If the elders and all the seeking ones come to the meeting without this kind of preparation beforehand, they are leaving the entire meeting to fortune. If you come to the meeting without being prepared you may offer a two second prayer such as, “Lord, have mercy upon us and enrich the meeting, Lord.” Actually, you have left the entire meeting to fortune. When you see that nothing good is coming out in the meeting, by that time you will have nothing to minister. This means that all of us have come to a love feast, and nobody cooked anything. Everybody came empty-handed. You have left the love feast to the “god of fortune.”
You may say, “Do not say this Brother Lee. Did not the Lord use the five loaves and two small fish to feed five thousand, and still there were twelve baskets left over? Why couldn’t the Lord do this?” According to your observation you may feel that I am short of faith and that my ways are too practical. The Apostle Paul, however, had faith, but the real situation forced him to make tents to take care of the needs of himself and of the needs of his co-workers. Did he not have the faith? The Bible never teaches us to have the kind of faith which does not require our labor. This is the teaching of superstition and the teaching of Pentecostalism. They have a kind of faith in which eventually they lie to people and build up false miracles. One brother who was a missionary in Indonesia told us that the so-called changing of water into wine during a revival he attended was a great hoax. We do not need to pretend in this way. The Lord may perform a miracle, but I never heard that in the entire church history the Lord repeated the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand with five loaves and two fish. Also, we see in the book of Acts that the believers had everything in common for a short period of time. This did not work so well for a long time, so when the Apostle Paul came on the scene there was no longer such a practice. You still have to make a living by yourself and work with your own hands. If you do not work, you should not eat (2 Thes. 3:10). To work properly, to gain more so that you can take care of the needy ones, is the proper going on for the long run in the New Testament.
Do not think that to get yourself prepared for the meeting is not scriptural. It is absolutely scriptural, but it depends on what way you prepare. If you go to the concordance and to the Scofield Reference Bible to pick up some points and some verses and put them together to get yourself prepared to give a long message, your message will make everybody sleepy. This will be the best sleeping dose, and this is empty and killing. According to our practice so far, we have the holy Word in our hand and by the Lord’s mercy He has given us a publication that always opens up the Word. Why would you not use this? We need to use these two things—the Word and the “opener” to get ourselves prepared.
We cannot expect the entire congregation to prepare in this way. At least, however, we should expect ourselves, the leading ones, the co-workers, and the ones who take care of certain meetings, to prepare for the meeting in such a way. Our responsibility, our obligation, and our duty is to get ourselves prepared for the coming meeting. I believe that if we would practice in this way, every kind of meeting would be rich. It would not be like some of our experience in the past, because in the past nobody actually bore the responsibility. The church meeting actually is the meeting of the elders and all the serving ones. If the elders and all the serving ones get themselves so prepared, the meeting will be rich. When the whole church comes together, this one may have a psalm, that one may have a teaching, and another may have a revelation. They will not have it by instant inspiration, but they will have it by “pre-readiness.” You must prepare yourselves before the meeting time. Through our experiences, we have the way to prepare ourselves. To prepare yourself for the meeting is to get into the Word and to get into some messages which can help you to enter into the truth. This will be a rich preparation for you to take care of the meeting, and eventually the meeting will serve a dual purpose—to nourish the saints and, for the long run, to educate the saints.
While the issue of nourishment is forever, the nourishment itself only remains temporarily. Once the truth has been constituted into someone, however, it will remain there forever and its remaining is its supply. Our need for the long run is this kind of education with the truth, which is really something solid, living, and existing. We need this. Do not expect to have an overnight success which is like a factory making artificial flowers. Overnight you can produce many flowers, but in a genuine nursery or garden it takes time to grow flowers. Do not pick up the thought that we could do a quick work. You may have the thought that within two years a great number of people will be added to the church. Most of these people, however, may be empty. This is mushrooming. We must take care of the church in a way of growing gradually by life and by truth.