AWAKE, SLEEPER, AND ARISE FROM THE DEAD, AND CHRIST WILL SHINE ON YOU (4)
Second Timothy 1 says that God has not given us a spirit of cowardice. He has not given us a weak, “wishy-washy” spirit. But God has given us a spirit of power, with a strong will; a spirit of love, with a loving emotion; and a spirit of sobermindedness, with a clear mind (v. 7). You must be strong in your will. All the followers of Christ, all the martyrs of the Lord, are people with a strong will. You cannot be wishy-washy. If you are, you can do nothing. We, the seekers of the Lord, must learn to be strong in our will. Because I have received a vision and am under the Lord’s enlightenment, I have to be strong for the Lord’s interests.
I say again that you must have a time to go to the Lord. You must go to the Lord again and again until you get the enlightenment and are exposed in His light…To be vital is not a matter of shouting some slogans or of carrying out some movement. To hear the fellowship concerning the vital groups and then to go to do it in ourselves is a movement. It means nothing. Only one thing counts—for you to contact the Lord by yourself.
I would like to give you a short testimony of my experience in this matter. I was with the Brethren for more than six years—from 1925 to 1931—when the Lord shined on me in a particular way. In August of 1931, while I was walking on the street, something deep within me said, “You have been with the Brethren for all these years. You have gone to meeting after meeting and have heard message after message. But look at how dead you are. In these years you didn’t bring one person to the Lord.” I was really bothered by this realization. The next morning, I went to the top of a hill to spend some time alone with the Lord. I wept and prayed, “Lord, have mercy upon me. What shall I do?” That was something vital. I did that every day for quite some time.
There is the need of a real start among us today. There must be some contact between you and the Lord. When I had my times with the Lord on the top of that hill, I had to repent and confess. This brought me into an intimate fellowship with the Lord. I did this day by day for a number of weeks. What I have been teaching here is according to what I have experienced. The many teachings that I had received from the Brethren did not help me in the matter of life. It was not until the Lord shined upon me that I began to be brought into the pathway of life.
You may say, “Well, the Lord has not come to me yet.” But I would say, “The Lord is waiting for you. You need to go to Him.” The Lord is within you, but you may not care to listen to Him. He is speaking all the time. You need to stop yourself from all other things. Go to a closed room, to a mountaintop, or to some other place to be with the Lord for a personal time. The only thing that has helped me and that can help you is to contact the Lord directly. No one can escape from the Lord’s presence. He is the source. Go to Him, and you will be enlightened. (Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1993, vol. 2, “The Training and Practice of the Vital Groups”, ch. 8, pp. 327-329)
The church in Zamboanga 