In this message we want to see the third step in the work of the New Testament priests of the gospel-teaching and perfecting the saints. We need not only to nourish and take care of the new believers but also to teach and perfect them. After a child is born, he needs to be nourished and educated. If a child is born but not fed, he will die prematurely, but if a child is fed after birth but not educated, he is still not perfected. Therefore, after a child grows to a certain extent, he needs to be educated. As far as our physical, human life is concerned, we need begetting, nourishing, and teaching; as to our spiritual life, it is the same. As the New Testament priests of the gospel, we need to work on sinners that we may help them to be saved and bring them back to God through the gospel. We also need to go to meet in their homes that we may nourish and take care of them. Then we need to bring them to meet in small group meetings that are full of mutuality.
Hebrew 10:24-25 says, “Let us consider one another so as to incite one another to love and good works, not abandoning our own assembling together...but exhorting one another.” The assembling together here is what we call a small group meeting, a meeting that is full of the nature of mutuality. This is not a big meeting with one man speaking and the rest listening. Rather, it is an assembling together of ten to twenty people with mutual fellowship and mutual teaching. Actually, the small group meeting is the most important part of our Christian church life. Regrettably, although the church has been on earth for more than nineteen hundred years, this kind of meeting has gradually been neglected and lost. As a result, today’s Christianity in general is not strong. Due to the negligence in care and teaching, hundreds of thousands of believers have fallen into a desolate condition. To have mutual consideration, teaching, and inciting, we need the small group meetings.
These group meetings are the Christians’ own meetings. If a Christian does not go to the group meeting, he abandons his own meeting. Strictly speaking, a big meeting is not our own meeting but the meeting of the minister; we attend his meeting to listen to his speaking. But when we have a group meeting of ten to twenty people coming together, with no one giving a message for us to listen to, no one being there to lead us, and with our doing everything ourselves, that is truly our own meeting.
Perhaps some may ask what they should do in such group meetings. First, we would say that the group meeting is not a worship service, and it does not have regulations or procedures. We, the saints, simply set a date and a time for all of us to come together to have our own meeting. We Christians are a meeting people. Even before we come together, we sing and pray in our homes. We pray daily and praise the Lord constantly. We sing and pray in our daily life, not only on the day of the group meeting but even on other days. Our life is a life of singing and praying; we are singing and praying Christians. Every morning when we rise, we begin to call on the name of the Lord, and then we sing and pray. In this way we overcome spontaneously. If we remain silent, neither singing nor praying, we are defeated, but whenever we open our mouth to call and whenever we sing and pray, immediately the devil flees and we are revived and overcoming. When we live such a life of praying and singing day by day, before it is time for the group meeting, we have already started it in our homes. Therefore, when we come together, spontaneously we have something to say, and our prayers and singing are full of the Lord’s presence.
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