This is why even today the Lord has no way to come back. Israel has been restored, and the city of Jerusalem has been returned to the hands of the Jews. But if you look at the situation among Christians, there is nothing encouraging and nothing promising. All you can see among today’s Christians is blindness, arrogance, ignorance, and darkness. The books of First and Second Timothy say some are blinded with their pride (1 Tim. 3:6; 6:4; 2 Tim. 3:4). This is the situation among most of today’s Christians. This Greek word for blinded means a kind of smoke which covers the sky and covers your sight so that you are blinded. What is the smoke? It is the pride and the arrogance. Today’s Christians are full of arrogance and pride. Their arrogance and their pride are spreading a kind of smoke to cloud the entire situation to make their sight so foggy. So they are blind. Paul used this word for predicting the degradation and decline of the church and also for the dealing with the decline of the church. Why has the church declined? Because of the blindness through the pride.
This is the situation today among so many Christians. Where is there a way for the Lord to do something? There is no way. If I’m simply criticizing I ask the Lord to forgive me, and I beg you all to give me grace. Even I would ask the whole of Christianity to forgive me. But you look at today’s Christianity. America is the leading country in everything, especially in Christianity. If you look into all the Christian papers, there is nearly not one paper with a positive message.
When they began to defame us, one book would just blindly quote another. They don’t even know what they are talking about. Even in defaming us, they are in darkness. They said we practice Oriental mysticism. There is not such a thing in the Orient as Oriental mysticism. They invented this term. So I wrote to one of the opposers in a nice way asking him to explain to me what is mysticism in the Orient. He had been there as a missionary for years, but I don’t believe he has anything to tell me, because there was not such a thing. They just invented this term to smear our name, to smear our face, and then others followed. If we had not taken legal action even more books would have come out. Why? Because they have nothing positive to print. If they don’t print these things, what else would they print? The Lord said that whatever our heart is filled with, our mouth would utter (Matt. 12:35). If they were full of Christ they wouldn’t use even one page for the defamatory things. The pages we put out are not sufficient to minister Christ. Week after week we put out three to four messages, yet we don’t have enough pages to cover all the positive things of Christ. This is the poor situation today. We are very much privileged by the Lord to be in His recovery. So from the beginning of the year we picked up the burden to spend some time with the Perfecting Training. But don’t think this is a training to give you some knowledge. This training would not load you with more things; rather this training is unloading you. This training is taking things off from you.
If we do mean business with the Lord, the day will come when we will be no longer managing anything. We would not manage in reading the Bible: we would not manage in prayer; even in living Christ we would not manage. No! He will have the full position to manage; that will be the real living of Christ.
All of us, especially the seeking ones, like to set up a schedule. The more you are seeking, the stronger your schedule would be. The sloppy ones don’t have a project; they don’t have a schedule. Which is better? Of course it is better to have a schedule. I appreciate that you have a morning watch schedule. You have a schedule that tells you how many chapters you would read a day and how many messages you would read a week. This is very good, even much better than those sloppy ones who don’t have any schedule. Eventually, when they come to the meeting, they don’t even know where their Bible is. When they start to the meeting their Bible is in the linen closet, and their hymnal is under the sofa. They don’t have any schedule. This is sloppy. I don’t appreciate this. I surely would like to encourage you all to have a schedule.
But listen, when you have a strong schedule you become a strong master. You have a schedule for Christ. But it is you and not Christ. You need to grow into a stage where you are not loose nor are you managing. This is wonderful, but it is not so easy. For us not to be loose, yet not managing is not easy. This is why we need this Perfecting Training. This training would not send you back to a stage of looseness. That stage has to be condemned. But you have to realize while you are having a strong schedule, you need to be unloaded and released from your schedule. Don’t go back to be loose. Remain here, but remain here to be unloaded. In our living of Christ we are too bossy.
Surely this training has brought you to a kind of troubling situation. You are here but you don’t know whether you have to go back or to go on. You don’t know whether to advance or retreat or stay. I would say don’t go back, don’t advance, don’t stay. Maybe after another year you will appreciate these words: don’t go back, don’t advance, and don’t stay. Then it will not be you living Christ, it will be that He lives Himself. It will not be so much you who are reading the Bible with a strong determination. It will not be you who are praying unceasingly with much gnashing of teeth.
The past nine months of the Perfecting Training have helped you enter into a strong decision or a strong practice to live Christ. This is good; it is not bad. But it is also a strong frustration because it is you. You have been trained, and in a sense it is helpful, but in another sense it eventually becomes a frustration. What shall you do? There is no answer. Many of you today are still in a strong stage with the strongest determination to practice Bible reading, to practice morning watch, to practice the prayer, to practice the living of Christ. All these are good and are needed, but all of them have probably become frustrations. These things are building you up.
This is why I asked the brothers to tell us what more they wanted and what more they needed. Three of the brothers didn’t tell us definitely what they wanted. Either they were somewhat humble or they were clever, not wanting to expose themselves. Or perhaps I was dull and didn’t get into their speaking. But one brother told us he feels that now he needs the Body. This is a proper understanding. But when I asked you to tell us what you want, I didn’t expect that any one of you would say that you want the church, the Body. I expected you would say that you want to pray more, that you want to sing the Word, that you want this and you want that, and you want a lot of things. It was wise that you didn’t say this. If you had said this you would have been caught by me. I would have said you want more reading of the Bible, more prayer, more singing, more psalming just to strengthen your holy, sanctified, spiritual, heavenly self. But whether you said this or not, you have been caught already, because I know that within you, you do have some want. Either you want to read the Bible more, to pray more, or to live Christ more.
This message is to lay a foundation for the coming Friday nights when we will cover deeper, more subtle, and more negative things. I believe that a number of you have already entered into a stage where you don’t know how to go on. Your church life is not that pleasant nor is it that bad. Some of you may have even considered that you should leave the church life. Yet you realized that if you left it would be terrible. So you have no way. You have been brought to a stage that you have no way. You have no way to go on, no way to stay, and no way to leave. This is a very good sign! This is a sign you have been improving. Yet you have been brought to a stage by the Lord that you need to get yourself unloaded. What we have been speaking about now is a practical reality in our Christian life. I believe you have the ears to listen to my speaking, although others might consider it nonsensical. I surely know what I am talking about. I am pretty sure that I have presented you the right picture. And I do believe that some day your sky within may be clear, and then you will see it is the seeking you, the improving you, that bothers Christ. On the one hand you love Him to the uttermost, and you seek after Him, but on the other hand you are bothering Him and you are frustrating Him because you are the boss. Every day in your spiritual schedule you give Him the orders; you ask Him to do something for you. One day our sky will become clear, and you will see this.