From now on the full-time trainees must concentrate on studying the Bible. In the Lord’s recovery we care only for the revelation of the Bible. We strongly disagree with the way of theological seminaries, which distorts the understanding of the Bible. Hence, the full-time trainees must realize their urgent need to know the Bible. But we will not set up a seminary or a Bible school to address this need. Instead, every trainee must spend half a day to study the Bible, until they are well versed in the Bible. Your foundation in the Bible is not solid; therefore, we need to rise up and catch up, putting in a good deal of effort to study the Bible.
It is difficult for the saints who are past sixty to study the Bible in this way. Nevertheless, it all depends on their effort. For example, I now study the Bible more than I did fifty years ago. However, you should not think that I have studied the Bible thoroughly, or that I have achieved success. I am still a student, and I am still studying. We study because we realize that our knowledge and experience fall short of the riches in the Bible. I therefore hope that the full-time serving ones will have a good beginning. You should not desire to be a spiritual giant or to become famous. You should serve in coordination with the brothers and sisters in your locality and spend half a day to study the Bible.
How you study is entirely up to you. You may take notes or underline the text. The only rule is that you set aside four hours every morning to study the Bible. I hope all the full-timers will accept this assignment. The saints who are part-time should also make an effort to study the Bible.
Furthermore, the brothers and sisters who serve full-time need to budget their time and make a schedule. Every morning from Monday to Friday, you must study the Bible for four hours and then serve in the afternoons and evenings and on Saturdays and Lord’s Days. We have two major trainings every year. The summer training is around the time of the American Independence Day, and the winter training is around the Christmas and New Year holidays. While other people are enjoying their holidays, we are working and serving. This is what a full-timer should do.
Concerning your service, there is the work with children, the work on school campuses, and the gospel work in the community. We need further training in these areas. No matter which service we take part in, we must use four hours in the morning to study the Bible.
When we serve in coordination with the brothers in the church, we should keep the principle of having no opinion. From this time forward, we should begin to build up our character. Our nature is inherent, whereas our conduct is cultivated. Thirty percent of our character is innate, and seventy percent is cultivated. As we begin to serve the Lord, we should not only read the Bible and study the truth but also be trained in character for the Lord’s service. The character needed for the Lord’s service is higher than that for any other occupation.
The first and primary condition to cultivate a character for the Lord’s service is to go against our disposition. If our disposition likes to talk, we should stand against our talking. We all share the common disposition of having opinions. We need to pay attention to this matter. After I was saved, I began to read the Bible in English and noticed that it differed from the Chinese translation of the Bible. I even wrote my older sister and said that the English translation was better than the Chinese translation of the Bible. In addition, I wrote down the verses that differed and their corrections based on the Bible in English and mailed the list to her. At the time, I enjoyed doing it. Later, as I had more learning, I felt that what I had done was childish and naive.
After many years I realized that the Chinese Union Version is a good translation that is even better than the King James Version. The strength of the King James Version is in its good English structure. However, the King James Version was translated in the 1600s, and the manuscripts it is based on are less accurate than the manuscripts discovered later. In the 1800s a group of British and American Bible scholars formed a committee to revise the King James Version, but they had different views on many points, including whether to use the name Jehovah. The British scholars, who advocated using Lord, published the Revised Standard Version. While the American scholars, who advocated using Jehovah, published the American Standard Version. This version was completed in 1901.
Western missionaries translated the Old and New Testaments into Chinese using the Revised Version and the manuscripts in the Hebrew and Greek languages. This translation is called the Chinese Union Version and was published in 1919. It is widely used by Christians in China and is one of the best translations into Chinese. The language is of a high standard, and it is based on manuscripts that are more accurate than those used for the King James Version.
You will not encounter the difficulties that I encountered as a new believer when you study the Bible, because we have been studying the truth for the past sixty years. Hence, you will not waste your time. As we learn the Bible, we should have no opinion. I hope that we build up a character to learn without opinions. We should never criticize a version of the Bible as being wrong, even though our translation of the Bible is based on years of experience as well as the studies of many scholars throughout the generations.
It took us a significant amount of time to translate the Recovery Version into English, and we are still revising it. Several full-time brothers in America are currently comparing the Recovery Version with the Greek text with the view of publishing a revised edition. When we were working on the Recovery Version, we consulted many translations and the best reference books. The Recovery Version is not something produced from our imagination, neither was it done by merely consulting a Greek dictionary and a few reference books. Rather, we took the original text as our basis, and then considered the strengths of different versions. After careful evaluation and consideration, we made our decisions.
Even more time and effort were spent to write the footnotes. We are standing on the shoulders of all the orthodox biblical scholars over the past nineteen centuries. We collected and consulted writings from the time of the church fathers until the present day. None of our work was done hastily. Therefore, we should not criticize the footnotes that differ from our concept; rather, we should learn from them. We should not have any opinions, because opinions damage a person greatly.
Likewise, when we learn to serve in the different localities, we should not disapprove if there is something in the coordination that differs from our view. Our disapproval shows that we are naive. In order to build up our character for the Lord’s service, we must learn to have no opinions. When we study the truth, we should be diligent without having any opinions, and when we serve the Lord, we should labor diligently without any opinions. We should always learn to work without opinions. If we are vacuuming a room, we should do it thoroughly and not criticize, which is to express an opinion. I hope that as we serve, we will have no opinions. We will know only to be diligent and to labor by doing more and learning more. We should all build up such a character.
Then we will become useful persons. In the future many of us will be able to give messages according to the Bible. The way to give a message that will stir up people’s interest is to speak according to the Bible, that is, to speak by expounding the Bible. This is the most powerful way to speak. There is no book that can meet the standard of the Bible. Therefore, the best way to give a message is to expound the Bible, but this requires a thorough knowledge of the Bible. Gaining such knowledge takes extensive training. Hence, we must spend the next four years to lay a good foundation in the New Testament. We can begin with Paul’s fourteen Epistles and read them in sequence, starting from Romans. After the fourteen Epistles, we can read the Gospels, Acts, and James through Revelation.