Message Four—What Are We?
John 1:22 They said then to him, Who are you, that we may give an answer to those who sent us? What do you say about yourself?
2 Pet. 1:12 Therefore I will be ready always to remind you concerning these things, even though you know them and have been established in the present truth.
Being Established in the Present Truth
First, we must clarify that we are not some thing. We are not a new denomination. Neither are we a new sect, a new movement, or a new organization. We are not here to join a certain sect or form our own sect. Other than having a special calling and commission from God, there would be no need for us to exist independently. The reason we are here is that God has given us a special calling.
Second Peter 1:12 mentions the words “established in the present truth.” The “present truth” can also be rendered the “up-to-date truth.” What is the up-to-date truth? Actually, all the truths are in the Bible; there is not one truth that is not in the Bible. Although they are all in the Bible, through man’s foolishness, unfaithfulness, negligence, and disobedience many of the truths were lost and hidden from man. The truths were there, but man did not see them or touch them. Not until the fullness of time did God release certain truths during particular periods of time and cause them to be revealed once more. …Every worker of the Lord should inquire before God as to what the present truth is.
God Recovering Different Truths from the Sixteenth Century On
From the sixteenth century on, God has been recovering different truths. The sixteenth century was the age of the Reformation. It was a time of monumental change in religion. …We have to consider the history from the time of the Reformation as belonging to four periods. The first period is the period of the Reformation. The second period is the time immediately after the Reformation, from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century. The third period is the nineteenth century, and the last period is the present twentieth century.
First, let us consider Luther’s Reformation. …The best thing about him was his recovery of the truth of justification by faith. This is Luther’s particular recovery. Of course, God did not recover all the truths through Luther. Luther recovered only the truth concerning justification by faith.
Following this we come to the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In 1524 the Anabaptists, a group of believers who proposed re-baptism after infant-sprinkling, were raised up in Germany. …After twelve years, in 1536 John Calvin was raised up by God. …Finally, in Scotland he had a fresh beginning and established the Scottish Presbyterian Church.
By 1732 the earliest missionary body in the world was conceived, the so-called Moravian Brethren. …They were the first group of brothers to go throughout the entire world to evangelize.
At the same time there was a new discovery within the Catholic Church. A group of spiritual people were raised up by the Lord. …One of his contemporaries was Madame Guyon. She was born in 1648 and died in 1717. She was even more knowledgeable in the matters of the union with God’s will and the denial of the self.
In 1827 a group of people were raised up in Dublin, Ireland. Among them were men like Edward Cronin and Anthony Norris Groves. They saw that many things in the church were dead, lifeless, and formal. They began to ask the Lord to show them the church according to the biblical revelation. Through prayer and fellowship, they felt that they should rise up and meet according to the principle of 1 Corinthians 14. As a result, they began to break bread at a brother’s home. …In addition, the Brethren made many discoveries concerning the millennium, the question of rapture, and the prophecies in Daniel and Revelation.
After Hopkins, God gained another sister, Mrs. Jessie Penn-Lewis. …Mrs. Penn-Lewis was one who truly bore the cross. Through her experiences, many believers were attracted to pursue the truth concerning the cross. …We can see that the discovery of God’s truth is progressive; the more it advances, the more complete it becomes. By the end of the nineteenth century, almost all of the truths had been recovered.
There was the great Welsh Revival of 1904. During this revival many towns saw their whole population saved to such an extent that there were no more souls to save. Many phenomena of Pentecost were manifested among them.
God’s Cumulative Revelations and Present Work
We know that God’s truths are cumulative; later truths do not negate earlier ones. All the past truths of God form the foundation of the truths today. What we see today are the cumulative revelations of God.
From 1926 on, we began to release many messages concerning salvation, the church, and the cross, and we testified much concerning these things. By 1927 we concentrated our attention on the subjective work of the cross. We saw that concerning the cross, there is not only the truth concerning Christ’s death, but there is also the fact of resurrection. …After this, God showed us what the Body of Christ is and where the reality of this Body is. We began to realize that as there is only one life of Christ, there is only one church. …By February of 1928, we began to mention something concerning God’s eternal purpose. From that time on, we began to tell people what God’s eternal purpose is. …Despite the above revelations, it was not until 1934 that we realized that the centrality of everything related to God is Christ. Christ is God’s centrality and God’s universality.
I believe that God has only one work today. It is the message of Colossians 1:18 which says that God desires to see Christ have the first place in all things. The basis of everything is the death, the resurrection, and the ascension of Christ. Other than Christ, there is no spiritual reality. This is God’s “present truth.”
Our Work and Responsibility
Our work is to sound out the call to God’s children to return to God’s central purpose, to take Christ as the center of all things, and to take His death, resurrection, and ascension as the basis of everything. This is the message of Colossians 1 and 3. We know the position of the church in the New Testament. We realize that this position is lofty and spiritual. We thank God for the help rendered to us from the Western missionaries. Yet God is showing us today that we should bring everything back to God’s central purpose. Our work today is to return to the biblical ground of the church.
We have four responsibilities today: (1) Concerning the sinners, we have to preach the gospel. (2) Concerning Satan, we have to realize there is a spiritual warfare. (3) Concerning the church, we have to hold fast what we see today. (4) Concerning Christ, we should testify of the fact of His preeminence in all things. (CWWN, vol. 11, “The Present Testimony (4),” ch. 15)