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Additional Local Church Quotes by Witness Lee on Watchman Nee’s Burden for the Local Churches
The church is God’s goal. Today He places this goal
before man. God’s ultimate desire is to have the New Jerusalem. God intends to
put the church, which represents the New Jerusalem, into every city as a unit.
Before the New Jerusalem descends from heaven, God’s goal is to have a
miniature of the New Jerusalem in every city. This means that God desires to
have a church in every city to express His eternal will. From beginning to
end, the most important work God desires to do is to build up the Body of
Christ. For this reason God establishes a local church in every city. The
local church is the miniature of the magnificent church of God, a small-scale
model expressing the New Jerusalem. The will of God is to establish the
church, the Body of Christ, the New Jerusalem. But this scope is too vast; how
can we touch the New Jerusalem, which is in the new heaven and new earth? What
shall we do? We can never grasp this firmly. However, you can come to Shanghai
to achieve this purpose. For in every city there is a miniature where God puts
the saved ones and unites and assembles them together to become a local church
and thereby express His will….
I am not here accusing you! I myself am guilty! In
these many years of evangelistic work in China, very few have paid attention
to God’s emphasis. Roman Catholicism has been in China for more than three
hundred years, and if we count from Nestorianism, Christianity has been in
China for over a thousand years. Yet no one has ever paid attention to the
expression of the eternal will of God on a small scale. But we also are the
same. We only pay attention to personal victory over sins, overcoming
experiences, work, and saving souls, but we have not yet seen how to express
in a particular locality God’s will concerning the church. May God be gracious
to us and cause us to see that personal victory over sins, overcoming
experiences, and the work of saving souls are merely things related to the
local assemblies—they should not replace the church. God’s center is fixed on
the church in every locality, and everything else should be joined to this
center. Therefore, our aim today is not merely to pay attention to overcoming
experiences, victory over sin, preaching the gospel to sinners, and having
prayers answered. Rather, we should go a step further and ask what we should
do in order to be fitly framed together with other brothers and
sisters….
The question today is not whether this piece of stone
is good or bad, big or small, beautiful or ugly, but whether this piece of
stone is properly fitted with other pieces of stone and whether these pieces
of stone can be built into a house. Many Christians today are very good, and
others are extremely shining and beautiful, but they cannot be framed
together. They are either too big or too tall; they just cannot be fitly
framed with other Christians. Every person who is saved is a living stone.
Therefore, the question is not whether you are victorious, defeated, powerful,
weak, good, or bad. The question is whether you can be joined with all the
other living stones, properly fitted into the building. If you are a stone
which leaves cracks between you and the other stones, you are not of much use
in the house of God.
(Witness Lee, Seer of the Divine Revelation,
265-270)
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