Prayer: Lord, thank You that You are the source, and You are our Master. We can come to You at any time to seek Your supply. We do need Your supply. Up to the present moment, we need Your supply so that we may know how to form the groups step by step and how to build them up, how to have everything increasing to be eighty percent of the church life. Lord, teach us and guide us, even in our fellowship with one another. Show us the way. This morning we trust in You for this matter. We still need more leading, more guidance. We need Your light, and we need Your revelation. We do not like to do anything that is seemingly right, yet still so natural, out of our self-concept. Lord, deliver us from all these things. We desire to follow You to perform the Father’s plan, God’s economy, and to take care of the growth in life, to have the real spirituality. Lord, we do not like to be an unturned cake, but we do not know how to turn to the other side. Lord, help us. We need You in every detail. We need You to deliver us from trusting in ourselves. We do not like to have any trust in ourselves. We are fearful of this. Lord, we tremble before You that we might do something seemingly new yet altogether against You. Lord, defeat the enemy; he is busy. Whenever You do something, he is busy. We need Your wisdom to be aware of all his doings. Lord, destroy the enemy’s work, the work of darkness, the work of the spiritual forces in the air. Rebuke Your enemy and shame him, and bind all the evil spirits. Amen.
We may think that it is easy for us to form the groups, but actually it is not easy. This is the reason that we have hardly begun to practice the group meetings, although we have been speaking concerning the groups for a considerable time. It may be easy to contact some other saints and to get some companions, but it is not easy to form a group and to make it effective so that it can carry out the functions of producing, nourishing, and perfecting.
In addition to this, we have a very particular background. The recovery has been with us for more than seventy years. The Lord has shown us many things, and He has brought us into many situations and through many different kinds of experiences. We not only have such a background, but now in the recovery there are more than twelve hundred churches around the globe. We cannot go on to take the new way as we have seen it, and yet forget our background and our present situation. On the one hand, we must find a way to take care positively of the formation of the groups, and on the other hand, we must find a way to care for the background and the present situation.
In Anaheim there is a church with approximately three hundred active members, including those in the English-speaking, Chinese-speaking, and Spanish-speaking meetings. If we are absolute and desperate to consecrate ourselves to the Lord for the new way, and especially for the present step of forming the groups, yet we forget about the present situation, that is wrong. We cannot simply set aside the present situation and do something separate.
Our background is not a light or superficial background, because for many years we have paid attention to seeking the Lord, knowing Him, experiencing Him, living Him, growing in Him, and having Him increased and magnified in us. From the very beginning we were led by the Lord in this way, and we have never deviated from this kind of seeking. This is our background of spirituality. In addition, we have a further, deeper background; that is, we take care of God’s economy to have everything for the building up of His organism, the church. God desires to have the church, and we are endeavoring to reach His goal. Very few Christians take care of the church. Most Christians only take care of their work. Many Christians use worldly methods to promote and carry out their work. However, it is impossible to walk in the spirit and still be involved with worldly things. In Romans 8:4 Paul said that we must do everything according to our spirit. It is impossible to engage in worldly practices and still be according to our spirit. Other Christian groups may have large gatherings in which they use worldly attractions to please people. That is an action that does not take care of spirituality. We cannot do that. We do desire to gain the increase, but we do not want to bring forth children by incest. We do not want to produce Ammonites and Moabites (Gen. 19:30-38). We may get people saved by employing worldly means, but these saved ones may be Ammonites or Moabites. The Ammonites and Moabites were not allowed to enter into the holy congregation for ten generations (Deut. 23:3).
We need to learn the lesson. For more than seventy years the Lord has been keeping us from all kinds of pollution and defilement. We cannot go on quickly or easily, because we must take care of spirituality, the church life, the church ground, the oneness of the Body, and many other things. Therefore, on the one hand, we must take the new way, the God-ordained way, as the Lord has revealed it to us, and on the other hand, while we are going forward we must take care of our background, our present situation, and the many churches around the globe.
After much consideration before the Lord, I feel led by the Lord to the conclusion that while we are endeavoring to take the new way, we should not change anything of the present situation. We should not change our present way of conducting the children’s meeting, the young people’s work, the prayer meeting, and the existing group meetings. However, besides caring for all the things of the existing local churches, the full-time elders and co-workers can devote more of their time to help the saints take the new way. While they endeavor to practice the God-ordained way, they should still participate in all the different aspects of the work, including even the existing group meetings.