In this chapter we shall continue to speak about having an outreach and reaching unbelievers.
Haggai 1:7 through 9 says, “Thus says Jehovah of hosts, Consider your ways. Go up to the mountain and bring wood and build the house, and I will take pleasure in it and will be glorified, says Jehovah. You looked for much, and yet it amounted to little; and when you brought it home, I blew on it. Why? declares Jehovah of hosts. Because of My house that lies waste while you each run to your own house.” In Christianity there is much teaching to push people to do gospel work. However, the purpose of this gospel work is only to win souls. If we come back to the picture in Haggai, we will see that God’s intention to bring in people is not merely on the negative side, to save their fallen soul from hell. Rather, it is something positive. God’s intention is to bring more materials for the building of His house. We need God’s salvation not only because we are fallen but because God has an eternal purpose to accomplish, and for this purpose there is the need for many persons as material. Therefore, we need to bring more people to the Lord as the materials.
The type of the temple is a clear picture of the building of the church. In the Old Testament time the people of Israel were charged to go to the mountain to bring material for the building of God’s house. This type signifies that we must go out to reach unbelievers for the building of the house of God. If we have this understanding, aim, and burden in reaching people, our results will be one hundred percent different. We are not going out only to bring souls to be saved; we are going out to bring people as the dear, precious materials for the building of God’s temple.
The brothers and sisters who have been raised up by the Lord in these days to take the way of His recovery must realize that we must always increase in two ways. We must increase in the measure of life, and we must also increase in the number of persons. This is to increase both in quality and quantity. To be increased in the growth and measure of life is to be increased in quality. However, quality always comes out of quantity. If we do not have the quantity, how can we have the quality? We need the quantity, the increase of numbers.
It is easy for Christians to be unbalanced and go to an extreme. We need to learn to be balanced in several directions. We need to grow in life, but we also must increase in number. Life always must grow in all the churches day by day, and our numbers also always must increase. Otherwise, we are unbalanced; we are a “cake not turned” (Hosea 7:8).
It may be that in a local church the increase comes mainly from brothers and sisters who immigrate from the Far East. These believers are like children born in someone else’s home; they are the “adopted children” of that local church. This means that as regards the increase, that church still has a failure.
It is not sufficient to bring only one person to the Lord every two years. Two years is too long; consider how many days and hours are in two years. This means that if we start with fifty persons, in two years we will have only one hundred, and in four years we will have two hundred. This may sound good, but it is not completely good. In Taiwan in 1949 we had close to a thirtyfold increase in only one year. We started with thirty to fifty people, and by the end of the year we had over one thousand.
If we cannot bring one person to the Lord in two years, there is little practical purpose to being on earth. On the earth, even in one large city, there are millions of people. In such an ocean of faces, why can we not bring one person to the Lord? We have very much neglected our duty. It is not right or fair to be on the earth for two years and not bring one person to the Lord. Sometimes, though, we are even worse than this; we may not have brought one person to the Lord in four years. I am concerned about this situation. Let us not criticize others; let us criticize ourselves.
The best way to check whether a commercial business is right or wrong is to look at its accounting. We should not care for the general manager’s or director’s report; we should check the accounting books. What is its balance, profit, loss, and liabilities, and what kind of turnover has it had in the past ten years? We should look at the statistics and worksheets. In the same way, we should not say that our meetings are wonderful and everything is wonderful. If everything is wonderful for a whole year, yet there is no increase, there must be something wrong. We need to check ourselves.