Introduction

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. JOHN 12:24

There is a kind of Christian teaching that adds information to the mind. There is another kind that quietly dismantles a man. The ministry of Watchman Nee belongs to the second kind, and that is why, more than fifty years after he died in a labour camp in Anhwei province, his words are still read in languages he never spoke, in countries he never visited, by believers who were not born when he was buried. He was not a systematic theologian, and he would have been uneasy at being called one. He wrote no volume of dogmatics, founded no seminary, and left behind no confession of faith bearing his name. What he left behind was something both smaller and larger: a body of spoken ministry, taken down by listeners and afterwards gathered into books, which pressed a single question upon the conscience of the believer. The question was not What ought I to do for God? It was What has God already done, and am I willing to stand upon it? That question runs like a seam of ore through everything he taught. It is there in The Normal Christian Life, where he laboured to show that Romans chapters six to eight are not a counsel of effort but a declaration of accomplished fact. It is there in Sit, Walk, Stand, where the Christian’s whole conduct and warfare are made to rest upon a prior resting. It is there in The Release of the Spirit, where the great hindrance to fruitfulness is located not in the believer’s weakness but in his unbroken strength. And it is there, most painfully, in the last twenty years of his life, when the man who had taught the church about the cross was himself required to bear one.

This book is an attempt to set out, in eighteen short chapters, the teaching for which Watchman Nee is chiefly remembered. It is written for the ordinary believer — the pastor with more congregations than books, the student who has heard the name and wants to know what the fuss is about, the professional who is respected at church and quietly defeated at home, the believer who has been trying for years to live the Christian life and has begun to suspect he is going about it the wrong way entirely. A word about how to use it. Each chapter is deliberately short, and each one ends in the same two places: a set of application points, and a prayer. This is not decoration. Nee held, with some force, that spiritual truth which is merely understood has not yet been received at all. He was fond of pointing out that revelation in Scripture is almost always followed immediately by demand. The Lord shows a man something, and then requires something of him. A chapter of this book that is read and admired but not obeyed has, by its own argument, failed. Read one chapter a day, or one a week. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own. A word also about the limits of this book. It is a summary, and every summary is a kind of flattening. Nee’s actual ministry is richer, stranger and more uneven than any digest of it can be, and there is no substitute for going to the works themselves. Throughout these pages his own books and spoken addresses are named, so that the reader may follow any thread back to its source. A short guide to those works is provided at the end.

One more thing must be said at the outset, and it is better said plainly. This is not a book of hero-worship. Watchman Nee was a man, and the record of his life contains matters that are painful, contested and, in some particulars, probably unknowable this side of eternity. There were seasons of controversy among his own co-workers. There was a period of some six years in which he withdrew from the Lord’s Table. When the state finally tried him in 1956, the charges laid against him included moral and financial ones; his defenders have always insisted these were manufactured by a hostile government determined to destroy his credibility, while some careful historians have concluded that not all of them were. The trial was conducted under a regime that had every interest in his ruin, which makes the evidence extremely difficult to weigh at this distance. The reader may be tempted to ask why a book of this kind would raise such a matter at all. The answer is that Nee himself would have insisted upon it. No teaching was more central to him than that the flesh — including the religious flesh, including the gifted and useful and admired flesh — is utterly untrustworthy and must go to the cross. A book that presented him as a spotless saint would be contradicting the very doctrine it was written to commend. So the counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Weigh every chapter against the Word of God. Where Nee is faithful to Scripture — and on the great themes of the cross, of union with Christ, of consecration and brokenness and the Body, he is very faithful indeed — receive it gladly and act upon it. Where he presses beyond what is written, and there are places where he does, mark it, set it aside, and lose nothing.

Truth is not damaged by being carried in an earthen vessel. That, after all, is the only kind of vessel God has ever used.

One final observation, which may explain why this particular ministry has travelled as far as it has. Watchman Nee wrote in Chinese, for Chinese believers, in a country sliding into war. He never intended a worldwide readership and would very likely have been embarrassed by one. Yet his books have crossed nearly every border that exists, and are read today in languages he never heard spoken, by Christians whose circumstances have nothing in common with his own. The reason is not literary. It is that he dealt almost exclusively with what does not vary. Cultures differ enormously in what they prize, permit and punish; the human heart is depressingly uniform. Self-reliance, the instinct to earn, the reluctance to be broken, the preference for governing oneself — these require no translation. A believer in a wealthy suburb and a believer in a village without electricity are further apart in circumstance than almost any two people in history, and they are wrestling with precisely the same man in the mirror. So this book assumes no particular setting. Wherever it is read, and into whatever language it is carried, the questions it raises will already be waiting. There is also this. Nee did not teach the deeper life from a position of comfort. He taught it to workers who would shortly be scattered, and he sealed it by returning to Shanghai in 1949 when he could have stayed away, and by refusing, through twenty years of imprisonment, to purchase his freedom by denying his Lord. A man may teach the cross with his mouth. Nee was required to teach it with his life. That is why we still listen.