It is important to see that the universal building can be accomplished only through the local building. If we are not built up with others in our own locality, we should not expect to be able to be built up in any other locality. All those who are burdened to migrate for the spread of the church life must firstly be built up in their own locality. If you have not yet been built up in your local church, I encourage you not to migrate. Before we can be built up universally, we must be built up in a practical way locally.
If you have been in a locality for a period of time without being built up with others, there must be a reason for this lack of building. The reason may be your natural cleverness or your reservations concerning the church life. Yes, you have stopped wandering from group to group, and you have come into the church life to stay. However, in order for you to be built up locally, your disposition, your being, must be dealt with. Nothing tests your spiritual maturity as much as this matter of building. Furthermore, the local building is a great help in your spiritual growth. If you are willing to be built into the church in your locality, you will have the abundance of the growth in life. The building must begin with the local aspect and then spread to the universal aspect. Some saints have not grown very much because they have not been built into the church locally. The reason for the lack of building is that they have too many reservations. Although they are in the local church, they have the tendency to withdraw or to hold back when certain situations arise in the church. It is this holding back that keeps them from being built up. Instead of withdrawing or holding back, we should be willing to be broken and even “wrecked” in order to be built up with others. What a difference this makes to our growth in life! If we grow in this way, the church life will spread both through us and with us, and we shall be useful in any coming migration. However, if we are not built up locally, we shall not be a help to any future migration. Only those who have been built up locally can support the spread of the church life through migration. Any who have reservations about the church, yet who desire to participate in a migration, will be a cause of frustration.
The spread of the Lord’s recovery is the move of the living Christ in our spirit in a corporate way. The Lord’s move is with the saints not individualistically, but corporately. As those who seek the Lord, we should not hold anything back from Him. On the contrary, we should always give in to Him and be willing to be broken so that we may be built into the church in our locality. Then wherever we may be, the recovery of the Lord will spread through us. This is altogether different from a movement of man or an organization. For the genuine move of Christ as the life-giving Spirit in His Body, we need the local building.
We thank the Lord for the many churches raised up through migration. We also thank Him for the many who have been useful in migration because they had experienced some amount of local building before they migrated. At the same time, we must admit that there has been some frustration in certain places. The reason for this frustration is that certain ones still have reservations. They still have the tendency to hold back from the church life. This underscores the fact that the success of migration depends on the degree of building. If we are built up in an absolute way, migration will proceed also in an absolute way. But if we compromise with the local building, we shall also compromise in any future migration.
In conclusion, I wish to emphasize again that how much building we have universally as well as locally depends on how much we give up the ordinances and realize in a practical way that Christ is everything in God’s economy. Since He is the all-inclusive One, we should not hold on to anything in place of Him. If we hold to Christ as everything to us, we shall experience the genuine building, first locally and then universally. This will make us useful in migration for the expansion of the church life.