THE CHURCH BEING GOD’S GOAL
AND THE TARGET OF THE ENEMY
There is the need of such a transmission, because there are layers of opposition. In Hades there is opposition. On this earth there is opposition. In the air there is opposition. There is opposition from the evil one, who would even go to the third heaven. Mainly all this opposition is against the church. If we would speak only about the threefold dispensing, the triune dispensing, everyone would think this is wonderful, but once we speak about the church, opposition rises up. This is because the church is God’s goal.
When I first came to this country, I was warmly welcomed. In 1964 I was invited to speak to a group of people in Dallas. I was there for a week of conference meetings. My host and hostess exhorted me to speak only on Christ and not touch the church. They said that if I touched the church, no one would come the next day. At the end of this week, I realized that the Lord was burdened for me to speak on the church, so I made a strong resolution to do it. Before I spoke, I asked them to read Romans 12. By reading Romans 12 the host and the hostess realized that I would speak on the church, so they dropped their heads. That bothered the congregation. But there was a young man there by the name of Benson Phillips. Eventually, through that whole week, he was and still is the unique one caught by the Lord. So actually, I spent the whole week there just to catch him. After he came in, he took the lead among the saints in Texas, and now he has been sent to Russia.
Would you speak on the church? It is a battle to touch the church, to speak about the church. The church is the goal of God, and the church is the very target of the enemy. Throughout my over sixty years of ministry, I have been warned not to speak about the church. I was advised to just speak concerning the riches of Christ. The church is a bothering matter.
THE NEED TO SEE THE ONE BODY,
THE ONE CHURCH OF GOD
Look at today’s situation with the thousands of divisions among the Lord’s people. There is a "church market" full of division and confusion. In Anaheim there is a division called the Church of Taiwan in Anaheim. In my home town of Chefoo in mainland China, there was a division called the Church of England in China. Logically, the Church of England should be in England, and the Church of Taiwan should be in Taiwan. What confusion this is! Today there are not only divisions but also confusion. People have argued and have been divided over whether to have wine or grape juice at the Lord’s table. They have also been divided over what kind of bread to use at the Lord’s table.
In the recent past, there was a different teaching among us which said that the local church should be autonomous. If we receive such a teaching, this means that we have not seen that the church is the Body of Christ. Can any part of our physical body be autonomous? If the various parts of our body were autonomous, this would mean that our body was cut into pieces. How could we make our blood circulation autonomous? The circulation of our blood is throughout our entire body. In the same way, no part of the Body of Christ can be autonomous.
(The Issue of the Dispensing of the Processed Trinity and the Transmitting of the Transcending Christ, Chapter 6, by Witness Lee)
