You may continue your talk with him by saying, “To read the Bible is good, but it should be accompanied by another thing-our prayer to the Lord. Our reading should be matched by prayer. We can take the word ‘All Scripture is God-breathed’ and simply turn it into prayer, saying, ‘Lord, thank You for all the Scriptures. Thank You that all the Scriptures are God-breathed.’ You must learn to pray the words of the Bible in this way.”
You should demonstrate how to read the Bible and pray. You can also read him 1 Thessalonians 5:17-18-“Unceasingly pray; in everything give thanks”-and say, “Prayer should always be followed by thanksgiving. This verse says to pray without ceasing and then to give thanks to God.” You can read these two verses and then demonstrate a little bit. This will help him. In contacting him in this way, you can open up the conversation to both the reading of the Bible and prayer.
After a few days, you must visit this one again. This time when you arrive, rather than listening to him first, you should say, “Two days ago we talked to you about reading the Bible and praying. Now we would like to tell you about another practice which is crucial to our Christian life-keeping morning watch.” You can explain to him what morning watch is by saying, “Every day, rise up a little earlier to spend some time with the Lord to read the Bible and converse with Him. While you are conversing with the Lord, you can tell Him whatever you need. This is to pray. You do not need to do this too long, maybe about ten minutes every morning. This will be a great help to your Christian life.” You can talk to him about this practice and charge him to practice it. Then when you come back to visit again, you can check to see if he is practicing this or not.
You should also have the time to say, “Another crucial practice of the Christian life is to attend the meetings. Hebrews 10:25 says that we should not forsake the assembling of ourselves together. We Christians are like the bees; none of us can live the Christian life by himself. We must meet together. There are the home meetings, the small group meetings, and the larger meetings of the church.”
We should not merely explain or present these four practices to the new ones. We need at least one month to help them build up these practices. Every time we go back to visit them, we must check with them concerning these four practices. They may tell us that they have failed. One may say that he kept morning watch for three mornings but on the fourth morning he could not rise up. We need to check with him, “When did you get up? When did you go to bed?” No one likes to go to bed early. Even if you decide to go to bed at 10:30, you may not get to bed until 11:30. If we are going to learn to keep our morning watch, we must ask the Lord to grant us His grace and mercy so that we can go to bed earlier. If we do not go to bed earlier, it will be hard for us to get up earlier. We have to try to help the new ones build up their time of morning watch as a habit.
If the new ones are to live a healthy Christian life, they must practice these four things. They must read the Bible, and to some extent they must learn to study the Bible. Prayer is healthy to their spiritual life, so we must do a lot to help them to pray. We must help them build up a habit of prayer and tell them that to pray is not merely to ask God to do things for us but to breathe God into us. We must also help them to keep morning watch and attend the church meetings. We must work to build up these practices over quite a period of time.
While we are helping to build up these four practices in the new ones, we will also need to touch other matters. We must go to the home meetings in a very flexible way. In one visit we can cover two or three things, but with some subjects we must help them over a period of time. With the matter of consecration, we do not need a long time, but with these four practices, we need a longer time. Even one month may not be adequate for building up a new one in these practices. While we are working on him concerning these four practices, we can cover other things.
Now is the time to practice the home meetings by taking care of those whom you have baptized. You delivered these babes, so the responsibility is upon your shoulders to go back to them to feed, nourish, and cherish them. Do not do things without any kind of direction. You should work for quite a period of time to develop in them these healthy practices that are crucial to the Christian life.
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