In the summer of 1933, I was called by the Lord to serve full-time, yet I struggled with the Lord concerning this matter for about three weeks. Although I eventually turned in my resignation to my employer, I continued to have an inward struggle for some time. On the day I turned in my resignation, that same night after a prayer meeting, I talked to a leading brother and a leading sister concerning my decision to drop my job to serve the Lord. Although they both confirmed my decision, I still felt that I lacked the confirmation from the Lord. But as I went to the Lord later that evening, I was immediately rebuked by the Lord for my lack of faith in trusting Him. Eventually, through this experience, I became clear that the Lord really wanted me to drop my job. The next day confirmation came in the form of a letter of invitation from a group of Presbyterian believers in Manchuria. This invitation which was waiting for me at the post office had arrived on the day I resigned from my job. This was a real confirmation to me of the Lord’s leading. Based upon this invitation, I went to my boss and asked him to allow me to go to Manchuria for a period of time and that when I came back, I would arrange everything with him concerning my job. He agreed.
In Manchuria I baptized about twenty believers, and those believers became the start of the church life in that region. This made me very happy. While I was in Manchuria, a letter came from my former employer in which he asked me to stay on at the company, and he also promised to increase my salary. It was also the policy of the company to give large bonuses to its employees at the end of the year. This coming bonus became a real temptation to me. I began to reason within myself, saying, “It is now September, and I would have only three months to go. Why not wait until the end of December to leave? Would three months make that much difference? If I wait until December, I could get that big bonus.” Because of this kind of reasoning, I went back to Chefoo with some possibility to remain in the employment of that company until the first part of January. But when I returned home from Manchuria, a letter from Brother Watchman Nee, who was on the way back to China from England, was there for me. The letter contained only a short note saying, “Brother Witness, concerning your future, I feel that you should serve the Lord full-time. How do you feel about it? May the Lord lead you.” I was very touched by this short letter because I knew that it was not Brother Nee’s practice to write such notes to anyone. I was touched even further when I saw that the date of his letter corresponded almost exactly with the time of my struggle. This meant that as I was struggling, he somehow came to know about it. That surprised me very much. This letter from Brother Nee strongly countered the letter from my employer and greatly inspired and strengthened me. Eventually, I decided to go to the office and hand over my job to another person as soon as possible. I also resolved to go to Brother Nee and find out how and where he wrote that letter to me. After I left the job, I went to Shanghai in the fall of 1933 to see Brother Nee and ask him why he had written that note to me. He answered that one day while he was sailing from England to China on the Mediterranean Sea, as he was with the Lord, the Lord gave him the feeling that he should write a note to me. He then wrote a short note, sent it to the bookroom in Shanghai, and the bookroom then forwarded the letter to my home in Chefoo.
I was very inspired by his letter because I knew that his sending of the letter was not a coincidence; it must have been something of the Lord. I also was very impressed with Brother Nee, because this demonstrated that he was a man very much with the Lord. Otherwise, how could he have had such a feeling to write a note to me in China while he was far away on a trip from England to China? He was a man with the Lord; therefore, even to this very day I can declare that I completely trusted him. Brother Nee was also not the kind of person who always told people what to do. Many times brothers would come to him and ask him whether or not he felt that they should go to a certain place to labor or not. Often Brother Nee would not answer them because he refused to be in the principle of the Old Testament prophet. He taught that in the Old Testament, if one needed to know something concerning God, he would go to a prophet, such as Elijah, but in the New Testament, the believers have the anointing (1 John 2:20, 27). Therefore, we have no need for anyone to teach us. He practiced this very strongly, but in this instance, he wrote such a note to me. This confirmed to me that this was really something of the Lord.
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