My point in sharing this is that the hall in Chefoo was greatly used and blessed by the Lord because of the practical service poured out by so many saints. Every bit of that meeting hall was cleaned and prepared with much love and prayer. While the saints in Chefoo were cleaning the hall, they were praying. As someone cleaned a chair, he would pray, "Lord, I pray that whoever sits on this chair will be saved." They prayed definitely in this way.
In my whole life, I never saw a church life like the one in Chefoo. There were no great giants among us, but there was the service and functioning of all the small members. Even our children were looking for opportunities to serve the saints. While the gospel meetings were going on, some small rooms in the meeting hall were full of saints who were praying. They prayed until the meeting was over. That was a church fully in service. It was brought up and built up by every member functioning spontaneously. We have to let the saints know that the service of the church is the function of all the members with grace. This grace will reach people, nourish people, and even save people.
Grace is God embodied in Christ as our enjoyment (John 1:17b; 1 Cor. 15:10). Every member has to experience Christ as this grace. In whatever we do to serve in a practical way, grace is with us, and this grace will go out to reach others. This means we minister grace to others in our service.
Regardless of what we do to serve practically, if we really do it in spirit, surely grace is with us. Then by our doing we will minister Christ as grace to others. First, we need to experience the grace of Christ in our own circumstances (2 Cor. 12:9). Then we minister grace to others through our service. Here we should stress that in order for us to experience Christ as grace, God always gives us certain kinds of circumstances. Sufferings and trials are often ordained by the Lord for us that we may experience Christ as grace. So when Paul asked the Lord three times to remove his thorn in the flesh, the Lord would not do it. He said that His grace was sufficient for Paul. Under certain God-ordained circumstances, we experience grace and accumulate grace to have a storage of grace in our Christian life. Then when we serve, we have something as grace to minister to others.
The goal of our service is not to accomplish things, even with something such as vacuuming the floor. Our goal is to infuse others with Christ as grace. We can infuse one another with grace while we are serving together. There should be no gossip, murmuring, criticism, or vain talk. Our talk should be our fellowship with grace to infuse one another. We need to have grace to minister to others. Actually, our goal is not to keep a clean hall, but to minister Christ as grace to others.