HOW TO CONTACT PEOPLE (2)
In order to be vital, we should be ones who are in the intimate and thorough fellowship with the Lord, without anything between the Lord and us. If we are not such persons, we are not qualified to contact people for God’s economy. Many in Christianity promote soul-winning. They may gain people, but most of the ones they gain are dying spiritually. We do not want to bring dead and dying people into the recovery. We must have the vitality to vitalize those whom we contact. The vitality is hidden in our intimate, thorough fellowship with the Lord, with nothing between us and the Lord. This makes us absolutely one with the Lord.
We must have a thorough confession all the time of our failures, defects, wrongdoings, practices of the flesh and of our natural man, our offenses toward God and men, and our sins. We want to remain in and be conformed to Christ’s death ( Phil. 3:10 ). We must confess that we have not been fully conformed to His death, especially in the way that we speak to our spouse. First John 1 says that if we say we do not have sin, we are lying ( vv. 8 , 10 ). If we say we have no sin, this means that we are blind. We are full of sins, so we must make a thorough confession of our sins. Because our hands become dirty throughout the day, we have to wash them many times. In the same way, we must confess our sins to the Lord throughout the day to receive the continual cleansing of His blood.
We should pray thoroughly for our visiting of people and for those whom we visit and contact. We should not contact someone without praying for him. We should pray adequately and desperately for the people whom we contact. In the past I encouraged the saints to visit people by knocking on their doors once a week for about three hours. Those who go out should be able to stand on the thorough prayer they have had throughout the week. We should pray desperately that the Lord would make us fruitful. If each of us cannot gain one person for the Lord within a year, this is a shame. The Lord charged us to go and bear much fruit for the Father to be glorified ( John 15:8 , 16 ). We must keep the Lord’s word to bear fruit, but we have not done this absolutely.
We must be so familiar with all the outlines of the recent messages concerning the person of Christ and His accomplishments in the three stages of His full ministry. We can memorize them and use them spontaneously in our visiting and contacting of people. The churches in Taiwan have entered into the way of pray-reading, studying, reciting, and prophesying all the items of the outlines. If we practice this, we will be saturated and soaked with all these points, and we will have much of the truth to speak to others. If we take this way, we can become very useful in going out to speak to people. What we speak concerning the person of Christ according to the new light that we have received will be very attractive to people, because they have never heard such things.. (The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1994-1997, vol. 5, “The Vital Groups”, ch. 15, pp. 182-184)
The church in Zamboanga 