Our burden is still concerning the grouping. We may have been Christians for many years, yet we must admit that we are too natural. We may think that we are very spiritual, yet we have to realize that we are “naturally spiritual.” This means that we have not been dealt with by the Lord that much.
A number of you who have prayed a lot in the church meetings should learn to stop yourselves from praying. Your natural prayer has been a very strong frustration to the church life. If you desire to pray, you must learn to pray a real prayer that is not initiated by you. You must learn that in the matter of prayer, you need to be crossed out. Not to pray is a defeat, but to pray by yourself is a mistake.
Some of you pray much in a habitual way in the prayer meetings, but in your prayer it is hard to realize any unveiling or revelation. Our prayer should be full of revelation. The Lord’s prayer in Matthew 6 is a simple prayer, but it is full of revelation and without explanation. His prayer in John 17 in also full of revelation. Probably no chapter of the entire Bible bears as much revelation as John 17 does. The apostle Paul’s prayers in Ephesians 1 and 3 are full of revelation. This shows us that we have to learn to pray. We have been going on for a long time in a natural way.
Not only in the matter of prayer but also in the matter of the church life, we are too natural. This is why we need to have the grouping, hoping that the Lord would give us a new start. We should not do anything naturally, nor should we be silent. We should tell the Lord that we do not want to be silent or natural. This forces us to learn what it means to exercise our spirit. We have a saying among us that we need to exercise our spirit, but how many of us do it? This saying has become popular among us, but in our meetings it is difficult to see the genuine exercise of the spirit. To exercise our spirit, we need a lot of dealing. We must first deal with our natural way and our natural person, our natural being, which includes our natural prayer and our natural speaking.
The vital groups must be something absolutely new with a new start. A few saints among us can be either silent, not doing or saying anything, or when they do function, they can be very expressive. In their prayer, they cover a lot of things. This is a big shortage; this is also a defect. We should not believe that in one prayer the Lord would burden us with that many aspects and with that many items. When some of us pray or prophesy we cover perhaps as many as twenty small points. In a short prayer of less than one minute, the Lord would not burden us with twenty points. That is our habit. When we open up to pray or to prophesy, we like to cover every direction. After our prayer, we may even forget what we have prayed because we covered too many points.
We should not compose a prayer in which we really have not prayed for anything. Our prayer must not come out of any kind of composition but out of a burden. In this message my burden is much, much heavier than what I can speak. My only burden is for the groups. If I pray, I will pray only for one thing—the vital groups. The Lord does not need us to train Him, teach Him, or explain to Him in our prayer. He knows everything already.
Some of you, on the other hand, are naturally silent. You do not say anything in the meetings and you do not pray. If all these habitual ways are not broken in us, we cannot be grouped together in a vital way. To be grouped together is to be blended together. According to our experiences, there is no other way to be blended except by thorough and much prayer. We should not talk too much. We should not think that if we talk together, we will be blended. This is wrong. Blending can be accomplished only by praying together. We must be persons of prayer.
The Lord Jesus was working on this earth in His ministry for three and a half years. In those three and a half years, He worked day and night. Many thousands of people were helped by Him in His ministry, but eventually out of His work only one hundred twenty remained for the fulfilling of God’s economy. All the rest, including Nicodemus, were not there for the economical filling of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. All of the one hundred twenty were Galileans. Here we can see the principle of grouping. These one hundred twenty were not separate individuals, but they were all grouped together to be one group. On the day of Pentecost, the Spirit came down on one group. The Lord Jesus was the One who grouped them together.
From the first day that the Lord Jesus began to call the disciples, He started the grouping. The Lord was like a big magnet, drawing the disciples to Himself to become a group. In the four Gospels, we can see that the disciples were quarreling and competing with one another. At times they were in rivalry with one another (Matt. 20:20-28; Luke 22:24). The Lord Jesus dealt with each one of them. All those dealings were for one thing—to group them together. Eventually, those who remained in an absolute way for God’s purpose after the Lord’s earthly ministry were the one hundred twenty. The others were not grouped but scattered. The Lord gained only one group, and this group prayed in one accord for ten days (Acts 1:14-15). They stayed together, they lived together, they ate together, and they lodged together for ten days, doing nothing but praying. Then they experienced the outpoured Spirit on the day of Pentecost. On earth at that time, there was only one group whose prayer touched the heart of God and His throne in the heavens.
The church actually was initiated from the first day that the Lord Jesus came out to work at the age of thirty. He gathered Peter, John, Andrew, and James, those Galilean fishermen, along with other disciples. He brought them together and grouped them together. He never let them go. In a sense, they all were “jobless” for three and a half years. They gave up their jobs to follow the Lord Jesus and be with Him. Wherever the Lord Jesus went, they went. The Lord did not need them mainly to help Him to work, but He wanted them to be dealt with. The Lord did not give them a program or a schedule to follow. He just wanted them to be with Him (cf. Mark 3:14). The Lord Jesus dealt with them day after day. The one hundred twenty were a group of dealt-with people. Before their ten days of prayer, they had been with the Lord Jesus for three and a half years.
They also witnessed the Lord’s death, resurrection, and ascension. They saw how the Lord was betrayed, was judged, was brought to Calvary, was put on the cross, and was buried. They saw all of these processes. They saw the empty tomb. Then on the evening of His resurrection, the Lord Jesus came to them, breathed into them, and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22). From that day, the day of resurrection, the one hundred twenty became persons with the Triune God in them. That revolutionized, changed, their entire being.
After His resurrection, the Lord appeared to them over a period of forty days (Acts 1:3). The resurrected Christ dwelt in the disciples because He had breathed Himself as the Spirit into them on the day of His resurrection. His appearing does not mean that He had ever left them; it simply means that He made His presence visible to them, training them to realize and enjoy His invisible presence all the time. Thus, they experienced the Lord’s death, the Lord’s resurrection, and the Lord’s training them for forty days. Then the Lord ascended right in front of their eyes on the Mount of Olives (Acts 1:9-12).
After seeing all of these things, could they still be natural? Surely they were no longer natural persons. The Lord ascended, but they still had the Lord within them, and they prayed together for ten days. Do you believe that they prayed naturally? Would they pray a prayer with many items, instructing the Lord and telling the Lord what to do? Surely they did not do this. Would some of them be silent, not uttering a word in prayer to the Lord? Surely they were not like this. Rather, I believe that each one of them prayed for ten days.
Prayer is really powerful, but in order to be powerful, our prayer must be a prayer that touches the throne of God and the heart of God, and it must be a prayer that can move the very God. We have to pray, but we should not pray lightly. We should not pray by composing a prayer.
We do not want to go out to reach others until our grouping is consummated. Otherwise, we may go out, but go out powerlessly as we did in the past. We need to pass through a period of time in which we can be blended with all the members of our group and allow the Lord to gain our group as one entity for the carrying out of His New Testament economy.
Now that we have seen that we need to be blended together, we may still not know what to do in order to be blended. Now that we have been charged not to do anything naturally, we may wonder what to do. I hope that from now on in our group meetings we would not pray our old, natural prayers. Then we may say, “What shall we do? We do not know what to do!” Actually, this is wonderful. The first thing we have to do is to cry to the Lord in this way. We should cry to the Lord, even with tears, “Lord Jesus, I don’t know what to do. I never imagined that it is so hard to be a Christian. I cannot make it, Lord.” This is the best prayer. If we pray this way, even once, our entire person will be changed.
Some of us are very nice persons, but that naturally nice person should be condemned. We are nice yet we are cold like a piece of ice. We cannot be blended with others. Some nice people have set themselves up as a pattern, hoping and expecting that others in the church would be like them. But if everybody in the church were like them, the church would become like a big piece of ice.