The Overcomers and the Reward

To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne. REVELATION 3:21

The last strand of Nee’s teaching to consider is the one that gave his movement its urgency and its name for suffering. It is the doctrine of the overcomers, set out most fully in the addresses published as God’s Plan and the Overcomers, and running through much of what he wrote about the kingdom and the church.

God’s eternal purpose

Nee began not with the fall but with the purpose that preceded it. God’s intention, declared in Genesis 1:26, was a race bearing His image and exercising His dominion. Sin interrupted it; redemption serves it. Salvation, in his framing, is not the end of God’s plan but the means by which the original purpose is recovered.

According to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord. EPHESIANS 3:11

The consummation is a corporate one: a Body prepared, a Bride made ready, a city descending.

The overcomers

But Nee observed something about the way God has always worked. When the whole fails, God takes a remnant, and through the remnant recovers the whole. Noah in the flood. The seven thousand who had not bowed to Baal. Gideon’s three hundred. The returning exiles under Zerubbabel. He applied this to the church. The Lord’s word to the seven churches of Asia is addressed to whole congregations, but the promise is invariably narrowed: to him that overcometh. Not to the church as a whole — to those within it who overcome.

He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son. REVELATION 21:7

The overcomers, in Nee’s teaching, are not a superior class of Christian with a different salvation. They are simply the believers who are actually living the normal Christian life — those in whom the cross has done its work — and God uses them to secure His purpose for the whole Body.

Salvation and reward

Here Nee made his most controversial eschatological distinction, and it must be set out accurately and then examined. He held — following Robert Govett, G. H. Pember and D. M. Panton, whose works he had absorbed early — that Scripture distinguishes between salvation, which is by grace through faith and cannot be lost, and reward, which is according to works and can be forfeited. Every believer will be saved. Not every believer will reign.

If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire. 1 CORINTHIANS 3:14–15

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:10

From this he taught that some believers will enter the coming kingdom’s reign and others will not, that the millennial reign is a reward rather than a universal Christian entitlement, and that a believer may suffer real loss — though never the loss of salvation itself.

Weighing it

The distinction between salvation and reward is plainly biblical. The passages above teach it, and so do the parables of the talents and the pounds. Believers who ignore it tend towards a complacency the New Testament never permits. But the further elaboration — a partial rapture, exclusion of some believers from the millennial kingdom, a period of remedial discipline for the unfaithful — rests on a chain of inferences rather than on plain statements, and the majority of evangelical interpreters have not been persuaded. These are matters on which sincere believers have disagreed for a long time, and the wise reader will hold them lightly. What should not be held lightly is the moral point beneath them, which is unmistakably apostolic: how a Christian lives now will matter then.

But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway. 1 CORINTHIANS 9:27

There is something fitting in ending here, because this doctrine was not theoretical for the man who taught it.

Watchman Nee spoke about the overcomers to workers who would shortly be scattered, imprisoned and in some cases killed. He himself spent the last twenty years of his life in confinement, refusing his freedom on the terms offered. He was denounced by former colleagues, buried his wife without being permitted to attend, and died on a labour farm in Anhwei with a piece of paper under his pillow affirming that Christ is the Son of God who died for sinners and rose again, and that he still believed it. He had preached that the crown goes to those who overcome. He was required to prove whether he meant it.

Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life. REVELATION 2:10

The Bride made ready

Nee’s overcomer teaching has an end in view, and it is not individual. He set it out most fully in The Glorious Church, tracing a single thread from the first pages of Scripture to the last. He began at Eden, with a detail he considered deliberate. Eve was not formed separately from the dust as Adam had been; she was taken out of the man, from his opened side, while a deep sleep was upon him.

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs …and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman. GENESIS 2:21–22

In this Nee saw a foreshadowing of the last Adam, from whose opened side on the cross came the church — a bride of the same nature as the Bridegroom, drawn out of His death.

Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; that he might sanctify and cleanse it …that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing. EPHESIANS 5:25–27

The consummation, then, is a wedding.

Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. REVELATION 19:7

Two words in that verse carried Nee’s whole burden. Made herself ready — there is something the Bride does, and it is not automatic. And his wife, singular — the readiness is corporate. There is no such thing as an individual bride. This is where the overcomer teaching finds its proper proportion, and it guards against the misuse the doctrine invites. The overcomers are not a spiritual elite being rewarded for outperforming their brethren. They are those in whom God has been able to do His work, and the purpose of that work is not their private distinction but the readiness of the whole. They are the firstfruits, not the harvest; the vanguard, not the destination. Understood that way, the doctrine produces exactly the opposite of spiritual competition. A man who grasps it does not ask how he may be counted among the overcomers. He asks what it will cost him to be of use to the Body, and he stops keeping score — which is, in Nee’s terms, a fair sign that the cross has begun its work.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Live this week with the judgment seat of Christ genuinely in view. Let it affect one specific decision. 2. Distinguish clearly in your own mind between what is settled — your salvation — and what is not yet settled: your faithfulness. 3. Identify one area where you are building with wood, hay and stubble — activity that will not survive the fire. Stop, or rebuild it. 4. Hold the disputed details lightly and the moral urgency tightly. Do not divide from anyone over the finer points of the kingdom. 5. Ask what you would refuse to surrender if it cost you your liberty. Then ask whether you are living now as though that were true.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You are coming, and I will stand before You, and the fire will test what I have built.

I thank You that my salvation is not in question — it rests wholly on Your finished work. But my faithfulness is very much in question, and I ask You to deal with me now rather than to leave it until then.

Make me an overcomer, not for the honour of it, but because You are worthy of a people who did not love their lives unto the death. Whatever it costs, keep me faithful to the end. Amen.