HAVING ENTERED THROUGH THE NARROW GATE AND WALKING ON THE CONSTRICTED WAY (2)
God made the heavens and the earth, and He also ordained the night and the day. The night is very important, so it came first. The evening and the morning are one day in Genesis 1 (v. 5). For your health the night is important. If you take care of your night in a wise way, you will be healthy. Still there are a number of jobs in our society that require people to be on duty at night. We have to thank the nurses and the policemen who do their duty at night, sacrificing themselves for others. But according to the God-ordained principle, the night is for us to sleep, and the day is for our living and working.
Healthy people will tell you that they are regulated according to the principles of life. Each one of these principles regulates us. If we eat too fast, we will suffer. Neither should we eat too slow. That is not healthy eating. Healthy eating must be moderate, neither too fast nor too slow, in order to satisfy the inner feeling of our body. When we take care of the principles of life in the human realm, this makes us vital physically.
We are being trained to be vital. But in our concept we think that to be vital is to be like Samson. Samson, however, was not vital. He did not live long. He even had to commit a kind of suicide by sacrificing himself in order to kill others (Judg. 16:30). On the other hand, Boaz was very vital. He was a regular person. In the past summer training we pointed out that we cannot see anything of life in Judges. But the book of Ruth, a book of four chapters, is a book of life. I believe that if the book of Ruth were written today, the writer could get a Nobel Prize. That is a marvelous short story full of life. Boaz was a healthy person; he was vital. Some powerful Pentecostal preachers were immoral, and yet they were powerful. They were like Samson.
Do you want to be like Samson or like Boaz? We surely want to be like Boaz, a person who was regulated according to the life principles. He was a vital person. Who brought Christ to you? Samson is not in the lineage of Christ. But Boaz is a most important link in the lineage of Christ (Matt. 1:5). Christ could come to us because of Boaz. This is what it means to be vital.
When I was looking to the Lord for this message, the Lord impressed me, “Tell the saints who love Me and who want to be vital something about the narrow gate and the constricted way.” To be vital should not be a miracle. Trees do not grow in a miraculous way. We planted many small trees around the meeting hall in Anaheim seventeen years ago, but today they are all big. Their growth was according to the principles of life. God ordained these principles. (Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1993, vol. 2, “The Training and Practice of the Vital Groups”, ch. 13, pp. 371-372)
The church in Zamboanga 