By the Lord’s power I was saved when I was nineteen, and the Lord planted within me a heart that loves the Bible. Therefore, I studied the Bible diligently for eight years, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-seven. This is the period of time when a person’s comprehension and memory are the strongest. I truly loved the Bible, and the more I read the Bible, the more I loved it, because no book in English or Chinese could compare to the Bible. I felt that the Bible is profound and that every verse contains an important meaning. I also collected many Christian books as reference material for the things that I did not understand. I later came across the expository magazines published by Brother Watchman Nee. I thought that he could expound the Bible in such a marvelous way because he was an elderly man. It was only when I began to write to him that I found out that he was only two years older than I. This increased my eagerness and motivation to understand every word and verse in every chapter of the Bible. I asked Brother Nee which book could teach me to understand the Bible. He replied that as far as he knew, the book that was the best exposition of the Bible was the Synopsis of the Books of the Bible by J. N. Darby. He added that it was difficult to read because of its long sentences. Hence, a person needed to read it four or five times before he could begin to understand it; unless a person made an effort to study, he could not enter into it. Brother Nee and I eventually became co-workers.
When I began to serve full time, I visited Brother Nee in Shanghai. One day he came to me with two large sets of books and indicated that they were for me. One of the sets was Darby’s Synopsis of the Books of the Bible, and the other was Henry Alford’s New Testament for English Readers. That was in 1933, fifty-two years ago. During these fifty-two years these two sets of books have always been with me, and they have been a continuous help to me. From the time that I received these books, I have made an effort to study the most particular and profound words in the Bible.
I have been studying the phrase the fullness of God for more than forty years. It was not until the last twenty-five years that I began to understand the difference between the fullness of God and the riches of God. This is a crucial matter that every new believer needs to understand. I want to supply you with the basic and profound truths in the Bible, and I hope that you can obtain light, truth, life, and a rich supply from these truths.
Let us begin with the meaning of the fullness of God. The fullness of God is the overflowing of God’s riches to become His expression. The fullness of God is also the expression of God’s riches. For example, here is a cup with water in it, but you do not know how much water is in the cup. There may be a small amount of water in the cup, or there may be much water. If I pour water into the cup until the water overflows, the cup becomes rich with water to the point of overflowing. This overflowing is the fullness. Inside the cup are the riches, and what flows out is the fullness. The cup first has the riches and then the fullness. Therefore, the fullness is the issue of the overflowing of the riches. This issue is the expression of the riches. Unless the cup overflows, we can only guess concerning what is inside the cup. Once it overflows, we know that water is inside the cup, because the water is expressed.
Hence, we should never consider the riches as the fullness. These two things are absolutely different. The riches are the quantity of an object, whereas the fullness is the flowing out, the overflow, of the object to become the expression of the object. God’s fullness is the overflow of His riches, and this overflow is God’s expression. God is abundantly rich. He is so rich that His riches overflow. This overflow is the expression of God.