Conclusion

He must increase, but I must decrease. JOHN 3:30

We have covered a great deal of ground in eighteen short chapters, and it would be easy to close this book with the impression that Watchman Nee taught many things. In truth he taught one thing, from many angles, for thirty years. The one thing is this: Christ has done everything, and the believer’s whole business is to get out of the way. Everything else is commentary. The distinction between the blood and the cross is that truth applied to guilt and to nature. Know, reckon, present is that truth applied to the mechanics of daily deliverance. Sit, walk, stand is that truth applied to position, conduct and conflict. The breaking of the outer man is that truth applied to the servant. The Body is that truth applied to the church. And the overcomers are simply those in whom it has been allowed to work.

What to do with it

If you have read this far, you are now in a position of some danger. Nee himself would have said so. The peculiar hazard of teaching about the deeper life is that it can be received as a subject. A man may become an enthusiast for the doctrine of the cross while remaining entirely uncrucified. He may collect the vocabulary — reckoning, brokenness, soul-life, the Body — and deploy it fluently, and be exactly the same man he was before, only harder to help. Nothing in these pages is of the slightest use as information.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

So here is the plainest counsel this book can give. Go back to the one chapter that made you uncomfortable. Not the one you found most interesting — the one you would rather not read again. That is where God is working. Take the application points at the end of it, and do them, one at a time, slowly, over the coming months. Then take the next. And expect it to be unspectacular. The great danger of a book like this is that it creates an appetite for crisis — for a single overwhelming experience after which everything is different. Such moments do occur; Nee’s ministry contains several. But the ordinary shape of this work is far less dramatic. It is a long succession of small surrenders, most of them unwitnessed, in which a man gradually stops defending himself.

Two things to carry

Carry away, first, a settled confidence. If you take nothing else from these chapters, take this: your acceptance with God does not fluctuate. It was established at Calvary, it rests on the blood of Christ, and your performance this week did not improve it and cannot damage it. Every genuine advance in the Christian life begins from that security, never from anxiety about it. Carry away, second, a holy discontent with the ordinary. Not with your circumstances — Nee had rather more to be discontented about than most of us and did not complain — but with the gap between what Scripture says is normal and what we have settled for. That discontent, honestly held before God, is one of the surest signs that the Spirit is at work.

Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus. PHILIPPIANS 3:12

A last word about the man

We have been honest in these pages about Watchman Nee’s limitations. He speculated where Scripture is silent. He systematised what might have been left as testimony. Parts of his teaching have been used, by others and perhaps sometimes by himself, in ways that did harm. His life contains a period of withdrawal he never fully explained and accusations that will not be settled in this world. None of that has been raised in order to diminish him. It has been raised because he taught, more insistently than almost anyone, that no servant of God is to be looked at. The man who wrote about the alabaster box would have been appalled to become one. And so the right response to his ministry is not admiration. It is obedience — not to him, but to the Lord he pointed at, whose life he spent thirty years trying to describe and twenty years quietly proving.

Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith. HEBREWS 12:2

The watchman’s work is to wake the household and then to be forgotten. He would be content with that.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, I have read about Your cross, and I have understood some of it, and I am afraid of leaving it there.

Do not let me become a student of the deeper life instead of a partaker of it. Do not let me acquire words for things I have never experienced.

Take the truth I have seen and press it into me until it costs me something. Begin with the chapter I would rather forget. Begin today.

You must increase. I must decrease. Amen.