In order to get the benefit of these four purposes in full you must dive into the Recovery Version with the footnotes and the Life-study messages. It is not an easy task to be built up in the truth. You must study the text and every note. If possible, it is helpful to take care of the cross-references. Then you need to study the Life-study messages. You need to get into these messages not like you are reading a newspaper or a reference book. You must consider the text of the Recovery Version with the notes and the Life-study messages as a textbook. Because this is my work, I know the nature of it. I am fellowshipping this with you to let you know the way our publications were written. If you merely read them in a light way, you cannot get into them. You must study them as a textbook.
If you merely read the Life-studies, you will only receive a temporary nourishment. That will only become a kind of inspiration to you. An inspiration is like a vapor in the air. When what we read becomes a truth in our being, this nourishment remains forever. What I have received is not all the time inspiration, like a vapor. What I have received from the Lord is always the solid truth, so it remains in me, nourishing me all the time. You must have the truth. The only way for the truth to get into you is through your mentality. Then it remains in your memory. If you do not understand, the truth cannot get into you. The truth gets into you through your mentality, your understanding. Also, if the truth gets into your memory, it becomes a constant and long term nourishment. Then you have an accumulation of the truth, and you are a person continually under the constant nourishment. You will then know how to present the truth to others, not merely to inspire them or to stir them up, but to make them solid and constituted with the truth.
I do not have any definite decision as to what way we should take with our church meetings. If I were taking care of a local church meeting, I would not make any decision immediately. I would go into the meetings and by going on in the meeting life I would learn something. I would realize what the best way is to have a meeting. We may begin to have an experimental period of time to gradually find out what the best way is.
First, we must admit that the type of meetings today among the Christians on this earth is altogether inadequate. I do not believe that any meeting among the Christians today on this earth corresponds with some of the meetings under Paul’s leadership in the New Testament times. We have no record of these meetings and we cannot trace them, but I do believe that even the meetings we practice do not correspond that much to the meetings which were at Paul’s time. I believe the Lord did this because this age is an age of life and of the Spirit, even of the sevenfold intensified Spirit, not of letters, rituals, or forms. I believe the Lord intentionally did not let us know what the way was, because once He would let us know the way, it would become a fixed ritual. Today there is no Christian that can tell us what the fixed way for Christian meetings is. Therefore, we have to grope for the proper way by our spirit according to the present, real situation. We may also discuss some principles. We hope that the leading ones, either the elders or the ones who are taking care of any meeting such as the Chinese speaking meetings, the Spanish speaking meetings, and the young people’s meetings, would pick up a burden and look to the Lord for a desire that all the saints would get into this New Testament ministry.
We have seen that to get ourselves into the New Testament ministry needs time. We must mean business with the Lord. I became full-time in the Lord’s work in 1933. Before 1933, immediately after I was saved, was mainly my college education period. I studied in school and after graduation I had a job, but morning and evening and especially on Saturdays and the Lord’s Day I did nothing but study the Bible. I would not call the books that I studied spiritual books, but books concerning the understanding of the Bible. I mostly received an education concerning the Bible from the Brethren assembly meetings. They did not care for how many were there in their meeting. They only cared for one thing— to pass on the knowledge of the Bible. At that time I greatly appreciated them and they treasured me because as a young man I was a continuous attendant of their meetings. What I heard in their meetings and what I read in the books I studied.
I spent at least eight years building a basic foundational knowledge of the Bible before I came out as a full-time worker. I have had altogether seven Chinese Bibles. I lost the first Bible, but I have the other six. The second Bible is full of notes, but they are very childish. The fourth Bible, however, is worthwhile to use and has more notes which are much more mature. This Bible is greatly worn out. If I could have had today’s Recovery Version with the notes and the Life-study messages at my time, that would have been wonderful. In those eight years, though, I surely got into the knowledge of the Bible.
This is what I expect of you brothers who are taking the lead in the church or in any kind of meeting. You must acquire a solid knowledge of the New Testament ministry. What I got into as a young man was good but it was far off. There was nothing of the Triune God dispensing Himself, nothing of Christ and the church, and nothing of Christ, the Spirit, life, and the church. At that time I acquired much biblical knowledge concerning prophecy and typology. I also received the benefit of learning how to interpret prophecy. The Brethren assembly teachers were famous in knowing the Bible, and no other groups could compete with them. Even today the reference books which I use cannot compete with J. N. Darby. No one can present any principle in knowing the Bible as deeply as Darby. Darby’s five volumes of the Synopsis of the Books of the Bible bear a particular characteristic in that he presented the principles for understanding the Bible.
In 1925 I wrote Brother Nee asking him to please tell me what book could help me to understand the entire Bible. He said that according to his knowledge the best one is J. N. Darby’s Synopsis of the Books of the Bible. He wrote this to me fifty-nine years ago, and he told me that I needed to read these volumes anywhere from three to five times; otherwise, he indicated that I would not be able to understand them. I can testify that without reading Darby three to five times, you do not know what he is talking about. Sometimes one sentence of his is equivalent to a long paragraph. He has the ability to put phrase after phrase and clause after clause into a sentence. I have been influenced by him to some extent in my writing. Sometimes to make two or three sentences out of one long sentence changes the denotation.