THE NORMAL CHRISTIAN CHURCH LIFE
The New Testament Pattern of The Churches, the Ministry and the Work
WATCHMAN NEE
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The danger, with those who know little about
life and reality, is to emphasize mere outward correctness; but with those to
whom life and reality are a matter of supreme importance, the temptation is to
throw away the divine pattern of things, thinking it is legal and technical. He
considers that he himself has authority to decide on outward matters and rather
fancies that to ignore God’s commands regarding them is an indication that he
has been delivered from legality an is walking in the liberty of the Spirit.
But God has not revealed the truths that concern our inner life; He has also
revealed truths relating to the outward expression of that life. God prizes the
inner reality, but He does not ignore the outward expression.
But God demands both inward and outward
purity. To have outer without inner is spiritual death, but to have inner
without outer is spiritualised life. And spiritualisation is not spirituality.
We seek to follow the leading of God’s
Spirit but at the same time we seek to pay attention to the examples shown us
in His word. The leading of His Spirit is precious, but if there is no example
in His word, then it is easy to substitute fallible thoughts and unfounded
feelings for the Spirit’s leading, drifting into error without realising it.
The Spirit’s guidance will always harmonise with the Scriptures. God cannot
lead a man one way in Acts and another way today. In externalities, the leading
may vary, but in principle, it is always the same; for God’s will is eternal,
therefore changeless. God is the eternal God and His will and ways all bear the
stamp of eternity.
Here is a very important principle: If we
want to know the mind of God, we must look at His commands in Genesis and not
look at His permissions later on, because every later permission has this
explanation: “…Because of your hardness
of heart but from the beginning it was not so!” It is God’s directive and
eternal will that we want to discover, not His permissive will. We want to see
things as they were when they proceeded in all their purity from the mind of
God, not what they have become, with time, as a result of the hardness of men’s hearts. In the light
of this, the question we must then ask ourselves is: What kind of generation of
believers/followers of Christ do we desire to be? Those who will follow Him
with half measures, in our own terms? Are we content to follow Him based on
what is clearly His permissive will or are we willing to press on to recover
His absolute and eternal will? Selah.
If we could understand the will of God
concerning His church, then we must not look to see how He led his people last
year or ten years ago, or hundred years ago, but we must return to the
beginning, to the “genesis” of the church, to see what he said and did then. It
is then that we find the highest expression of His will. Acts is the “genesis”
of the Church’s history and the church in the time of Paul is the “genesis” of
the Spirit’s work. Conditions in the church today are vastly different from
what they were then, but these present conditions could never be our example or
authoritative guide. We must return to the beginning. Only what God has set
forth as our example in the beginning is the eternal will of God. It is the
divine standard and our pattern for all time.
Christianity is not only built upon precepts
but upon examples. God has revealed his will not only by giving orders, but by
having certain things done in his church so that in the ages to come, others
might simply look at the pattern and know His will. God has not only directed
His people by means of abstract principles and objective regulations, but concrete
examples and subjective experience. One of God’s chief methods of instruction
is through history.
Shall we then say that because God has not
commanded a certain thing, we need not do it? If we have seen His dealings with
men in days past, if we have seen how He led His people and built up His
Church, can we still plead ignorance of His will? Must a child be told
explicitly how to do everything? Are there not many things he can learn simply
by watching his parents or his older siblings? We learn more readily by what we
see than what we hear, and the impression is deeper. That is why God has given
us so much of history.
As
I read, I am asking myself, but why are we so hardened in heart, so impetuous,
so presumptuous, so resistant to simple truth that we just dismiss these
obvious truths with a wave of the hand and rationalise everything Nee is saying
to his own perspectives. We convince ourselves that he is not the Holy Ghost
and is only speaking from his own subjective opinion – Lord have mercy!
This book is intended for those who, having
learned something of the cross, know the corruption of the human nature, and
seek to walk, not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. Its object is to help
those who acknowledge the lordship of Christ in all things, and are seeking to
serve Him in the way of His own appointing, not of their own choosing.
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