In 1948 I released a message in Shanghai called “Coming and Going.” At that time, my burden was very heavy. The Lord said in Matthew 11:28, “Come to Me all who toil and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” Then in 28:19 He said, “Go therefore and disciple all the nations.” Coming and going is the living the believers should have. We come with sorrow; we go with joy. We come with our sins; we go with grace. We come with death; we go with life. We come empty-handed; we go richly filled with God. Not only so, in coming we are saved; in going we bring others to be saved. Coming, we receive grace; going, we dispense grace to others. Coming, we pour out our pain and sorrow; going, we are filled with joy and peace. This is the normal living of a believer—coming and going.
The Bible speaks more of “going” than of “coming.” Regrettably, most of the believers pay attention only to coming, such as coming to be saved, coming to be baptized, coming to the throne of God, coming to the meeting, coming to pray, and coming to read the Word. However, they have neglected the matter of going, such as, “Go therefore and disciple all the nations” (Matt. 28:19); “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel” (Mark 16:15); and “Go; behold, I send you” (Luke 10:3). In Isaiah 6 the Lord said, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for Us?” (v. 8). This indicates that almost no one is willing to go for the Lord. The believers who can and will come are few; those who will go and who can be useful are even fewer. Hence, we need to be reminded not to be a “half believer” but to be a “whole believer”; that is, not to be a “coming yet not going” believer but a “coming and going” believer.
There was a background to my speaking in 1948 concerning coming and going. In 1943 there was a big revival in Chefoo. It is hard to describe the condition of that revival. I can still remember a sister here in Anaheim who was saved in that revival. When she first came among us, I saw that her hair was like a tower of three stories. I could see it clearly from the platform. There were several hundred people in the room, but only this young lady’s hair was “three stories” high. However, one day when she came again, the top story was gone. After a few days the second story was also gone, and not long afterward her hair became even. During this time she was saved.
There was a brother named Sun Fung-lu, who was a judge at the local court. He loved the Lord very much after his salvation. Later, he became one of the elders in the church in Taipei. During the Chefoo revival, he had just been promoted from a local court to the higher court. One day he came to me and said that the condition of the Chefoo revival was probably more glorious than the condition portrayed in the Acts and that it was worthwhile to record it as history. In truth this might not have been so, but the impact of that revival was far beyond one’s imagination.
I can still remember the current of the revival. It began from December 31, 1942. The afternoon after the Lord’s Day meeting an announcement was made that there would be a meeting on the next day. What followed was one hundred continuous days of meetings. The time was not scheduled, but it was from morning to night. There was also no specific procedure for the meeting; everyone was free in spirit. Mostly it was I who gave the messages, but there was not a particular subject. The meetings were different every day. The Spirit truly was free. Hence, it can be said that it was a real revival.
After a month, on a Lord’s Day afternoon, we blessed the saints by laying hands on them. The elders and I knelt down in the center of the meeting hall and laid our hands on the heads of the saints. The saints, brothers and sisters separately, knelt down in the two aisles. They came forth one by one to receive the laying on of hands. You could not imagine it. The prayers for that many saints were just one continual prayer when put together, even though the portion that each saint received was fitting to his situation. It was the work of the Spirit. Included in that prayer were many biblical allusions such as “You are a little Benjamin,” and “You are John.” We laid our hands on and prayed for over two hundred saints. Afterward, everyone rose and was surprised at how marvelous that prayer had been. Later on, those who had received the laying on of hands testified that the words of blessing were exactly fitting for each of them.
On another Lord’s Day, after the preaching of the gospel in the morning, there was an edification meeting in the afternoon. Before I was about to release the message, I had a feeling within that I needed to pray, so I did. Once I opened my mouth and began to pray, I could not stop. I raised my left hand and prayed loudly that the Lord would shake us. Saints later testified that this prayer was like a waterfall pouring down. After I prayed with my hand lifted for half an hour, a brother came up to the platform to support my arm. I was there praying, and he was there supporting. That occasion was truly amazing.
This revival brought forth a great undertaking of migration. The first group to go comprised seventy saints. They each consecrated their whole family and set out in April of 1943. They sailed from Tientsin and then moved on to Suiyuan Province in Inner Mongolia. Their boat tickets were bought with the money offered to the church; we also provided each one with three months of living expenses. Originally, a number of Swedish and British missionaries from the China Inland Mission had been working in the region of Suiyuan for many years. However, due to the breaking out of the Pacific War, all the Caucasians, including the missionaries, had been imprisoned. The saints who migrated there were engaged in shoe repair, teaching, selling goods, and other trades. Their zeal for the gospel and their one accord truly touched the local Christians, who subsequently came and joined them. By the end of 1943 more than forty churches had been raised up.
Another thirty saints went out at the same time with the first wave. They set out from Chefoo to the mouth of the Yalu River in Antung Province, in the northeast of China. Thus, at one time there were one hundred saints who migrated from Chefoo. This move shocked the office of the Japanese secret agents. They could not understand what had happened that such a small civic organization had such a great mobilizing power. They therefore put me into prison and interrogated me with severe torture for a month. After they concluded that I was just a “Jesus addict” who was leading a group of other “Jesus addicts” to do such things, they released me.