According to the record of the New Testament, it is not adequate for a prophet merely to visit a church. He must stay with a church in order to perfect the saints. Acts 13:1 says that in the church in Antioch there were some prophets and teachers. The prophets were in the church in Antioch to perfect the saints to speak for the Lord. The professors in a college need to stay in their school at least two or three times a week in order to take care of their classes. They must do this constantly, regularly, and continually to perfect their students. The ones among us who have learned to speak the Lord as prophets should stay in a certain church to perfect the saints. The prophets perfect the saints by teaching them to speak for the Lord, to speak forth the Lord, and to speak the Lord into people to do the work of the New Testament ministry to build up the Body of Christ, as the prophets do. Teaching means instructing and implies allowing the saints to practice speaking for the Lord.
A prophet who is staying with a church should not merely speak in the meetings but should go to visit all the members of the church in order to perfect them. Sometimes he may instruct the saints in a small group, and sometimes he may tutor certain saints, that is, help one saint at a time. His burden is that the saints would learn how to speak for the Lord in a meeting. To teach students a course takes a period of time. One cannot teach a course in just one day or a few days. A prophet who is burdened to perfect the saints must speak in the meeting to spontaneously set up a model. According to the model he has set up, he can then contact the saints to perfect them.
It is not profitable to attempt to instruct the entire congregation at one time. If there are twenty-five saints meeting together in a certain local church, a brother who is a prophet could observe that among these twenty-five, two or three are prominent. These ones could be considered as the head sheep in a flock, the leading ones. First, he should try to help these two or three, to perfect them, to instruct them in the matter of prophesying.
To learn anything that can build up the Body of Christ requires a spiritual life. Therefore, a prophet has to help the church first of all in a general way. He would tell the saints that since we all love the Lord, and we know that the Lord desires to build up His Body by our growth in life, we must have a daily revival. Every morning after we rise up, we have to have a new start with the Lord. Lamentations tells us that the Lord’s compassions are new every morning (3:22-23). The Lord’s kindness and mercy are fresh every morning like the morning dew. Every morning, even according to the natural law, there is a new start. Even in the new heaven and new earth outside the New Jerusalem, the moon will still be there to divide the twelve months (Rev. 22:2), and the sun will also be there to separate day and night into periods of twelve hours each (21:23, 25). Therefore, we must follow the natural law in God’s creation. In the new creation we must have a new start every day.
Proverbs 4:18 says, “The path of the righteous is as the dawning light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day” (ASV). In the Christian life, there is no afternoon. The Chinese expression for afternoon means going down from noon, while the Chinese expression for morning means going up to noon. Our Christian life should be a life that is going up to noon. Sometimes, however, we experience a going down from noon. But when we go to bed, the dawning of the sun is awaiting us. We can have a new start with the Lord. Every twenty-four hours there is a new start.
We must be revived every morning. Then we must daily live an overcoming life. An overcoming life is to live Christ by walking in our spirit. Every morning we should experience Christ as the rising sun to be revived by Him, and all day long we should live Christ. We must be such persons so that we can learn how to speak Christ. Without such a life, such a living, how can we speak Christ? If a brother quarrels with his wife and behaves recklessly, how can he go out to preach the gospel? He will not be able to speak Christ. If we are defeated in our Christian life or are angry with others, we cannot speak Christ. To speak Christ requires a victorious life, a life that is right in the morning and overcoming the entire day. Then we are qualified and have the capital to do the business of speaking Christ.
If I am a prophet staying with the church, I must speak with the saints for three weeks concerning being revived every morning and living a victorious life every day. This will lay a foundation. All the saints will be helped by my speaking. My speaking will stir them up to practice the morning revival. After rising up early, immediately we should call on the name of the Lord and talk to Him, converse with Him. Then we can get into His Word. We can use two to four verses from the Scriptures to enjoy Him by eating the Word. This practice will give us a new start with the Lord in the morning. Then as we walk in the Spirit during the day, we can easily speak Christ at any time. A prophet would fellowship with the saints, showing them these things of the Lord by his experience and through the study of the Word of God. Then he would instruct the saints how to compose a short message that they could speak in the meetings for about three minutes. If a prophet stayed with a church composed of twenty-five saints and exercised to perfect them in this way, after about two years, most of the saints would be prophets in the church meetings. We need this kind of perfecting work in the churches.
In the past I studied Ephesians 4:11-16 many times, but I never saw so clearly that in order to have the saints meeting according to what is mentioned in 1 Corinthians 14:26, we must enter into the reality of Ephesians 4:11-16. I began to practice this in Taipei, and the church in Taipei has experienced the Lord’s blessing. As the saints experience Christ and enjoy the Word, there will be a gradual accumulation of the riches of Christ in their being day after day and week after week. No matter how busy the saints are in their jobs, at their schools, or with their families, they need to be helped to rise early in the morning to enjoy Christ as their sunrise. Then they will have a base to experience Christ during the day. If we help the saints practice in this way for about one year, most of them will be good prophets and their speaking will enrich the meeting. There will be no need to wait for someone to speak in the meeting. Most of the saints will be eager to present a three minute message. If twenty-five saints each spoke in this way for three minutes, there would be a rich meeting with twenty-five short messages for one hour and fifteen minutes. Think about how living and how rich such a meeting would be. This kind of meeting would help people, attract people, and keep people.
One of the most difficult things in the church life is to maintain the number of saints who meet together. If there are a hundred fifty saints meeting together, after half a year the attendance may go down to a hundred five. The number of meeting ones in the churches goes down and down because the meetings are poor and full of emptiness. In the old way of meeting with one man speaking and the rest listening, the saints eventually become bored. It is hard to maintain the number of people in the meetings with one man’s speaking, unless he is quite learned and eloquent. Still, by his eloquence he could only build up a congregation, not the Body of Christ. Do we like to have a very attractive congregation as a marvelous facade for display? Surely we would rather see the genuine building up of the Body of Christ in the organic way. We need meetings in which many of the saints speak Christ. In meetings like these, we can be nourished with the riches of Christ. These kinds of meetings will change people’s lives, and this will build the saints together. The saints will not be built together into a society or an organization by a certain kind of attraction, but they will be built together by the increase of the inner life. In this way there will be the transformation of the saints for the building up of the Body of Christ.
The saints can be perfected to be apostles and prophets. They can also be perfected to be evangelists and shepherd-teachers. Some may ask, “Who are the apostles among us, who are the prophets, who are the evangelists, and who are the shepherd-teachers?” We need to be perfected to do what all these gifted persons do and to be what they are. I like to see a church in which everybody is everything and everybody is nothing. This is the most spiritual church. We must be able to do everything.
We need to see that 1 Corinthians 14 and Ephesians 4 are the two outstanding chapters in unveiling the building up of the church as the Body of Christ, an organism. In the four Gospels, the only clear word concerning the building up of the church is in Matthew 16:18 where the Lord says, “On this rock I will build My church.” First Corinthians and Ephesians are two particular books on the building up of the Body of Christ. We should dive into the truth in these two books and learn the teaching they contain. If we can enter into the truth revealed in these books, the Lord can have a way to work out His New Testament economy in our age and before our eyes. Each one of us needs to be perfected by the four kinds of “professors,” gifted persons—apostles, prophets, evangelists, and shepherds and teachers. We need to be willing to be perfected by these professors. If you feel that you are one of the professors, you have to do what the professors do. You must teach your students with the goal of helping them to do the same thing that you are doing. My burden is to labor day and night to see 1 Corinthians 14:26 fulfilled by Ephesians 4:11-16.