AWAKE, SLEEPER, AND ARISE FROM THE DEAD, AND CHRIST WILL SHINE ON YOU (5)
You must take care of another principle in your fellowship with the Lord. When you go to the Lord, you must be sincere. You must not try to avoid the Lord by choosing the easy way or by compromising. That means you sell yourself cheaply. When you go to the Lord, you have to say Amen to whatever He speaks to you.
Do not say that you cannot do something or that you can do something. We cannot do anything in ourselves, but we can trust in Him. This is a great gift. A child does not need to cook, but the child should trust in the mother’s cooking. Our problem is that we either do not do anything or we try by ourselves to do it. Both are wrong. Do not do it, but trust in Him. Then He will do it for you all the time. Paul says that he was able to do all things in the One who empowered him (Phil. 4:13). He tells us clearly that we can do nothing, but he also tells us that we can trust in Him. Thus, Paul gives us a lot of imperatives. We need to take these imperatives by trusting in the Lord. Do not take the vital groups as a movement. Just go to the Lord. Get yourself vitalized. Then go to produce a vital group, not form one.
Verse 14 of Ephesians 5 is an imperative—“Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead.” We should take heed to this word. There is not any doctrine here. We must wake up. If we do not, we are through. We say that we hate the deadness of Sardis, but we have to arise from the dead. Awake and arise! This verse is very practical to us. If we awake and arise, Christ will shine on us. His shining will work out many things and show us where we are. He will shine on us to expose us. If we do not arise, Christ’s shining is not with us. His shining is waiting for our arising. We need to be vitalized because we are sleeping. We need to be saved from our deadness.
Do not trust in others to help you in this matter. You have to pray. You have to put your trust in the Lord. Only the Lord is the source. Only He can shine on you. Only He can bring you into the light to cause you to be fully exposed. Only He can render a real repentance and confession to you. The vital groups should be started by your going to the Lord. This is the sowing of the seed, and something will grow out of this. (Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1993, vol. 2, “The Training and Practice of the Vital Groups”, ch. 8, pp. 329-330)
The church in Zamboanga 