Our home meetings should be filled with singing. Singing comes out of being filled with grace (Col. 3:16c). When we have an inner realization of God’s grace, this realization will stir up our being to sing. Singing also comes out of being filled with the word (Col. 3:16a). When we are filled with the word, the Spirit bubbles from within us in lauding melodies. When the word of Christ fills us up from within, we will spontaneously flow out in singing. Our singing will be in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Psalms are long poems, hymns are shorter ones, and spiritual songs are the shortest. We also need to sing by exercising the spirit (1 Cor. 14:15b). We should not merely sing in our happiness. We should sing joyfully in our spirit. Our singing must come out from our spirit. In praying, in singing, in reading the word, and in touching the Spirit, the secret is to exercise our spirit.
Many saints come to the meeting, yet they do not exercise their spirit. Thus, it is hard to tell if they have a regenerated spirit. I was once with Brother Nee when some co-workers asked him why a certain brother never exercised his spirit although he had been with us for over thirty years. When Brother Nee responded to this question, he jokingly said, “This person might be saved, but not regenerated.” Brother Nee meant that this person belonged to the Lord, but it seemed that he was not regenerated because his spirit still remained in a deadened situation. In the church meetings, I have noticed that many persons like to be gentlemen. They think that when they exercise their spirit, they will be crazy men. They do not like to be crazy, but instead they like to be proper gentlemen. Others may shout, call on the name of the Lord, and sing in the meetings, but these ones never exercise their spirit. If all the attendants in our meeting were like this, that meeting would be a graveyard, a cemetery. Years ago I told the saints that the most quiet and calm place is Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles. Sometimes the Christian meetings are like a cemetery.
To prevent our meetings from being dead, we must learn to pick up the four basic factors for our Christian meetings. We should be mingled with the Spirit, soaked and saturated with the living word, and we should be praying and singing. Then we will be equipped, qualified, and completed to be the proper visitors to knock on people’s doors and set up home meetings. We will be a good example to the new ones in their home meetings. The children always like to follow, to copy, to learn, of their parents. When we go to the meetings, we must be a living person and a living example of one who loves the word, who is always filled with the Spirit, and who is singing and praying. Then our presence will be a great help and a great factor to strengthen and enrich the meeting.
As people who love the Lord, we must live according to God’s ordained way to practice His New Testament economy. We need to take care of our living, and then spend the rest of our time to visit people by knocking on their doors in prayer in order to get them baptized and to set up home meetings. Two saints bringing in twelve new ones a year would result in an increase of twenty-four. Twenty-four new ones can compose a proper local church. Every year a new church could be produced by our taking the Lord’s new way. After we go out to visit others and baptize them, we must endeavor to take care of them through the home meetings. We need to be like the nursing mothers who cherish their own children (1 Thes. 2:7). If the churches are faithful to the Lord’s new way, many new churches can be raised up within a short amount of time. We who go to take care of the home meetings to establish them and build them into local churches must be persons filled with the Spirit, soaked in the word, praying unceasingly, and singing all the time. Then we will be happy in the Lord, crazy with the enjoyment of Christ, and the doors of the homes that we visit will open to us.
If some doors will not open to us, we need to go and visit them again. In Taipei some homes were visited four or five times. When the saints visited one home for the fifth time, the host of this house told them that he admired their endurance and that he was ready to be baptized. A number of genuine believers were produced by our going to them again and again with longsuffering. When we go to visit others in a proper way, the Holy Spirit goes out with us. He goes in our going because He has been waiting for us to go for years. In the book of Isaiah the Lord exclaimed, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us” (6:8). We all need to respond in the same way that Isaiah did: “Here am I; send me” (v. 8).
We do not invite people to the gospel, but we bring the gospel to people. To visit others is to follow God’s pattern. When Adam fell, God immediately came to visit him, and asked Adam, “Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9). God was not sitting on the throne asking Adam to come to Him. God did not invite Adam to come to Him to hear the gospel. Instead, God brought the gospel to Adam. Eventually, God became a man to come down to the earth to visit people. He came down from heaven to save sinners (1 Tim. 1:15), He visited Zaccheus (Luke 19:1-10), He visited the Samaritan woman (John 4:3-42), He sent the twelve disciples to visit people (Matt. 10:5-8, 11-13), and He sent the seventy to visit people (Luke 10:1-6). He told the seventy that He was sending them as lambs in the midst of wolves (v. 3), but in the midst of these wolves were sons of peace (v. 6). By our visiting people, we will discover who the sons of peace are. Then these sons of peace will be regenerated and eventually transformed. They will be the members of Christ to form His Body in order to accomplish God’s eternal economy.
Christianity has missed God’s ordained way. In Christendom, big halls, cathedrals, and chapels are built to invite people to come to hear the gospel. But today the Lord has shown us that all the members of the church should be visitors going out to bring the gospel to people. We have to go to visit people and send meetings to their homes. If we ask people to come to our meeting hall, the majority will not come. But we can take our meetings to the homes. We can carry out the burden to provide these homes with “food to go.” We do not need to ask them to come to buy our food and eat our food. We need to send food to their homes.
In the Lord’s new way, we must do these two things: go to visit people and go to establish and care for home meetings. If we are going to do this, we must be persons one with the mingling Spirit, soaked in the living word, praying unceasingly, and singing all the time. We have published a four-volume series entitled Life Lessons for the nourishment of the new believers in their homes. At the end of each lesson there is a hymn. We need to sing these hymns and songs in the home meetings to stir up the spirits of the attendants. We should practice singing all the time (Eph. 5:19). Singing encourages people and makes them fresh and living. Today on this earth there are many burdens and much discouragement. When we go to the homes of the new believers in the evening, our singing of the songs in the Life Lessons will stir them up and encourage them. We must learn to be praying persons and singing persons. If we are such persons, our home meetings will be very fresh, new, living, and enlivening.