Great Searchings of Heart
Morning revival verses
Day 6
Judges 5:12–13 Awake! Awake, Deborah! / Awake! Awake, speak forth a song! / Arise, Barak; / And lead captive your captives, son of Abinoam. 13 Then a remnant of the nobles went down; / The people of Jehovah went down with me against the mighty:
Judges 5:31 May all Your enemies so perish, O Jehovah. / But may those who love Him be like the sun / When it rises in its might. And the land had rest forty years.
Acts 13:47 For so the Lord has commanded us, “I have set you as a light of the Gentiles, that you would be for salvation unto the uttermost part of the earth.”
Today’s Reading
I hope we will make a strong resolution to accomplish something while we are still young and capable. We must be like those in Judges 5 who made “great resolutions in heart” and “great searchings of heart” (vv. 15-16). We must achieve something for the Lord. We must never bury the grace that the Lord has given us or the gain that we have received from our training. When the Lord returns, we will be in trouble if the treasure within us is not dug out and the talents are not utilized. I hope that we will spend all we have and will not hold back anything. If we have a talent, we should spend a talent. If we have two talents, we should spend two talents. Only then will the Lord have a way to go on. Otherwise, we can wait for fifty years, and nothing will happen. Today there are almost twenty million people in Taiwan. Only five hundred thousand are saved. Are we not ashamed of this? We have been here for more than thirty years. The gospel has not spread very far. Do our hearts not ache? Perhaps we have grown numb to this fact. I hope that this word will prick our hearts. [Crucial Words of Leading in the Lord’s Recovery, Book 1: The Vision and Definite Steps for the Practice of the New Way, Chapter 16]
NOT GIVING OURSELVES TO THE LORD, BUT DENYING OURSELVES
The chorus of Hymns, #456 says, “O Jesus, Lord and Savior, / I give myself to Thee, / For Thou, in Thy redemption, / Didst give Thyself for me.” There is also a problem with the chorus. It is difficult to find a verse in the Bible that says the Lord wants us to give ourselves to Him. On the contrary, the Lord wants us to deny ourselves. Not only does the Lord not want our self; He even tells us that we should not want our self. Why would we give the Lord something that He does not want? Why would we give the Lord something He wants us to give up? Even though this hymn is very poetic, the truth contained in the poetry is not very high.
We should never think that discerning the truth is an easy matter….[In Matthew 16:21–24,] the Bible clearly tells us to deny ourselves; it does not want us to give ourselves to the Lord…. Romans 6:13 says, “Neither present your members as weapons of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as alive from the dead, and your members as weapons of righteousness to God.”…[Here,] yourselves in Romans 6 refers to our bodies. [We should present our bodies to the Lord.]
Myself in the chorus of Hymns, #456 refers mainly to the person in our soul, not to our body. Strictly speaking, we cannot give ourselves to the Lord; we must instead put ourselves aside. This is what Paul says in Galatians 2:20: “I am crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” The I, the self, in this hymn does not refer to the body but to the person, which is our natural I, the soul-life.
LETTING CHRIST LIVE IN US
If we do not have a basic knowledge of the truth when we read this hymn, we will gain a wrong understanding. The hymn says that we must give ourselves to live for Christ. To live for Christ is an erroneous concept. It is not that we live for Christ; it is that we let Christ live in us. Then, in our bodies we need to cooperate with the Lord and allow Him to direct us. According to what is written in Romans 6, when we present our bodies to be under His direction, we are offering our members to God (v. 13).
If we do not have the light of the truth when we sing this hymn, we will offer ourselves to God and think that we can do something great for Him. One of the problems in Christianity is that before believers give themselves to God, they do not have many difficulties. But as soon as they consecrate themselves to God, they have problems that result in divisions and produce many sects. Therefore, we must remember that we must not bring our “self” with us when we love the Lord. We should never think that after we have consecrated ourselves, we must live for Jesus from then on, nor should we want to accomplish something for Him. If we do this, we will fall into trouble, and after ten years the full-time serving ones will be divided into five or six different groups.
We should not consider living for Christ; instead, we must realize that we have already been crucified with Christ, that we have died, and that it is Christ who lives in us. We should not be persons who live for Christ; rather, we should be persons to whom to live is Christ. “Because we have judged this, that One died for all, therefore all died” (2 Cor. 5:14). If we have died, how can we still live? We must remember that we have all died. However, every way that we take in resurrection is a living way with a tremendous future because Christ is living in us. In ourselves, we are at a dead end. However, because Christ is living in us, we are full of hope and have a bright future.
If the young people have the slightest misconception concerning Hymns, #456, they will get into trouble. Anyone who is sixty-five years and over, however, will have a heart filled with so much gratitude that they will think it is sufficient just to have the opportunity to love the Lord, and they will be satisfied simply to serve Him in the church. The older ones do not really want to go out and do something great. Those who have been called by the Lord to serve Him full time for their entire lives have a wonderful testimony. Just as Judges 5:15 and 16 say, they have great resolutions in heart and great searchings of heart. But when we see some with such a lofty desire, there is also some concern because we fear that as “wild oxen” and “wild asses” they will desire to live for Jesus and want to accomplish something great. We fear that they will destroy the church. I say this because of lessons we have learned in the past. [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, Chapter 11]
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