A second issue of a person’s consecration is that he may have offered himself in a shallow way. After his consecration, he neglected it. The best way to help him is to pray, not in a general way but by calling on the Lord as the highest authority to deal with this person. We may pray, “Lord, this is a brother who prayed in Your name. You have to honor Your name, raise up Your name, and claim this person.” Many times this kind of prayer is prevailing. We should not pray this way in our self, because many times the Lord will do something such as bring a certain kind of hardship to that person. He will answer this call to the highest authority and come in to intervene and deal with the person for whom we pray. Then something may happen to him, and he will come to us for help. It is not like this every time, but this is a principle.
The third issue of a person’s consecration is that it is real and normal without any doubt. This is wonderful, but we still must know how to help such persons, not legally but according to the principles of the spiritual life. We should tell them that consecration is not a once-for-all matter. It is not only a crisis to pass through but a way to go on. Day by day we must keep our consecration real, living, and available. This means that day by day we need to consecrate ourselves. Then after we consecrate ourselves to the Lord, there will always be some struggle between us and the Lord. Whenever this happens, we must be defeated by the Lord; we must never defeat Him. Always let Him win the victory, and be willing to be defeated. We should pray, “Lord, I want to be defeated by You. I do not want to defeat You.”
We should also help such a person to realize that his inner consciousness, the anointing of the indwelling Holy Spirit, will now be very living and keen. All day long he must walk, live, and do things in the way of caring for this inner consciousness. As long as we care for the inner consciousness, we will keep a living fellowship with the Lord. Strictly speaking, therefore, the next experience after consecration is the sense of the inner anointing. It is a great thing to help the brothers and sisters pass through a crisis of consecration and enter into the stage of the inner sense of the anointing.
Too often we help the brothers in the church only in a general way. This is why I tell the co-workers that the proper way to learn something is in courses. The proper way to learn mathematics, for example, is by completing one course and moving on to another. If we do not learn by courses, we can study for our whole life and never learn much. In the church we may have message after message every week, but some brothers have been listening to messages for fifty years without learning much because the teaching is too general. The writings of the apostles, especially of the apostle Paul, are not general; they are very definite. Today in the church we need definite teachings. This is why we need trainings. It is right to take a certain period of time in a local church to deal with the stages of spiritual experience. We may need six months to deal with the real experience of regeneration, helping people to be clear what regeneration is and how they can know its experience. We need another period of time to deal with consecration. We need period after period in this way for a number of years. Then we will see a local church built up with a group of believers who have the real experiences. They know what regeneration is, they have experienced it, and they know how to help people with it. Likewise, they know what consecration is, they have this experience, they live in it, and they know how to help new converts to go on. The believers will have not merely a certain desire or love but the experience of life, the genuine learning, the discipline, and the practice. Such a church is a proper church.
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