A Great Quote By The Late Watchman Nee About The Kingdom

 

 “If we only preach grace without preaching the kingdom, the church will suffer and God’s children will suffer; and when the kingdom comes, there will be even greater suffering.  I must speak as I ought to speak.  I admit that after speaking in these few days, some will increase their opposition against me.  If these are my words, I am willing to see them opposed. Even I myself would oppose them. But if these things are the Word of God, and if God has spoken them, what can I do?  How I wish that I did not have to talk about these things. How I wish I could preach something that everyone would like to hear.  I am not Matthew.  I am not Mark.  I am not Paul.  I did not write the book of Hebrews, and I did not write Revelation.  If I were the writer, I could change things.  But these things are God’s Word.  God has spoken them and determined that they should be so.  My friends, when you read the Bible, you have to read what God has said.  You must not consider what man has said.  You should only care for what God has said.

 

The greatest difficulty today in studying the Bible lies in the prejudice in the mind of God’s children.  They have what they consider as truth and what they consider is heresy.  They think that everything that matches them is truth, and everything that does not match them and that differs from them is heresy.  REGARDLESS of how scriptural a basis there is for it, any thought or concept contrary to theirs is considered heresy.  But if that is one’s attitude, he is through.  At issue today is what God said. 

 

I am happy in my heart because I can preach the “heresy” of God’s Word and I can oppose the “truth” in man’s teaching.  Today we have to be clear before the Lord. We cannot be under any authority but that of God’s Word. I know no other authority. I do not know what theology is; I do not know what man’s word is; I do not know what the tradition of the church is.  I only know what the Bible says, and only what it says counts.  We must subject ourselves to it only.  We cannot change God’s Word.  The Word of God tells us the destiny of His children.  It tells us what we will experience in the kingdom.  We must pay attention to these issues because sooner or later we will face them again.  If we pay attention to them we will be careful how we live on earth today.”

 

Watchman Nee was a very radical man.  He spent the last 20 years of his life in a Chinese prison cell.  His own family put him there, that is, his Christian brothers that did not like what he preached.  He paid a price!  And it cost him everything