BEING FORMED INTO AN ARMY TO VISIT THE DORMANT SAINTS
There is a Chinese saying: “What we truly care about inwardly will be manifested outwardly.” I have a heavy burden that I can no longer keep inside myself. On one hand, it is good that we enjoy the Lord, but on the other hand, we must go out to fight. We need to recruit brothers and sisters to join an army that will go out and fight for the Lord. The working saints from the ages of twenty-five to forty-five should be in the army; the older saints as well as the younger ones can also be in the army. We should not consider ourselves to be too old to join the army.
Our enjoyment of the Lord has deepened over the past few years. The prayers and praises in the table meeting are better than they were five years ago. As those who are learning and maturing, we must go out to teach what we have learned. A person must not study without imparting what he knows into others. Similarly, a person learning martial arts must not merely do exercises; he must also engage in a fight. Hence, the time has come for us to go out. We must go out to teach, and we must go out to fight.
Even though we can now use terms such as essential and economical in a concise yet powerful manner in the meetings, what should we do about all the saints who are wandering and who are not in the meetings?…We must form an army and devise a plan to solve this problem.
We must consider a strategy to bring back the…brothers and sisters who have been absent from the meetings for a long time. We all must share this responsibility. We cannot be at peace until we find our brothers and sisters and bring them back.
In a routine church life we may be very busy but still be unable to bring the…saints back to the church life. If we would have the determination to find these saints and bring them back, even if we had to give up our jobs, we will be able to accomplish this. We cannot guarantee that all of them will return, but we will be able to recover at least forty percent—that is almost seven thousand saints. This would be a sweet endeavor.
In order to achieve this goal we must take the lead to voluntarily join the army. Let us forget our age; regardless of our age, we can still join the army We must be so absorbed in going out to find our brothers and sisters that we would not even care for sleep or meals. If our brothers and sisters do not return, we should never have peace in our hearts. We must not think that we are using too much human effort or that we are compelling people too much. We must recover our lost brothers and sisters back to God’s house. (CWWL, 1984, vol. 4, “Crucial Words of Leading in the Lord’s Recovery, Book 3: The Future of the Lord’s Recovery and the Building Up of the Organic Service”, ch. 4, pp. 71-73)
The church in Zamboanga 