For the above reason, in the New Testament, beginning from the Gospels, the Lord Jesus told His disciples again and again to be watchful, to watch and pray (Matt. 24:42; 25:13; 26:38, 41; Luke 21:36). In the Epistles, the apostles also taught us many times to be watchful and to be sober (Eph. 6:18; Col. 4:2; 1 Thes. 5:6, 8; 1 Pet. 5:8; Rev. 3:2). Today we are on the battlefield, not on a bed. When a man is on a bed, he can relax in every way. But when he is on the battlefield, he has to be on the alert all the time and be aware of everything going on around him. The Lord’s recovery has been among us for over sixty years. From 1922 to 1937, within a period of a little over ten years, we realized that our way of meeting and serving was not up to the standard of the truth of the Bible and that there was the need for change. By 1984, I saw the degenerating condition among us; many saints were half asleep. I was very depressed within. At that time I knew that this kind of situation could not be solved by merely holding a few conferences. Something had to be done from the root. This time we should afford the Lord an opportunity to move on among us, something we have been unable to do in the last few decades.
The first item we began to practice was gospel preaching by door-knocking. I believe all you trainees have tasted the joy, the song, as well as the tears in this matter. The tastes of sourness, sweetness, bitterness, and spicy hotness are all there. If you want to be an overcomer by visiting people for the preaching of the gospel, you must be prepared like an athlete in the Olympic games. During the time of the competition, every aspect of your life has to be adjusted and restricted. You cannot eat as you please, and you cannot do as you please. This is a suffering. It causes you to lose your soul-life. This is why the Lord said repeatedly in the Gospels that man has to “lose his soul-life for My sake” (Matt. 10:39; 16:25; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24). To lose the soul-life means to cause the soul to lose its enjoyment and to suffer. It is not too hard to knock on the door of our relatives and preach the gospel to them. But to knock on a stranger’s door is not easy. For that you have to lose your soul-life. Therefore, before you go out to knock on doors, you have to spend at least twenty minutes to deal with sins, to pray, and to be filled with the Holy Spirit. These three items are the prerequisites for our going out to knock on doors. Anyone going out to knock on doors without dealing with sins, praying, and being filled with the Holy Spirit will definitely make the trip in vain. But if you spend twenty or thirty minutes to deal with sins, to pray, and to be filled with the Holy Spirit before going out to knock on doors, your preaching of the gospel will be victorious, and you will experience in a genuine way that the Lord is one with you and that His power and authority are with you.
Although I have been a Christian for sixty years, I have just discovered that to preach the gospel in an absolutely overcoming way, we must knock on doors. Today the most universal and effective way to preach the gospel is by door-knocking. During the last year and a half in which we practiced door-knocking here, we baptized over thirty thousand people. No other method can compare with this. Also, its advantages are many-sided. Our former way of preaching the gospel reached only the ones that we were acquainted with; but when we practice preaching the gospel by door-knocking, we contact many that we did not know and could not reach before. Because of this way of door-knocking by sweeping through a district, house by house, we have not only gained thirty thousand new ones, but, unexpectedly, have also recovered over two thousand dormant brothers and sisters.
Previously I gave you a budget. If one-fourth of the saints meeting with us would go out to knock on doors, in just thirteen years, by the year 2000 A.D., all the doors in the whole world would be knocked on by us. Today, the gospel has been preached in every corner of the world; but it has not reached every household. In order to send it to every household, there must be the door-knocking. We have discovered that no other way of gospel preaching requires us to pay a higher price than door-knocking. Door-knocking requires that we sacrifice our time, our family life, our face, and our self. This is just as the Lord told us, “I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves” (Matt. 10:16). However, He also said, “a son of peace is there” (Luke 10:6). Our Lord knows that among the wolves there are still the sheep, the sons of peace, and He wants us to go and bring them out.
From now on, in the Lord’s recovery, we must lead the church to practice this matter of door-knocking for the preaching of the gospel. This does not mean that we take door-knocking as a condition for the receiving of a saint. We cannot expect every saint to preach the gospel by knocking on doors. But we do hope to build up this family tradition of door-knocking among us. Today in Taiwan, both knowledge and riches are abounding. Entertainments of all sorts also have increased. If we still use the old way in gospel preaching, we will not succeed. We must pay the price to be an overcomer, to take this overcoming way to preach the gospel by knocking on doors.