Our going out to visit people by knocking on their doors is a wonderful, proven practice. I received letters from some saints, however, who told me that they knocked on doors for a long time without getting any baptized. Surely such a person would be thoroughly disappointed and say that door knocking does not work. But door knocking does work, and it has been proven for over two years in Taipei. Others have said that to visit people by knocking on their doors will only work in Taiwan and not anywhere else. The statistics of our going out to visit others in the 1987 summer training here in Anaheim, however, prove that the rate of increase here is about the same as, and even higher than, in Taipei. Our success depends upon whether or not we have been trained in the Lord’s new way. Door knocking works, but you may not have been trained. You may not be successful because you have not practiced strictly what the training has discovered in the recent past. Those who have been trained to visit people, to baptize them, and to establish home meetings can testify that the trained way works. The churches in the United States need the training.
When we get into the training and practice it strictly, we will be addicted to visiting others. If you baptize three new ones in one evening, you will be “crazy.” The first baptism makes you happy, the second one will shock you, and the third one will make you crazy with enjoyment. Then you will look forward to going out again. In the training meetings in Taipei a number of saints testified that they became addicted to door knocking and could not wait for another evening to go out. When you get into the enjoyment of door-knocking, door-knocking is more prevailing. Door-knocking does not work with you when you are so dead and cold. However, when you are crazy with enjoyment in a proper way, every home that you visit is touched by you. It is not the doors that we knock on that make a difference but the person who knocks on them. When you pray for fifteen minutes with your team before going out and become happy in the Lord and crazy in the enjoyment of Christ, the doors that you knock on will open to you. Not only will the doors open, but also the people behind these doors will have open hearts to believe and open mouths to call on the name of the Lord and to pray and will be ready to be baptized.
Many times when the saints went out to preach the gospel, a person believed within five minutes and within another five minutes he was baptized. These were saved in a living way. We do not baptize people in a cold, silent, and dead way. The ones that we baptize get baptized calling on the name of the Lord in a living way (Acts 22:16). Sometimes in Taipei while the saints were preaching to the husband, the wife went into the bathroom to prepare the water for baptism although she had not yet believed. Baptism is an expression of the miracle of faith. Faith brings Christ into us. To ask a new believer to wait for a certain day to be baptized is wrong and unscriptural. The Bible tells us to believe and be baptized, not to believe and wait for a certain period of time until the church has a baptism. There is not such a record in the book of Acts. If we want to be prevailing persons in visiting people, we must be crazy with the enjoyment of Christ and happy in the Lord. If we are crazy in such a way, doors will be opened, hearts will be opened, mouths will be opened, and people will receive the Lord and be baptized. It is a miracle to save a person. No good philosophy or ethical teaching can save people in this way. When we Christians become crazy in Christ, we can do miracles. Thus, we have to live Christ every day. The more we live Him, the more we are crazy in Him.
The church meetings promote, strengthen, improve, and enrich the Christian daily life. If Christ is making you crazy, that is, if you are living Christ every day and coming to the meeting with Christ and full of Christ, you will have a good meeting. This good meeting will promote, strengthen, improve, and enrich your Christian daily life.
Eventually, the Christian daily life and the church meetings become a cycle for the Christians’ growth with Christ for the building up of the Body of Christ (1 Cor. 14:26; Eph. 4:15-16). We go out to knock on doors to get people baptized and set up meetings in their homes not merely to save them or release the truth to them. Our burden is to regenerate them to be the members of Christ, and eventually through the home meetings, they all will be built up as the living Body of Christ. We need to build up the Body of Christ according to the God-ordained way to carry out the New Testament economy. The fellowship in this chapter needs to be brought into our practice so that we have a church-supporting daily life, which is Christ living in us and lived out of us.