TRAINING THE SAINTS TO HAVE A NEW START

We must spend a long time to train the saints in every locality. You need to speak on these matters continuously as a kind of training for at least seven days; it is better to take two weeks. Then hopefully we may have a new start. Otherwise, whatever you do according to what you heard was going on in Taiwan and according to what you heard from my messages will just be a mere copying. That will be just like the tongue-speaking sister upholding the dead body to get it to walk. This will not work. Please keep in your good memory the contents of Book 7 regarding the principle of the genuine oneness. Based upon that fellowship, train the saints in your locality for two weeks with much prayer plus fasting. Train them with the fellowship in this book, Book 8. Take more time to demonstrate and to illustrate until all the saints in your locality get a full knowledge of the real way revealed in the New Testament concerning our meetings.

To teach the saints to meet according to the way revealed in the New Testament needs some time. Do not just change the way of your meetings. That does not work. You must stir up every member in your locality to rise up to be profitable persons for the Lord's recovery, telling them that we are not here in any way or in any aspect to repeat the poor history of Christianity. We hate to see that repetition. We like to see a real restoration, a real revolutionizing in everything in the recovery. In studying the Bible we do not follow the old way. In prayer we do not follow the old way. In our service we do not like to follow the old way. In our meeting life, even the more, we do not like to follow the old way of Christianity. We refuse to repeat the pitiful, degraded history of Christianity. (Elders' Training, Book 08: The Life-Pulse of the Lord's Present Move, p. 45)

The same principle applies to the matter of eating. Many times our Lord went without food for the sake of His work. He did not make His eating a priority. But this does not mean that our Lord never ate. He could eat well at ordinary times. But when the need was before Him, He could forsake eating. This is to put the body under subjection. We are not so dependent on food that our work has to stop if we have to go hungry. Unfortunately, in the Lord's work, many cannot function without food. We undoubtedly need food, and we have to take care of our physical body, but the body must be trained to go without food when special circumstances call for it. Remember the occasion when the Lord sat down at noon beside Jacob's well to rest while the disciples went to get some food in the city. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and the Lord asked her for a drink. At the same time He opened up the matter of the living water to her. In the end the woman did not give Him anything to drink. It was high noon, the time for a meal and a drink, but the Lord patiently explained to this spiritually thirsty and suffering Samaritan woman the word of life and the meaning of the living water (John 4:5-26). This shows us how one can carry on God's work without the interruption of food. If we arrive at a certain place and cannot do anything until we have had a meal, our body is not serving us as it should. We should not be extremists, and we should not skip our meals all the time. But when there are special demands, we should be able to forego our eating. Bread is not the most important thing. We should be the master of our body. When we need to go without a meal, our body should obey us. We should not be overcome by our body's insistent cries for food. This is what it means to make our body our slave.

In Mark 3 the Lord was surrounded by such a multitude that He had no time to eat. His relatives reacted by seeking to drag Him away from the crowd, for they said He was beside Himself (vv. 20-21). Yet the Lord continued with His work. He was not beside Himself, but the multitude had their pressing needs. He was able to forego His food and drink for the sake of the work. If we can never forego our own needs when the work demands our immediate attention, we will have little effective work. At critical times we have to push ourselves a little to the extreme; we have to be somewhat beside ourselves. When the need calls for it, we should be able to bridle our body and ignore the demands for food and drink. We should not consider these demands to be mandatory.

The Bible plainly states that Christians should fast when occasion requires. The meaning of fasting is to temporarily put aside the legitimate demand of the body. Sometimes a special need calls for serious prayer. At these times we should fast before the Lord. We do not advocate fasting three or five times a week. But if a man has been a Christian for eight or ten years and has never fasted once, something is not right. The Lord spoke of fasting in His teaching on the mount. If we have never fasted, we lack something in our experience. The purpose of fasting is to make our body our slave. (Character of the Lord's Worker, The, pp. 49-50)