As young people serving the Lord from your youth, you must learn the lesson never to have any ambition to be a leader in God’s house. There is an organic arrangement in the Body of Christ. You can see this from our human body. The ears are not for themselves when they grow on the sides of the head, neither are the eyes for themselves when they are in the eye sockets. God’s creation is so organic and so wonderful! Although the eyes are in a high position, they are lower than the eyebrows. This is not for the eyes to decide. It is altogether an organic story, a story of the life in the body.
According to the New Testament, the disciples all wanted to be great. When the Lord Jesus told the disciples that He would be handed over to man’s hands and be killed, not only were the disciples not able to hear it, on the way they were even disputing who should be great and who should sit on the Lord’s right hand and left hand. Not until the Lord Jesus had been crucified did they stop disputing (Matt. 20:17-26). Surely we should love the Lord. But, it is a terrible thing to have the ambition to be a leader and a head in the Lord’s recovery. You should do your best to function as a member in the position that is organically arranged for you in the Lord’s Body.
We need to learn to have no opinion in the Lord’s service and work. For example, we all are now here being trained and, of course, we go out in the evenings to knock on doors to preach the gospel. If one day you return to your local church, and you push the preaching of the gospel by door-knocking without caring for the feelings of the brothers and sisters, I am afraid that you might cause problems. Therefore, when you return, it would be best for you to say, “Thank the Lord. The Lord has given me grace that I always have the burden to preach the gospel.” To say “gospel preaching” will not cause opinions; for you to say “door-knocking” probably will. Once opinions come, regulations and methods will also come, and in the end the church will suffer loss. Hence, if you go back to your local church and there are brothers and sisters who do not agree with door-knocking, you should not argue nor should you shout slogans. Rather, you should still go to visit gospel friends and to preach the gospel. In this way the gospel will still go out. So you see that if a thing is spoken inappropriately and understood improperly, it will cause opinions. Therefore, learn not to cause opinions.
Besides this, learn not to seek credit for the things you have done. Do not always seek to have a good record or to show that you have some merit. Also, learn not to envy; learn to be glad to see others succeed; be glad to see others do better and more than you; and be glad to help others succeed. These are all lessons that we must learn.
No matter where we go, we must remember that there is no such thing as position in the Lord’s church. In one sense each member in the Body has its own position. Yet it is not what the world realizes as position. When Paul wrote 2 Corinthians, he said, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus...and Timothy the brother” (1:2). In 1 Timothy he said, “To Timothy, genuine child in faith” (1:2). Paul did not exalt himself, thinking that he had a certain status in writing to Timothy. Although they had a great difference in age and Paul indeed could be a teacher to Timothy, Paul still deemed Timothy a brother. In the church there is no office and no position. These must be dropped and forgotten. In addition, in the Lord’s recovery, do not just do your own work. We must see that we all are doing the same work.
Every point mentioned above is very important to those who are taking the way of serving the Lord. Because of these problems, factions and strivings develop among Christians against one another. If we want to avoid these, we need to realize the four levels of meaning of God’s economy according to this message: the teaching of the apostles, the ministry of the New Testament, the Body of Christ, and the local churches. In addition, we must learn in the service not to desire leadership, to have opinions, to envy, to credit ourselves, or to have our own work. If we do this, we will be blessed in the Lord’s recovery and will be perfected.
(A message given by Brother Witness Lee in Taipei, Taiwan on April 19, 1988)