Presenting CWWN v11 - The Present Testimony (4)

kw: book summaries, watchman nee, christian ministry

This volume of The Collected Works of Watchman Nee contains the last part of the letters and articles by Watchman Nee published in The Present Testimony from October 1933 to August 1934. The articles include parts five through seven of "The New Covenant"; classic teaching by Nee such as "The Meekest Man", about the life and labors of Moses, "Living by Faith", about how God prepares us for a life that is steady in spite of circumstance, and "A Shallow Life", where he expounds the Parable of the Soils (which begins, "The sower went forth to sow") in a most searching and personal way.

A great portion of Watchman Nee's teaching is devoted to training young Christian workers, both those who might become elders and those who might engage in apostolic (missionary) work. After reading "Ministering to the House or to God?", a young and eager Christian might be forgiven for thinking he or she can never come up to the standard. And, of course, that is the point. Only Christ can minister to His church; our most pressing responsibility is to learn to "live Christ", based on Galatians 2:20, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me."

The closing portion of the book is "Questions Related to the Workers", not from The Present Testimony, but the contents of a talk delivered in January 1934. This was not a Q&A session, but is instead full answers to the ten most frequent and most crucial questions he had heard over and over from young workers. I consider this message an excellent "warm up" for reading his book, The Character of the Lord's Worker, published in 1948 and the subject of a (much) later portion of this series of posts.

The volume concludes with a Table of Contents for all 36 issues of The Present Testimony.