The Ministry of the Word

But we will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word. ACTS 6:4

Among the messages given to the workers in the trainings of Nee’s last years of freedom was a series afterwards published in English as The Ministry of God’s Word. It is a book for preachers, and it is written with a preacher’s severity about his own trade. But its central question reaches every believer who has ever opened his mouth to speak of Christ: when God speaks through a man, what part does the man play?

The Word made flesh

Nee began where the question is answered most perfectly — not with preaching at all, but with the incarnation.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us … full of grace and truth. JOHN 1:14

In the Lord Jesus, he observed, the divine and the human are joined without either being diminished. He is wholly God and wholly man, and the Word of God reaches us in Him not by bypassing His humanity but through it. The Father’s speech came in a Galilean accent, in parables about sheep and seed and lost coins, from a man who was hungry and weary and wept. Nothing in the humanity obstructed the Word. That, Nee argued, is the pattern for every ministry of the word that follows.

He then turned to Scripture itself. The Bible is the word of God, and yet it is unmistakably written by men. Paul does not sound like John; Peter does not sound like Moses. Their temperaments, their histories and even their turns of phrase are left visible on the page.

For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. 2 PETER 1:21

The men spake; the Holy Ghost moved them. Both halves of the sentence are true, and Nee refused to let go of either. God does not ordinarily speak by dictation through a passive instrument. He speaks through a person — and the person He has prepared.

The minister is part of the message

From this followed the point that gives the book its edge. If the word of God comes through a man, then the condition of the man matters. A pure word passed through an undisciplined vessel arrives coloured, and sometimes spoiled. The preacher’s temper, his vanity, his hobby-horses, his need to be admired, his unresolved grievances — all of these travel with his sermon whether he intends them to or not. The hearers may not be able to name what is wrong, but they sense it.

For we are not as many, which corrupt the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God speak we in Christ. 2 CORINTHIANS 2:17

This is why Nee placed so much weight on God’s dealings with the servant before He uses him. Paul’s thorn in the flesh, his sufferings, his long years of obscurity, were not interruptions to his ministry but the making of it. The same Paul who wrote with such authority had been emptied of confidence in himself; that is precisely what made his words trustworthy. The teaching here is the natural companion of the chapter on the breaking of the outer man. There the concern was that the spirit be released; here it is that the word should come through unmixed.

For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:5

Revelation, thought and words

Nee was unusually practical about what actually happens when a servant of God speaks, and he described it in stages. First there must be revelation: the minister has to have seen something himself. Not merely read it, nor gathered it from commentaries, but been shown it by God, so that the truth is his in the way that only light makes things ours.

But when it pleased God … To reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen. GALATIANS 1:15–16

The order in that verse is exact. Revealed in me comes before preach him. Then, Nee taught, what has been seen must be carried into the mind and set in order, and then clothed in words — accurate words, chosen with care, because a true seeing can be squandered by careless speech. He had no patience with the notion that the Spirit makes preparation unnecessary. And finally the spirit of the minister must go out with the words. He spoke of the preacher’s burden: the weight of a thing God has laid upon him, which he carries until it is delivered.

But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay. JEREMIAH 20:9

A sermon may be correct in every sentence and deliver nothing, because the man has discharged information without releasing the burden. Another, plainer and less polished, may leave a room altered. The Lord Himself named the difference: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life (John 6:63).

And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. 1 CORINTHIANS 2:4

Where to read this with care

The book deserves two cautions, and Nee’s own convictions supply the first. However closely God joins Himself to a faithful minister, no preacher’s word stands alongside Scripture. The apostles spoke as those through whom Scripture itself was given; no one since has done so. Some who have taken up this teaching have allowed a gifted speaker’s ministry to acquire an authority that places it beyond question, and the results have been unhappy. The remedy is the Bereans’ remedy, and it applies to every sermon ever preached.

These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so. ACTS 17:11

The second caution concerns the language of burden and spirit. It describes something real, and every preacher knows the difference between a message that has been given and one that has merely been assembled. But an inward sense of weight is not, by itself, evidence that a word is from God. Men have felt burdened about their own opinions. The test of a message is not the intensity of the messenger but its agreement with what is written — and a congregation is entitled to apply that test without being accused of resisting the Spirit.

Held with those cautions, the book’s central burden is sound and badly needed. There is a way of speaking about God that leaves people informed and unchanged, and a way that brings them into His presence. The difference is not chiefly in the technique. It is in the man, and in what God has been permitted to do with him before he stood up.

If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God. 1 PETER 4:11

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Before you next teach, lead a study or even share a verse with a friend, ask yourself honestly: what have I seen, and what have I only read?

2. Name one habit of temperament — impatience, cleverness, a favourite grievance — that tends to travel with your words. Bring it to God before you speak again.

3. Prepare thoroughly for your next opportunity to speak, and then pray as though the preparation were not enough.

4. Test the next sermon that moves you by searching the Scriptures afterwards, as the Bereans did. Do the same with your own.

5. If you have been given something to say and have held it back, ask whether it is fear or wisdom that is restraining you.

A PRAYER

Lord, You were pleased to make Your Word flesh, and You are still pleased to speak through men and women. I am astonished that You would speak through me.

Forgive me for the times I have spoken of You to be admired, and for the times I have passed on what I never saw. Let nothing of my vanity or my temper travel with Your word.

Show me Your Son, and then give me the words, and then give me grace to let what You have shown me go out with them. Let those who hear find You and not me. Amen.