In the preceding chapter we saw that the work of God’s New Testament priests of the gospel, which is specifically carried out in sinners, includes four major steps. The first step is to go forth and visit people with the gospel that sinners may be saved and offered as sacrifices to God. The second step is to nourish the new believers. Saving sinners is like giving birth to babies; thus, what follows is the need to nourish and cherish the newborn ones that they may gradually grow in life. For this we need to feed the newly saved believers with the milk of the word in the Holy Scriptures that they may grow until they can present themselves as living sacrifices to God. The third step is to teach and perfect the saints. The gifted ones in the church perfect the grown-up saints for the purpose of making every one of them able to do the work that the gifted ones do, that is, the work of the building up of the Body of Christ. The fourth step, which is also the climax of the work of the priests of the gospel, is to help the perfected saints so that every one of them can prophesy. To prophesy is to speak for the Lord, speak forth the Lord, and speak the Lord into people, thereby dispensing and ministering Christ to others. This kind of prophesying is mainly not to predict but to present to others the Lord’s intention, the Lord’s gospel, and the Lord’s truths.
The church should have a meeting for all the saints to come together that all the saints may be perfected to speak for the Lord. This meeting should not be for one or two persons to speak and the rest to listen, but for every attendant to prophesy, to speak for the Lord. It is not that one man speaks and all the rest listen, but that all speak and all listen to one another. In this way the riches of Christ are released through every member. Regardless of how rich a person’s speaking is, it can never replace the riches released by all the members. Through all the saints’ prophesying one by one, the riches that they have experienced in the church are ministered, item by item, for the satisfaction and edification of everyone. As a result, all the saints are built up through the supply of the riches of Christ to accomplish the work of the building up of the Body of Christ. These four steps of the work of the priests of the gospel are full and complete. They begin with preaching the gospel to save sinners for their regeneration, and they continue with nourishing and cherishing them and teaching and perfecting them that they may grow and mature in Christ, having the knowledge in truth and the experiences in life, so that they may speak for the Lord through the divine prophesying.
Such a complete work carried out by the priests of the gospel is clearly revealed in the New Testament. However, the condition of Christianity before our eyes is not like this. Consider the first step, that is, the preaching of the gospel for people to be regenerated. Every believer going out personally to bring people to salvation as a priest of the gospel should accomplish this step. But deformed Christianity has changed this to a big gospel campaign with a gathering in which one man preaches. In this way, all the believers’ spiritual and organic faculties for gospel preaching are negated. The work of gospel preaching, which should be carried out by every believer, is borne solely by one person, and the rest of the saints mostly help only in some practical matters during the big gospel meeting, such as inviting people, ushering, sitting with guests, and after the meeting, speaking with them and recording their names. Thus, the saints’ direct, personal preaching of the gospel to sinners is annulled. This kind of Bible-deviating, deformed preaching of the gospel causes the saints over a period of time to form the habit of not preaching the gospel and thereby to become incapacitated in gospel preaching. If our organic faculties, whether physical or spiritual, are not exercised for a long period of time, they lose their function. We fully acknowledge that the big gospel meetings can save sinners; moreover, apparently the number of saved ones is considerably large. However, if we compare this practice with the practice of every believer preaching the gospel, there is still a great difference. According to statistics, it is rare for any Christian organization to have more than a thirty percent rate of increase of believers. This rate may not seem high, but if we can accomplish this, the result will be significant in a few years.
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