenches me. When everyone would not speak, it is hard for me to speak. On the other hand, if everyone speaks and I have to fight to get a chance to speak, I am stirred up. If you are the only one on a basketball team who plays, there is no encouragement for you to play, and it is hard for you to play. Suppose, however, that every member of the team is playing and coordinating together. This is a revival. My burden is to stir you up to revolt against the silence in the meetings. Forget about the Christianity way of meeting. When you come to the meeting, you should be prepared to speak.
You must speak in the meeting, but you should not speak your own word. We all have to learn to speak Christ as our word, the Word of God, and to speak His word, the word as revealed in the Bible. To speak in this way, we must experience Christ. The more we experience Him, the more we have to say of Him. We should not merely say something concerning Him, but we must “say Him”; we must say something that is Christ Himself. We have to speak the Christ whom we have experienced in our daily life, and then we have to speak His word. Colossians 3:16 says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.” For the word to dwell in us richly, we need to learn the word by studying the Bible.
After Jesus had been conceived in the womb of Mary, she went to visit her relative Elizabeth, and during this visit she offered a praise to God (Luke 1:46-55). Mary’s poetic praise is composed of many quotations from the Old Testament, which indicate strongly that she was very familiar with the word of the Old Testament. She probably studied the Old Testament thoroughly in order to pick up the various points and terms that composed her praise to God. This indicates that Mary was a godly woman, qualified to be a channel for the Savior’s incarnation, and that Jesus would grow up in a family which would be filled with the knowledge and love of God’s holy Word.
The tragic thing about most Christian meetings is that very few of the attendants have an adequate knowledge of God’s Word. They are not so familiar with God’s divine revelation. Even if the attendants have the inspiration, they do not have the words to express their inspiration. A person needs an adequate vocabulary to compose, utter, and express his thought. Without the proper vocabulary, it is very difficult to utter our experience.
I encourage all of you to revolt against the traditional practice of Christian meetings and come to the meeting and learn to speak. To speak, however, you must acquire the adequate vocabulary. You can acquire an adequate divine vocabulary from your experiences of Christ, from the Bible, especially from the New Testament, from the Life-study messages, and from the footnotes in the Recovery Version of the New Testament. In the Life-studies and in the footnotes of the Recovery Version are many high, deep, and profound terms that we should learn and use. In describing the wonderful Spirit whom we have received and whom we now enjoy, we have used seven marvelous adjectives. The New Testament clearly reveals that this Spirit is all-inclusive, processed, compound, life-giving, indwelling, sevenfold intensified, and consummated. All the ones among us who are under twenty-five years of age are in a golden time to acquire a rich spiritual vocabulary. When you are rich in vocabulary, it is easy for you to compose any sentence, any paragraph, and any article. We must spend time to increase our spiritual vocabulary. It is regretful that many of us are short of divine utterance and expression.
Even if we have the adequate vocabulary, we still need the Spirit. The book of Acts shows us that we need to be filled with the Spirit, and we need to receive the outpouring of the Spirit. Inside we need to be filled, and outside we need to receive the outpouring of the all-inclusive, processed, compound, life-giving, indwelling, sevenfold intensified, and consummated Spirit.
This Spirit has two aspects—the essential aspect and the economical aspect. The essential aspect is that He would enter into us as our spiritual and divine essence to be our very life supply and the spiritual content of our divine life for our life and living. The essential aspect is the inward aspect, the aspect of the divine essence. The Holy Spirit, who is today’s consummated life-giving Spirit, is God’s very essence, God’s divine substance (John 4:24). This Spirit has come into our spirit (Rom. 8:16), and He enters into our being to be the very essence of God to us. He Himself is this divine essence, and He comes into us to become the divine essence within us. To be regenerated is to be born of God, and to be born of God is to receive God’s very essence into our being. God’s divine essence has been born into our being, and this essence is nothing less than the Spirit of God. This is the essential aspect of this wonderful Spirit.
The other aspect of the Spirit is the economical aspect. The economical aspect refers to God’s plan, God’s dispensation. The essential aspect of the Spirit is for our life and living, while the economical aspect of the Spirit is for our ministry and work to accomplish God’s plan. The Spirit enters into us as the essence, and He comes upon us for the economy. This is why we see in the Acts that the Spirit fills the disciples inwardly and comes upon the disciples, being poured out upon the disciples, outwardly. These are the two aspects of the same, one all-inclusive Spirit. First Corinthians 12:13 tells us that we were all baptized in one Spirit. This is the economical Spirit. Furthermore, we were all given to drink one Spirit. This is the essential Spirit. To be baptized is to get into the water. To drink is to get the water into you.
We are short of these two aspects of the one Spirit. It is a divine fact that we have Him within us as the essence and upon us for the economy of God, yet in our experience we are short of Him within, and we are short of Him without. Inwardly we do not have much of the divine essence, and outwardly we do not have much of the Spirit for God’s economy. All the saints in the Lord’s recovery have to rise up to seek after the filling of the Spirit and after the outpouring of the Spirit. May the Lord stir us all up to seek after these two aspects of the same one Spirit.
Generally speaking, fundamental Christians do not care for the Spirit, and some even dare not to speak concerning the Spirit. On the other hand, the practices of Pentecostalism related to the so-called Spirit are not built upon the divine Word. They build nearly everything upon their feelings and experiences without a strong scriptural base. We all have to come back to the pure Word. In the pure Word of the Bible, especially in the Acts and the Epistles, the Spirit is greatly emphasized. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, and the seven Spirits are among the many titles of the Spirit’s person. We must realize that we need the Spirit.
In the New Testament the life-giving Spirit is the ultimate consummation of the processed Triune God. The Triune God, after being processed, has been consummated in the sevenfold Spirit. Today the Triune God is not “raw,” but He has been processed through incarnation, human living, crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and ascension. This processed Triune God is now consummated in the all-inclusive Spirit. This is why 1 Corinthians 15:45 says that “the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit,” and 2 Corinthians 3:17 says that “the Lord is the Spirit.” Today our God is the Spirit; our Savior is the Spirit; our Redeemer, our Master, our Lord, our Jesus Christ, is this Spirit. We all need to seek the filling of this Spirit inwardly for our life and living and outwardly for our ministry and work to carry out God’s economy.
For our meetings, we need to be gathered together into the Lord’s dear name. Then we will enjoy His presence in our midst. In our gathering we have to speak. Everyone should speak and learn to speak the Word, which is Christ Himself. We need to speak the word of Christ, the words of the New Testament, and sometimes even the word quoted from the Old Testament. We also need to have an adequate knowledge of the Word. This is why Paul tells us that God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the full knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). If we mean business with the Lord for His recovery, especially concerning the meetings, we all have to learn the Word. Second, we have to be filled with the Triune God, and we have to have the Triune God poured upon us. We have Him within, and we have Him without. We all need to be wrapped up with Him. We need Him as the Spirit.
The way to get this all-inclusive Spirit is to pray, and when you come to pray, the first order of business is to offer the sin and trespass offerings. In the Old Testament, whoever came to the tabernacle to contact God had to offer the sin offering and the trespass offering. The first thing in our prayer that rises up, or springs up, within us is our sin. This is why we need to make a thorough confession of our sins. If you do not do this, you do not realize how many sins you have. But when you come to the Lord to contact Him, not being occupied with so many prayers for matters, things, and persons, to be filled with Him and to be a person wrapped up with Him, you will immediately have the deep sensation that you are wrong in so many matters. If you would confess your wrongdoings, one wrongdoing after another will rise up within you for your confession. It may take you one or two hours to get yourself fully cleared up and cleansed. When you get yourself fully cleared up in prayer by confessing your failures, your wrongdoings, your mistakes, your sinful things, your offenses, and your shortcomings, that will be the time you will be filled with the Spirit.
We all need to come back to the pure Word and make a thorough confession to God. If you feel that you are wrong with others or that you have wronged others, you had better make some restitution. Get yourself right with every person, and especially get yourself right with God. After your confession, that will be the time you are filled with the Spirit. We all need to have this kind of experience. You do not need to wonder what your feeling or sensation will be after you have made a thorough confession and are filled with the Spirit. There is no need for us to seek feelings, manifestations, or signs of being filled with the Spirit. We should drop these considerations and just go to the Lord again and again, making confessions. Every day we need this kind of clearing up. Then we will enjoy the infilling of the Spirit and the outpouring of the Spirit all the time. A number of saints can testify that when they practiced making a thorough confession to the Lord, they experienced the Spirit in a rich way. I hope that you would take this word and go to the Lord.
We may have heard much of the fellowship concerning the small group meetings, but if we do not have the adequate word plus the infilling and the outpouring of the Spirit, it will be hard for us to practice the small group meetings. At the most, all we will be able to have as the contents of the small group meetings is a little talk that we may term fellowship. That, however, is absolutely inadequate. In our small group meetings we should speak with the Word of God, and we should speak the Word with the Spirit. We do not speak the Word just by ourselves, but we speak the Word with the Spirit. Without the Word and without the Spirit, it is hard for us to utter anything in any kind of meeting. Even in a meeting of three or four it will be hard for you to speak. Without the Word and the Spirit, you will have no intention to speak. You will feel that you have no need, no desire, no burden, and no incentive to speak. But when you have the adequate word and the infilling and the outpouring of the Spirit, you have something urging, pushing, burdening you to speak. When you speak, there will be rivers of living water flowing out of your innermost being (John 7:38). This is the overflow of the rich word through the flowing Spirit. If we want to see the churches built up practically and in a rich way in all the localities, we must practice the small group meetings with the saints speaking in this way.
On the one hand, I believe that a number of us have found out that the small group meetings are really helpful. We have discovered that these small group meetings really work to bring people in, to touch people, and to take care of people. At the same time, I believe that some of us have found out that it is hard to go to the small meetings. Instead, some like to come to the big meetings because they feel that they do not need to speak since someone else will be speaking in the big meetings. However, if you go to a small meeting with less than ten saints and do not speak, you will be exposed. It may be that in your small group everyone is speaking, but you do not know how to speak and have nothing with which to speak. As a result, you are bothered and even afraid to go back to your small group meeting again. We are encouraged to go to the small group meetings when we are full of the Word and full of the Spirit. When we are full of the Word and full of the Spirit, we like to flow out all the riches of our Christ to others so that they may enjoy the divine dispensing.
We must remember these two crucial points: to let the word of Christ dwell in us richly and to be filled with the all-inclusive life-giving Spirit. There is no need for you to discern whether you are experiencing the essential aspect of the Spirit or the economical aspect. These are two aspects of the one Spirit. All of us need to seek after the Word and to seek after the Spirit.
Both the Word and the Spirit require our earnest seeking. To seek after the Word, we need to study the Bible and pray-read the Word. We also need to study the footnotes in the Recovery Version and the Life-study messages along with some other helpful reference books. We need to accumulate all the good terms and expressions from all the Bible books and from other divine, spiritual books to enlarge our divine, heavenly, and spiritual vocabulary.
We also need to pray every day and not just once during the day. We need to pray to make confessions all the time in order to keep ourselves cleared up. Through our prayer we need to get ourselves fully and clearly empty from within. Then we will be fully cleansed, not only by the blood but also by the cleansing Spirit. Then this cleansing Spirit will fill us up. He is in us, but we are filled with so many other things. If a bottle is filled up with dirt, the air cannot get into the bottle. The more dirt that is poured out of the bottle, the more air gets into the bottle. In like manner, how much air gets into us depends upon how much dirt will be poured out of us.
Every day we have to spend some time to pray to get fully cleared up. We must get emptied every day. You may not feel that you are so sinful, yet you have to realize that you are so filled up with things other than Christ. You are occupied with all kinds of things other than Christ. In the eyes of the Lord all the occupying things are sinful. Even good things, moral things, and ethical things that are occupying you from within are sinful in the eyes of God if they are replacements of Christ. You have to confess, “Lord, forgive me for letting this good thing occupy me to replace You within me and to usurp Your ground in me. I want to get this cleared up.” Every day we have to get ourselves cleansed, cleaned, emptied, and cleared up.
From the time that we rise up in the morning until the time that we retire at night, we need to wash our hands many times. Otherwise, our hands will be fully dirtied. As Christians who are walking and living on this earth, we must realize that no place, no person, and no thing we touch is clean. We get dirty by touching all these worldly things, so we need to get ourselves cleansed and cleared up from within and from without. Every day we need some time to deal with the Word, and we need some time to deal with the Spirit to keep us always prepared to speak Christ, to speak for Christ, and to speak forth Christ at any time and at any place. We need to be the speaking believers everywhere and at every time. In your home, in your office, and on the street you need to speak. You need to speak even the more in the meeting. We all have to learn to be a speaking believer. To do this, we need to deal with the Word all the time, and we need to have the infilling and outpouring of the all-inclusive Spirit.
My prayer is that the saints would realize what their need is today. The Lord’s up-to-date move is to build up the church through the small group meetings, yet the small group meetings require all the saints to have the Word and the Spirit. To have the Word requires our study, and to have the Spirit requires our being filled with Him. To have Him within us and upon us all the time means that we are really one with the Spirit. Then wherever we go and wherever we are, we speak. We have the encouragement within, we have the material, and we have the Spirit. We have everything we need to be a speaking member of the Body of Christ. May the Lord burden all of us to seek Him in His present-day move in this way.
