Abiding in the Lord

NOT QUENCHING THE SPIRIT OR NEGLECTING THE LORD'S WORD

Scripture Reading: 1 Thes. 5:17-21; Col. 3:16-17; Eph. 5:18b-20

Prayer: O Lord, we thank and praise You from the depths of our heart for gathering us once again. Your Spirit dwells in us, and also Your word is in us. We truly offer up our worship to You from the depths of our being because You have drawn us to seek You and Your word. Cleanse us again with Your precious blood. We trust in Your presence and the moving of Your Spirit; we do not trust in what we can do. Lord, we pray that You bless every one of us. We can sow and plant, but we cannot give life to others or cause them to grow. Lord, only You can do these things. For this reason, we really look to You to take care of the needs of everyone, especially the newly saved ones, that we may be full of light within and have Your word as a base to know assuredly that we have been saved, and that every one of us may become living to flow out Your life from within us.

O Lord, give us the utterance and pour out Yourself again upon us so that Your thought, Your feeling, and Your rich word may dwell in us. May what we speak be only Yourself. We pray that You come to every one of us that we may gain You right now.

O Lord, we can never forget Your enemy, Satan, the evil one. We ask You to crush him, even crush him now from within us. We bind him in Your name; we plunder his goods and release those who are bound by him. O Lord, set every one of us free--from sin, from the bondage of the world, and from the oppression of Satan. O Lord, glorify Your own name. We give You all the honor and glory. In Your own lovely name. Amen.

ABIDING IN THE LORD BEING A MYSTERY THAT CAN BE EXPERIENCED

In the previous chapter we clearly saw that a living way for us to abide in the Lord is to pray unceasingly and to give thanks in all things. The phrase abiding in the Lord is truly a mystery to the Chinese, but I believe that from the previous chapters we all must have gained some understanding. Although abiding in the Lord is a mystery, it is not an incomprehensible mystery. Perhaps we do not thoroughly understand it, but we can experience it. Take the human body as an example. A doctor will tell us that after a lifelong study, he still is very limited in his understanding of the human body. The more a doctor becomes a specialist, the more he feels that he understands so little. The longer a doctor practices medicine, the more he feels that his knowledge is short because the human body is too mysterious. In other words, he does not know all there is to know.

Not only so, there is an abstract system in man. Our heart, lungs, skin, bones, and so forth belong to a tangible, physical system; but our heart, mind, emotion, will, conscience, soul, and so forth belong to an intangible, nonphysical, psychological system. This nonphysical part is even harder to understand and explain. I have lived for over eighty years, but today if you ask me how to distinguish emotion, feeling, sentiment, and love, it would be very difficult for me to answer. Love is something of our heart; hence, it is an inward matter. Then, what is emotion or sentiment? How do we distinguish them from love? It is really hard to explain. Furthermore, in the deepest part of our being there is a spirit, which is an inward matter even more mysterious. The Bible tells us that God is Spirit (John 4:24); it also tells us that God not only stretched forth the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth but also formed a spirit within man (Zech. 12:1). From this verse we see that the Bible considers the human spirit as important as the heavens and the earth.

The matter of the spirit within man is truly mysterious and difficult to explain. Although the Bible speaks of the heart, its emphasis is still on the spirit. Regrettably, the Western missionaries who translated the Bible into Chinese were not very clear regarding the heart and the spirit, nor did the Chinese scholars who helped them in the translation clearly understand these terms, even though these scholars had high literary degrees. The result is that they combined these two words and produced a compound term, heart-spirit. Hence, this compound word heart-spirit occurs frequently in the Chinese Union Version. It is difficult enough to understand the heart and the spirit separately; putting these two mysterious items together makes it almost impossible for us to understand them.

Some of the hymns, following the usage of the Chinese Union Version, also use this compound word. When we were collecting such hymns for our hymnal, we tried to separate the two words by a comma. The heart and the spirit are not one item but two separate items. Despite the fact that they are hard to distinguish, they can be experienced by us. The same is true with the matter of abiding in the Lord. I trust that after considering these few chapters, you will already have had some experiences of abiding in the Lord. Even though you could not explain them, you surely will have had the taste of them.

GIVING THANKS IN ALL THINGS

In addition to abiding in the Lord, we need to give thanks in all things and to pray unceasingly. Here we must first say something about some language problems. Those who read the Bible know that the problems with language come from the tower of Babel. In the Greek text the clause in everything give thanks does not have the notion of blessings as the Chinese translation indicates. The Chinese translators rendered this clause as in everything thank the blessings because, according to its strict sense in Chinese, the word thank is a transitive verb and therefore requires a direct object; there would be no justification for not having a direct object. For this reason the word blessings was added. But such an addition distorts the meaning of this particular clause. In our experience we should not "thank the blessings"; rather, we should thank the Lord Himself. It is not "thanking the blessings"; it is giving thanks.

To pray unceasingly means to use our spirit, to exercise our spirit. For example, we use our feet to walk and our mouth to eat and talk. Likewise, we use our spirit to pray, and when we pray, we use our spirit.

The many years of my speaking for the Lord in serving Him may be divided into several periods. Before 1943 the emphasis of my messages leaned heavily on the truth. I spoke on many truths, such as God's selection, predestination, sanctification, and justification. Forty-two of the sixty topics in the book entitled Basic Truths in the Bible were written by me in 1943; in the previous year I had spoken on these forty-two topics, resulting in a great revival. When the revival came, I began to suffer persecutions. First,