Some saints have a real desire to serve the Lord, but they have a sense within that they are not so useful. They may be burdened to learn how to take care of people and bear remaining fruit, but they consider themselves not to be useful. We should not believe that we are not so useful. We must learn to stand against our feeling and tell ourselves that we are useful. We must say it every day and whenever we go out. We must declare it even when we are contacting the new ones. We must learn to say with our strong will that we are so useful! Praise the Lord! We must tell Satan, the angels, and all the universe that we are useful.
There are other saints who have an indecisive character. It is difficult for them to make any decision. We may be a person born with this kind of character and built up this way for years. As I have mentioned before in other messages, our character is derived thirty percent by birth, and seventy percent is built up by our habits and environment.
This full-time training will first of all help us to know the divine truths according to the holy Word. Second, it will enable us to grow in the divine life. It will help us to seek after Christ, obtain more of Him, experience Him more, and enjoy Him more. The training will also afford us the help to behave, act, and live as New Testament priests. New Testament priests are priests of the gospel (Rom. 15:16). They minister Christ into sinners in order to make them living sacrifices to God to be offered to God (Rom. 12:1). This is the gospel. The fourth matter that we will stress in this training is the perfecting and building up of a proper character. Our character must be dealt with thoroughly. We must pay our full attention to these four things.
In this message I want to stress one thing. We must have a proper prayer life. The first thing that everyone who wants to serve the Lord must learn is to pray. This does not mean to pray a little bit. I, with the help from some of the brothers in Taipei, have recently put out a publication to enable the saints to benefit much by staying ten minutes with the Lord in the morning. That is what we call the morning revival. Actually, ten minutes is not so adequate. Ten minutes is not sufficient to take a proper breakfast. It takes at least twenty minutes to eat a proper breakfast. Otherwise, we could only have enough time to drink a cup of coffee and eat a donut. Most saints cannot afford twenty minutes in the morning. However, ten minutes is still better than nothing. As we are learning to serve the Lord full-time and have dedicated ourselves to this, we now have at least four and a half months. We cannot say that we do not have time. We have a lot of time.
According to the present schedule, every day there are at least five occasions for us to pray. Although there are three occasions before noon and two in the afternoon, we may not pray during these five times. Spiritually speaking, we must pray according to our spiritual burden. This is right, but it may be just a kind of teaching. In practice, however, if we pray merely according to our burden, we will not have that much burden. The burden for prayer comes to us through our prayer. The more we pray, the more burden we have.