In my entire life I have never met another person who knew the Bible as deeply as Watchman Nee. He received much help from many of the finest Christian writers of past centuries, but he also stood upon their shoulders, seeing more things from the Scriptures than they did. He not only knew the letter of the Bible, but he also knew the Spirit of the Bible. He probed into the depths and touched the Spirit of the Scriptures. His knowledge of the Bible was filled with light and saturated with life. He had not only the objective view of the Scriptures but also the subjective experience of God's Word.
He was truly a man of God, knowing the Lord in a full way. He knew the Lord in His acts as well as in His ways. He knew the Lord not only according to His love, mercy, grace, righteousness, and holiness, but also according to His eternal purpose and His present economy. He had both the full, objective knowledge and the living, subjective realization of the Lord. He knew the Lord personally, as well as in the church, His Body.
He knew that the Lord as the living Spirit lived in his spirit, and he knew how to exercise his spirit. He practiced rejecting the mind, emotion, and will of his soul, and he also practiced behaving and acting in the spirit. In this way he lived by the Lord as his life. He cared little for work; he continually cared for life more than work. He said repeatedly that the work should be the outflow of life. His ministry was not one of work but one of life, carried out by life. He paid much more attention to what he was than to what he did. He was truly a man of life.
He saw clearly that the church as the Body of Christ was Christ's expression with Him as its life and content. He also saw that the church could only be practical with the existence of local churches. He saw too that only churches in localities could carry out God's eternal purpose to have the church built up in a way which the gates of Hades could not prevail against. He thoroughly realized that to recover the proper church life on the proper ground is God's present economy. He did not teach mere doctrines concerning the church. He received a full revelation from the New Testament, not only regarding the content and reality of the church, but also regarding the practicality of the church. Through the years in his ministry, he not only stressed the experience of Christ but also emphasized the practice of the church life. His vision was not only Christ, but Christ and the church. Christ was his life, and the church was his living. He suffered for the church more than for Christ. The persecutions which came upon him from the denominations came mostly because of his emphasis on the church. He was burdened to carry out his vision concerning the practicality of the church life. He desired to see a local church in every city in China.
I consider Watchman Nee to be a unique gift given by the Head to His Body for His recovery in this age. I fully respect him as such a gift. I have the full confidence and assurance that it was absolutely of the Lord that I followed this gift for the Lord's interest in His present move on this earth. I feel no shame whatsoever in saying that I followed a man --a man that was the unique gift and the seer of the divine visions in this age.
I am more than grateful to the Lord that immediately after being saved I was brought into such a profitable relationship with Watchman Nee and put into the closest relationship with him in the work of His recovery through so many events over a long period of time. The revelations concerning Christ, the church, the spirit, and life which I saw through Watchman Nee, the infusions of life which I received from him, and the things concerning the work and the church which I learned from him will require eternity to evaluate their true worth.