Prayer: Lord, we pray for the service of the church that all of the saints might be stirred up. Lord, we look unto You. Grant us mercy and grace that we may be touched deeply in our heart and in our spirit. Lord, open us that we may be open to one another. Grant us a frank and thorough fellowship that we may touch Your heart. Lord, we are open to You. Lord, do open to us and give us the mercy and the grace that we need for the present way. Amen. Lord, give us the grace to pray. How much we need Your grace that we may have a prayer life to pray for Your interests on this earth and for the increase and spread of Your church. Build up Your Body. Amen.
Years ago while we were there at Elden Hall in Los Angeles, we began to stress one thing—not to remain in the old religion. In Christianity today everybody knows how to start a meeting. As the believers come in, they just sit in their pews waiting for the meeting to open. Then a pastor opens the meeting, and a hymn is called. This is followed by singing and prayer. This is what we call religion. This kind of practice requires no exercise of our spirit. Although twenty-five years ago we overcame that, gradually, after a number of years we slipped back into that old religion. When we come to meet with the saints, we must be the first ones to open up the meeting, either by singing, by praying, by giving testimonies, by fellowshipping, or by asking questions. We should not come into the meeting hall and just sit there looking at the walls or the clock. This is wrong.
To meet is not just to sit there and listen to others. To meet means to pray, to sing, to testify, and to fellowship. We have all been drugged by Christianity. Unlike those in that old religion, we need not wait to enter the meeting hall before we start to sing. If we sing on the way to the meeting, surely we will be filled in spirit. The Spirit is the praying Spirit, the interceding Spirit, the praising Spirit, and the singing Spirit (Rom. 8:26; Eph. 5:18-19). We must learn to release the Lord within us, to release our spirit. We can release the Lord from within us by praying, singing, or shouting.
Because we have been drugged by Christianity, all of our heavenly gifts have been annulled. First, we have the gift of divine life. This divine life is within us. Second, we have received the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is also within us. We have the divine life and the Holy Spirit within us as two big gifts. Within us we do have a big deposit in our spiritual bank. Our deposit today is worth more than ten billion dollars. We should use it and “write” many checks. There is no reason not to use the divine Spirit and the divine life.
Another gift that has been robbed from us is the privilege and right to pray and call on the Lord’s name. We have the full right to exercise in this way, but because of tradition we do not pray, call on His name, shout, or testify to enjoy the divine life. If all of us in the church life would use our heavenly gifts, the church would be fully revived and quite living.
I began the ministry in this country in 1962. In those first eight years or so, we discarded everything of religion. Yet twenty-two years later I felt that the whole recovery had somewhat fallen back into Christianity. So I stopped the work in this country and went back to Taiwan to study our situation.
I discovered that our entire Christian life has been drugged because we do not believe or live out what the Bible unveils to us. We live a Christian life that is so natural and traditional. But I realized that the Christian life is a priesthood and we are priests. A priest is one who serves God and offers something to God. It is not a matter of doing so many things. Rather, how many sacrifices can we offer to God for His satisfaction?
The New Testament priests of the gospel must offer up saved sinners. They must gain the sinners and make them parts of Christ, members of Christ. By imparting Christ into sinners, we make them sons of God. All of these sons of God become the brothers of Christ who are His members. Because all of His members are His parts, we can offer the parts of Christ to God. This is something more than what the priests offered in the Old Testament. They only offered the individual Christ in type. They did not offer the reality of Christ. Today we do not offer the individual Christ but the corporate Christ, including the members of His Body. In order for us to produce the members of Christ, we must go to the homes to “dig out” the sinners. They are concealed there, so we must dig them out. However, we must realize that not everyone has been chosen by God. Whether someone has been chosen by God or not is not up to us. But it is up to us to dig them out. Some of them are the sons of peace (Luke 10:6). These are the chosen ones. We then infuse something of Christ as the embodiment of the Triune God into them. We tell them that Christ is God incarnated to live on this earth. He died an all-inclusive death on the cross that dealt with sins and many other things. Now He is living in us in resurrection as our Savior, Redeemer, and life-giving Spirit. We must minister such a One into the sinners. After five minutes, they will be infused with Christ and declare that Jesus is very good.
When a new one is at this point we must help him pray to believe in the Lord and receive Him. Immediately this sinner becomes a son of peace and a son of God. This son of God is also Christ’s brother. As a brother of Christ, he is a part of Christ’s Body. So he becomes a part of Christ. As New Testament priests of the gospel, we can now bring this sinner who is a part of Christ to the altar and offer him to God as a sacrifice. The Christian life is the life of a priest who gains sinners and offers them to God.
This is our Christian life. We do not handle animals such as lambs, goats, or sheep, but living persons. We must care for these living persons as our own children. We need to feed them, cherish them, and raise them up. As they are now the folks in our family, we surely must educate them, teach them, and instruct them. We ourselves must be in contact with the Lord to receive something of Him. Then, in turn, we inject them with the riches of Christ again and again. Then we can bring them to the small group meetings and the church meetings to instruct them and lead them to do the same thing we do.
This is the church life. This is the life that we should live today. However, this life has been annulled and confiscated by religion and tradition. Our only interest on this earth today should be to live such a Christian life.