When I am invited to any dinner, I only know how to eat; I don’t know how to investigate. Sometimes, however, I noticed that when a poor eater was invited to dinner, he didn’t eat. Rather he tried his best to find bones in the chicken. He was not a chicken eater; he was a chicken-bone finder. It seems his job was to find the bones. We have put out many issues of The Stream magazine and many life-study messages for people to eat. What a shame that this poor man was only looking for bones. We put out these messages only for the eaters; we never put them out for people to find bones. There may be some bones in every message. The American way of cooking fish is just to have the filet, but the Chinese way is to cook the whole fish. They serve the tail, the bones, the fins—everything—on the table. If you like to find fault, you can find all the faults in the Chinese cooking. But the Chinese cooking is not to afford you a way to find fault; it is to afford you the whole fish for your eating. What you eat and what you taste is the meat of the fish. Forget about the bones. You have to realize that without the bones the fish could not grow. I used to receive many letters and phone calls. Of all the letters I received, some of them were from mental cases. And mental cases always include a strong opinion. Whoever writes me a letter with a strong opinion I always consider that to be somewhat a mental case. This is really true. When you are so opinionated you are mentally ill. We invite people to our dinner to eat. The life-studies of Genesis, of Revelation, of Matthew, and of John are all for you to eat. We do not present these things for people to study to find the bones.
In 1936 Brother Watchman Nee and I were in Tientsin, the northern port which was quite close to the old capital of Peking. He was very much sorrowful about one thing. He had put out a booklet concerning how to get yourself comforted. This was a good booklet to comfort some suffering ones. Then a man who was so opinionated criticized Brother Nee saying that the translation of the text of that verse was not accurate. Brother Nee came to me pointing out that he had published that little booklet to comfort people. But that person did not get one bit of comfort. He was only bothered. Brother Nee had invited people to eat the chicken, but there was an eater who would not eat the chicken. Rather he was bothered by the chicken bones.
This is a real picture of today’s Christians. We all have to learn one lesson: in the church life we only know how to eat the chicken; we don’t know how to count how many pieces of bones there are. Learn to get nourishment, forgetting all the faults. If you can do this, it is a strong sign that you have been delivered from the custom, the habit, of being opinionated. How could we be such? There is only one way—remain in the spirit. Whenever you get out of your spirit, right away you have your opinion concerning everything. If four brothers come together not in the spirit, they will be full of opinions. Without the Lord’s salvation in our spirit, our daily life is just a life of opinion. Consider your talk at the dining table with your wife. You talk about this person; you talk about that person; you talk about that thing. All this talk is opinion. If this word concerning opinion would impress you, tomorrow morning you will have nothing to say. Whenever you open your mouth there is nothing but opinion. Opinion is a strong sign that you are out of the spirit. When you remain in the spirit the opinion is peeled off.
Five weeks have passed since the last meeting we had concerning the peeling off of opinion. I would like to ask how many of your opinions have been peeled off. This tells us how much you have remained in the spirit. If you say that in these past five weeks, no opinion has been peeled off, that is a poor sign. That signifies that you have not been remaining in the spirit.
My experience of the past few weeks has been that mostly I have been much more aware of how little I am in the spirit because my opinion is a strong indication that I am not one spirit with the Lord at that moment. I really appreciate what was said the last time we were together: it is at the very moment that we prayed the prayer that brings us into the spirit that we are the Lord, and we are one spirit with the Lord. I must admit and speak fairly that a good portion of time the opinion is there, and it is so easy to express something with my wife about someone or about something. This has been a real exposure to show me how little time I spend in the spirit.