In this message I would like to help you to see another aspect of the Christian life, the aspect of being conformed to the death of Christ. Many Christians are unfamiliar with this phrase in the Bible. However, the Lord has shown us this matter through the past seventy years, beginning with Brother Nee. Brother Nee began to minister in 1922, when he was just nineteen years old. Later in that same year the first local church was established in his home town of Foochow. Approximately ten years later I joined Brother Nee in the work, and I began to learn of him and to practice under him. Then, in 1949 I was sent by him from mainland China to Taiwan. Three years later, in 1952, Brother Nee was put into prison; that terminated his personal ministry among us. For the eighteen years that I was with him, I spoke very few messages that were not directly from his teaching. What Brother Nee taught, I taught. This was known among us for many years.
Then I went to Taiwan and began to work seemingly apart from him, because he was on the mainland and I was on the island of Taiwan. For the first two or three years my ministry remained in the sphere of what Brother Nee had taught, but shortly after 1950 the Lord began to show me something further. This has continued until today, for more than forty years.
In 1962 I came to the United States and began the work of the Lord's recovery in this country. During the past thirty years there has been even further progress in the seeing of the divine revelation. On mainland China we did not emphasize the term economy. Instead of the word economy, Brother Nee used the word plan. In his books he used the term God's eternal plan; he never used the word economy. After coming to the United States, I did not have the thought of God's economy until 1964. In that year I spoke the messages published in the book The Economy of God. It was at that time that I began to use the word economy, which is the anglicized form of the Greek word oikonomia. Later, beginning from 1984, I began to stress God's dispensing for the accomplishment of God's economy. In 1990 I spoke strongly on the divine economy and the divine dispensing (see A Deeper Study of the Divine Dispensing, The Economy and Dispensing of God, and The Divine Dispensing for the Divine Economy, published by Living Stream Ministry). I say this to illustrate how the Lord has shown us the divine things in a progressive way.