Learning to Walk by Faith

Margaret Barber and the School of the Spirit

Margaret E. Barber became one of the most important formative influences in Nee's early Christian life. She was not famous in the manner of a great platform evangelist. Her significance lay in spiritual formation, personal counsel, prayer, and the literature she placed into the hands of younger Chinese believers.

Nee and other eager workers would bring reports of their activities and successes. Barber's responses could be searching. She was concerned not only with what they accomplished but with the spiritual source of their activity. Was the work initiated by God? Had they waited upon Him? Were they seeking visible success, or obedience?

This distinction entered deeply into Nee's thought. Christian work can be done for God without being done from God.

Jesus said, “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing: for what things soever he doeth, these the Son also doeth in like manner” (John 5:19, ASV).

If the perfect Son lived in dependence upon the Father, how much more should Christian workers refuse independent action? Nee would eventually teach that the greatest danger in ministry is not only doing evil things. It is doing good things from the wrong source.

Natural Strength and Spiritual Work

Nee possessed obvious natural strength: intelligence, initiative, verbal ability, determination, and an appetite for study. None of these gifts was sinful. Yet each could become a substitute for dependence on the Holy Spirit.

This became one of his most characteristic insights. God does not merely ask whether the objective is correct. He cares about the source.

Paul described his own ministry in deliberately paradoxical terms: “When I am weak, then am I strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10, ASV).

That sentence overturns ordinary assumptions about leadership. Human institutions often select for visible strength. God frequently creates circumstances in which His servants discover the limits of that strength.

Nee would later describe the outer man as the complex of natural capacities through which the self expresses itself. The goal is not personality destruction. It is that the outer person cease to obstruct the Spirit.

The picture is not of a believer becoming passive or colorless. Paul remained Paul after conversion: intellectually vigorous, emotionally intense, courageous, strategic, and articulate. But those capacities increasingly became servants rather than masters.

The Library of the Church

Barber and other contacts introduced Nee to a broad stream of Christian literature. He read writers from the Brethren tradition, holiness and Keswick movements, devotional traditions, missionary biographies, prophetic teachers, and expositors. Andrew Murray, Jessie Penn-Lewis, D. M. Panton, Robert Govett, J. N. Darby, T. Austin-Sparks, George Müller, Hudson Taylor, and others contributed categories that Nee absorbed, adapted, and sometimes recombined in distinctive ways.

This matters when reading Nee. He was not a theological island. His writings emerged from a transnational Protestant world, translated into the setting of Republican-era China.

He read voraciously but did not believe that reading itself produced revelation. The Spirit must illuminate the Word.

Paul prayed for believers to receive “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him; having the eyes of your heart enlightened” (Ephesians 1:17-18, ASV).

Nee's emphasis on illumination could be misunderstood if separated from Scripture. At his best, he was not advocating private revelation that superseded the Bible. He was insisting that biblical truth must move from information into spiritual sight.

A person can explain justification and still live under condemnation. He can define union with Christ and still operate as though everything depends upon self-effort. He can teach the Body of Christ and still build a ministry around himself. Nee called believers to the difference between knowing a doctrine and seeing a reality.

Faith and the Character of God

The life of faith became another major theme. Nee was influenced by testimonies such as George Müller's dependence upon God and by the broader “faith mission” tradition. He learned to look to God for practical provision rather than make financial security the controlling principle of ministry.

Faith, however, is easily caricatured. Biblical faith is not optimism detached from evidence. It is confidence in the character and promise of God.

Hebrews says, “Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1, ASV).

The chapter then presents men and women who acted because they regarded God as trustworthy. Faith changed behavior.

Nee's mature teaching repeatedly opposed the attempt to produce faith by emotional intensity. Faith looks away from itself. If a person constantly asks, “Do I have enough faith?” he may be looking at faith rather than at God.

The Christian's security rests not in the psychological strength of believing but in the faithfulness of the One believed.

Waiting as an Act of Faith

For an energetic young worker, waiting can feel like waste. Barber helped Nee learn that waiting upon God is itself spiritual work.

Isaiah writes, “They that wait for Jehovah shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31, ASV).

Waiting does not mean laziness. It means refusing to substitute activity for guidance. A person can be extremely busy because he is afraid to trust God.

Nee would later distinguish between burden and mere idea. An idea may be good, but spiritual work requires God's initiative. This principle is particularly relevant to ambitious Christian leaders. Vision, strategy, and execution are valuable, but they are not self-authenticating. A church can execute a plan brilliantly and still miss what God is emphasizing.

The discipline of waiting asks uncomfortable questions. Would we still pursue this project if no one praised it? Are we responding to a burden from God or to comparison with another ministry? Are we willing for God to change the timetable? Can we abandon a plan after investing in it if obedience requires that?

Illness and Human Limitation

Nee's early ministry was marked by serious illness, including tuberculosis. Physical weakness became part of the school in which his theology was formed.

It would be irresponsible to imply that illness is always a direct divine lesson whose meaning can be confidently decoded. Scripture does not authorize simplistic explanations of suffering. Yet suffering does expose illusions of control.

Paul spoke of carrying “the sentence of death” in himself “that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raiseth the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:9, ASV).

That phrase could serve as a summary of much of Nee's spirituality: not trusting in ourselves, but in the God of resurrection.

Resurrection life is meaningful precisely where natural resources fail. If Christianity is merely the enhancement of human potential, resurrection becomes peripheral. But if God brings life out of death, weakness becomes a place where divine sufficiency can be known.

Nee's later teaching on resurrection therefore had existential weight. It was not only a doctrine to affirm at Easter. It described the pattern by which God works: what originates in natural life passes through the cross; what God raises can serve His eternal purpose.

Obedience Before Understanding

One of the dangers of an intellectually gifted Christian is the temptation to make understanding a prerequisite for obedience. Scripture often reverses the order.

Jesus said, “If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God” (John 7:17, ASV).

The willing heart is placed before fuller knowing. Nee learned that spiritual understanding is moral as well as intellectual. Disobedience can darken perception.

This does not mean Christians should obey human leaders blindly. Nee's later teachings on authority must be held together with the Berean principle of testing teaching by Scripture and the apostolic command, “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21, ASV).

Biblical obedience is first obedience to God. Human authority is always derivative, limited, and accountable to God's Word.

Properly understood, Nee's emphasis is searching: we should not demand endless new light while refusing the light already received.

The Cross and the Release of Life

The image of the grain of wheat became a powerful way of describing spiritual fruitfulness. Life is present inside the grain, but the outer shell must be broken.

Jesus applied the image first to His own approaching death: “Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit” (John 12:24, ASV).

Nee extended the principle to Christian service. The indwelling life of Christ is treasure, but self-protection, pride, natural cleverness, emotional impulsiveness, and stubborn will can obstruct its expression.

This teaching can become unhealthy if “brokenness” is used by leaders to crush personalities or demand submission. That is not the New Testament pattern. Christ does not authorize spiritual abuse. The breaking God performs is His work through truth, discipline, circumstances, and the cross, producing freedom to love and serve.

True brokenness makes a person more like Jesus: humble without being servile, courageous without being domineering, tender without being unstable, obedient to God without becoming manipulable by men.

From Borrowed Truth to Personal Reality

Nee's early years were filled with discoveries drawn from Scripture and Christian writers, but his deepest concern became that truth must be personally wrought into the servant of God.

Paul could say, “I bear branded on my body the marks of Jesus” (Galatians 6:17, ASV). His message had passed through suffering.

Nee increasingly believed that ministry is not merely transmitting accurate information. The minister himself becomes part of the message. God uses not only what a person says but what God has done in that person.

This is why spiritual formation cannot be replaced by content production. A preacher can download information faster than character can be formed. A teacher can master theological vocabulary faster than he learns humility. A leader can build an audience faster than he learns to carry a cross.

Nee's life warns against confusing platform with maturity.

The hidden years matter. The corrections no one applauds matter. The prayers no one hears matter. The decisions to obey when no visible reward follows matter. God forms servants in places that do not look strategic to human eyes.

Toward a Distinctive Ministry

By his early twenties, Nee's convictions were beginning to converge. Christ is life. The cross deals not only with sins but with the independent self. The Holy Spirit must be the source of Christian work. Scripture is to be spiritually apprehended and practically obeyed. Faith rests in God's sufficiency. The church belongs to Christ rather than to competing human parties.

These convictions would soon move from personal formation into public ministry.

Nee began publishing, preaching, gathering believers, and articulating a vision for local churches. The movement that emerged would inspire devotion, provoke opposition, and raise difficult questions about unity and exclusivity.

Before examining that movement, however, it is worth noticing the order of the story. God dealt with the worker before the work became large.

This order is biblical. Jesus appointed the Twelve “that they might be with him, and that he might send them forth to preach” (Mark 3:14, ASV).

First with Him. Then sent.

Nee would not always embody his own ideals perfectly, and neither would the movement that grew around him. But the principle remained central to his testimony: God's primary interest is not merely in what His servants can accomplish for Him. He desires people who know Him, live by His life, and allow the cross to remove whatever prevents Christ from being expressed.

That conviction would now be tested in the complicated realities of church life.

Margaret Barber's Hidden Greatness

Margaret E. Barber is one of the quiet figures without whom the Watchman Nee story cannot be understood. She did not build the kind of institution that guarantees a large historical footprint. Her influence moved through people.

That itself illustrates a biblical pattern. Barnabas is remembered partly because he recognized and strengthened others. Lois and Eunice shaped Timothy. Priscilla and Aquila helped Apollos. Much of the church's most consequential ministry is catalytic rather than famous.

Barber possessed books, convictions, experience, and a capacity to confront young zeal without extinguishing it. Nee later remembered her with unusual respect.

Her life raises a question for every Christian leader: Are we building our own visible legacy, or are we forming people who may eventually carry the work farther than we do?

Paul tells Timothy to commit truth “to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2, ASV).

The multiplication of hidden investment can outlast the platform.

Learning to Be Corrected

Nee repeatedly brought theological and ministry questions to Barber. Her corrections could be severe. The important lesson was not that she was always right but that Nee learned to submit his confidence to examination.

Gifted young leaders especially need people who are unimpressed by gift.

“Faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Proverbs 27:6, ASV).

Modern church culture often surrounds successful leaders with people who depend on their approval. As influence grows, honest contradiction becomes rarer. Nee's early formation included the opposite: a mentor able to say no.

His later strong authority raises the question of whether he always retained equivalent structures of correction around himself. The question should not be asked cynically. It is a universal leadership danger.

A teacher who believes in delegated authority needs authority and accountability above and around himself as well.

Books as Mentors

Barber's library introduced Nee to Christian worlds he could never have visited in person. Andrew Murray taught surrender and abiding. Brethren writers offered ecclesiology and biblical exposition. Holiness and Keswick voices emphasized victory and faith. Jessie Penn-Lewis contributed themes of the cross and spiritual conflict. Premillennial teachers shaped expectation of Christ's return.

Nee was capable of absorbing these streams quickly and expressing them in a fresh synthesis.

This is one reason Christians should read broadly. The Body of Christ extends across time. A believer can be discipled in part by dead authors.

But books require discernment. Every tradition has blind spots. Reading many authors can either broaden wisdom or create a patchwork theology with unresolved contradictions.

Nee sometimes harmonized ideas through powerful spiritual intuition rather than slow systematic argument. That gave his teaching freshness but also left tensions.

The lesson is to read widely and return constantly to Scripture.

Tuberculosis and the Edge of Death

Nee's tuberculosis brought him near the limits of physical strength. Illness changed the scale of time. A young man who expected decades of ministry faced the possibility that his life might be short.

Psalm 90 prays, “So teach us to number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12, ASV).

Mortality concentrates vocation.

Nee worked intensely on The Spiritual Man during this period, in part because he feared he might not live to teach the material later. The book's density reflects urgency.

Illness also strengthened his distinction between natural energy and resurrection life. When physical resources disappear, dependence ceases to be a devotional slogan.

Christians should be careful not to romanticize sickness as spiritually superior. Health is a gift. Healing can be sought. Medicine can be used. But illness can expose the illusion that life belongs to us.

James says, “ye know not what shall be on the morrow. What is your life? For ye are a vapor” (James 4:14, ASV).

Nee's later imprisonment would make the same lesson even more severe.

Spiritual Formation Before Public Usefulness

Margaret Barber's importance in Nee's life cannot be measured by the size of her public platform. Her influence demonstrates a principle that Nee later taught repeatedly: God often does His most consequential work in hidden relationships before visible ministry expands.

The modern church can be tempted to reverse that order. Gift creates opportunity; opportunity creates platform; platform creates pressure to appear mature. The result can be a public ministry developing faster than the private person. Nee's years under correction challenged that pattern. Barber was interested not merely in whether the young worker's ideas were right, but whether his reactions were governed by Christ.

James writes, “Let patience have its perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, lacking in nothing” (James 1:4, ASV). Patience is not passivity. It is the capacity to remain under God's formative work without fleeing prematurely into self-rescue.

Nee learned that being misunderstood could reveal as much as being praised. When a servant is praised, pride may rise. When criticized, self-defense may rise. Both responses expose attachments. The cross addresses not only the desire for pleasure but the desire to control one's image.

This does not mean that Christians should accept falsehood silently in every circumstance. Jesus answered accusers; Paul defended his apostleship; the prophets confronted lies. The issue is deeper: can truth be spoken without the soul demanding vindication as a condition of peace? Can a leader make a clear defense and still entrust reputation to God?

Barber's hidden ministry also shaped Nee's view of spiritual authority. Real authority, at its best, is not volume, office, or coercion. It arises from a life under God's government. Jesus contrasted Gentile rulers who “lord it over” others with His own pattern of servanthood (Mark 10:42-45, ASV). A mentor's authority is healthiest when it increases a disciple's dependence upon Christ rather than upon the mentor.

Nee's voracious reading during these years added another dimension to formation. Books allowed him to enter conversations with Christians across centuries and continents. Yet reading created its own temptation: borrowed conviction. A reader can learn to speak confidently about realities not yet personally known.

Nee would eventually distinguish between objective truth and subjective experience. The distinction can be overdrawn, but the concern is sound. A doctrine may be objectively true before we understand it. We do not make it true by experience. Yet truth is meant to shape experience. The resurrection of Christ is a historical fact whether or not a believer feels resurrection power; nevertheless Paul desired “to know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings” (Philippians 3:10, ASV).

Formation therefore joins Scripture, community, obedience, suffering, and time. None should be isolated. Scripture without community can become private interpretation. Community without Scripture can become group control. Obedience without grace can become legalism. Suffering without truth can become mere injury. Time without intentional response can produce age without maturity.

Nee's early tuberculosis made these lessons painfully physical. A body that cannot be commanded into strength confronts a driven person with limits. Christian faith does not deny those limits. It discovers that God is not limited by them. Paul heard, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9, ASV).

Weakness did not become Nee's ideal; Christ's sufficiency did. The distinction is important. Christianity does not seek sickness, humiliation, or failure as if pain were holy in itself. It seeks Christ, and when unavoidable weakness arrives, faith refuses to conclude that usefulness has ended.

Before Nee became a recognized teacher, he was being taught. Before he spoke about brokenness, he was corrected. Before he wrote about resurrection life, he faced bodily mortality. This order gives credibility to the best of his later teaching. The truths were not merely arranged in a notebook; many had passed through the resistance of an actual life.