“The Lord’s work is only the outflow of life. It’s not a matter of working for the Lord, but of letting the Lord work in you.”
(Watchman Nee)
Author: livinglywrong
Quotes by ME Barber
“The requirement to work for the Lord is not to work.”
“Whoever cannot stop working for the sake of God cannot work for the sake of God.”
“Whenever God delays in telling me His will, I find that I still have a disobedient heart and an improper motive within me.”
She often asked brother Nee, “do you love God’s will?” She did not ask, “do you obey His will?”
“The secret to understanding the will of God is that 95% is a matter of submitting to the will of God, and only 5% is a matter of understanding.”
What do you do when the devil knocks at your door?
When I was first saved, I heard a story about a young girl who knew the meaning of victory very well. During the Keswick Convention, a man asked the little girl how she overcame when the devil came to her. She answered, “In the past, if the devil came to knock at my front door, as soon as he knocked, I would say, ‘Don’t come in. Don’t come in.’ But the result was always a failure. Now when the devil knocks at my door, I say, ‘Lord, You open the door for me.’ If the Lord opens the door, and the devil sees the Lord, he will say, ‘Sorry, I came to the wrong door,’ and he will run away.”
(The Overcoming Life, ch. 6)
Never contact anyone with a cheerless countenance
LEARNING HOW TO NOURISH PEOPLE
The members of the vital groups have to learn how to nourish people to continue their cherishing of people. Cherishing without nourishing is in vain. When a mother wants to feed a naughty child, she will first make him happy by cherishing him. But without nourishing him, her cherishing is meaningless. After cherishing the child, the mother nourishes him with food. This is the way that Christ as the Head takes care of His Body, the church. He nourishes us after cherishing us.
Revelation 1 shows how Christ cares for the churches. Revelation is a book of signs. A sign is a symbol with spiritual significance. The first sign in Revelation shows Christ in His humanity as the High Priest, and the last sign is the New Jerusalem. As the Son of Man, Christ as the High Priest is taking care of all the churches as lampstands (1:12-13). On the one hand, He is cherishing the churches in His humanity; on the other hand, He is nourishing the churches in His divinity. The members of the vital groups have to learn these two things. When we visit people, invite them to our home, or contact them before and after the meetings, we must be one with Christ to cherish and nourish them.
THE MEANING OF CHERISHING AND NOURISHING PEOPLE
To cherish people is to make them happy and to make them feel pleasant and comfortable. We must have a pleasant countenance when we contact people. We should be happy and rejoicing. We should not contact anyone with a cheerless countenance. We must give people the impression that we are genuinely happy and pleasant. Otherwise, we will not be able to cherish them, to make them happy.
Then we should go on to nourish them. We do not nourish people when we speak to them about marriage, courtship, politics, the world situation, or education. To nourish people is to feed them with the all-inclusive Christ in His full ministry in three stages. When we speak to people about Christ, we should not speak to them in an incomprehensible way, in a kind of language that they do not understand. We have to find a way to present the all-inclusive Christ to everyone.
(The Vital Groups, ch. 11)
Christ was made man that we might be made God
Athanasius, one of the early church fathers, said concerning Christ, “He was made man that we might be made God,” and “The Word was made flesh… that we, partaking of His Spirit, might be deified.” This is the principle of God’s move on earth. God’s move is in man and through man. God’s move is to deify man, making man God in life and in nature but not, of course, in the Godhead. (Life-Study of Job, message 24)
“For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” (Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation)
How fruitful we are depends on whether we have an intimate concern
In 2 Corinthians 7 Paul was very emotional. In verse 13 he says that he “rejoiced more abundantly over the joy of Titus.” …Paul was very human and emotional in his ministering of life. Paul was so emotional because his concern was so deep and intimate. Without this kind of concern, we could never be abundantly rejoicing in the way Paul was. Instead, we may be as cold as a freezer, altogether lacking in concern for the saints. Instead of warming up others, we make them even colder. Nothing can grow when it is in such a frozen condition. We need the weather of spring to come to thaw us out and warm up our life. Once again there is a need for a ministering life. Do you know what a ministering life is? It is a life that warms up others. Learn to warm others. This is to have an intimate concern for them.
Many have read 2 Corinthians 7 without touching the matter of Paul’s intimate concern. If we do not have this kind of concern for others, we will not be fruitful. If I would minister life to the saints, I must have a genuine concern for them, a concern that is emotional, deep, and intimate. I must be so concerned that, at times, I may appear to others to be foolish or beside myself.
(Life-study of 2 Corinthians, message 44)
Fact, faith, feeling
“In that greatest event of this [the 19th] century, the emancipation of our slaves, there is a wonderful illustration of the way of faith. The slaves received their freedom by faith, just as we must receive ours. The good news was carried to them that the government had proclaimed their freedom. As a matter of fact they were free the moment the Proclamation was issued, but as a matter of experience they did not come into actual possession of their freedom until they had heard the good news and had believed it. The fact had to come first, but the believing was necessary before the fact became available, and the feeling would follow last of all. This is the divine order always, and the order of common-sense as well.
- The fact.
- The faith.
- The feeling.
But man reverses this order and says,
- The feeling.
- The faith.
- The fact.
Had the slaves followed man’s order in regard to their emancipation, and refused to believe in it until they had first felt it, they might have remained in slavery a long while.”
(From Hannah Whitall-Smith’s “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life”, chapter 6)
We all must be properly emotional and full of expression
“In [Romans 12:15] Paul says, ‘Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.’ We must be transformed before we can rejoice and weep with others. Some people were born in such a way that they are unable to weep or to rejoice. Regardless of how happy or joyful you are, they remain expressionless, resembling the statue of Mary at the entrance of a Catholic church, which never changes its expression. Some brothers and sisters are like this. They do not know how to rejoice or to weep with others; they seem to be stones without human affection. However, the church life needs emotional people. We all must be properly emotional and full of expression. I would like to have a face that can express all my emotions properly and adequately. We cannot put together people with stone faces and call it the church life; we must be living stones, stones full of affection. We must learn to rejoice and to weep with others.”
(Life-Study of Romans, pp. 315-316)
The divine life is needed for family life
“Suppose we did not have the divine life within us. This would certainly make family life very difficult, especially in relation to our in-laws, and particularly, to the mother-in-law…. For both a husband and a wife, a mother-in-law can create a difficult situation. For this reason, humanly speaking, it is better that a married couple not have a mother-in-law live with them.”
(Life-study of 1 Peter, pp. 173-174, 182)
What does it mean to serve God?
“The dictionary tells us that a priest is a person who serves God professionally. Most Christians would tell us that a priest is one who serves God. This is right, but what does it mean to serve God? Today’s Christians would answer that to serve God is to work for God. This answer is wrong! To say that a priest is a person who serves God is right, but to say that to serve God is merely to do something for God, is wrong.
To realize what a priest is, we must first see God’s eternal plan. God is a God of purpose. He has a purpose which He wants to accomplish. According to the revelation of the Scriptures, God has a plan to work Himself into a group of people in order that He might be their life and they might become His expression. Based upon this plan, God created man.
Man was destined to receive God, to be filled, saturated and permeated with God, and to have God flow out of him that he might be the living expression of God. This is a brief definition of a priest. He must contact God, be filled with God, and be possessed by God completely that he may be built up with others in the flow of the life of God. Then the priesthood will be God’s living, corporate expression.
Christianity’s concept is that if we love the Lord, we must work for Him. This is a natural, religious concept, not the revelation of the Bible. God never intended to call us merely to work for Him. God’s intention is that we must first open ourselves to Him that He may come into us to fill and flood us until He has taken possession of every part of our being. Our whole being must be saturated and permeated with Him. Then we will be one with Him. We will not only be clothed outwardly with Him as power, but permeated inwardly with Him as everything. Then spontaneously, God will flow out of us, and we will be built up with others in this flow of life.
I must repeat that a priest is not one who merely works for God. God has no intention of calling us to do something for Him. His intention is that we answer His call by opening ourselves to Him and saying, “Lord, here I am, not ready to work for You, but ready to be filled and possessed by You and to be one with You.” Not until we are one with the Lord can we ever work for Him and be a real priest. The main function of a priest is not to work but to spend time in the presence of the Lord until he is one with Him in the spirit. The priesthood that God plans to have is a corporate man who is saturated and permeated with Himself.”
(The Priesthood, chapter 1)
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