Watchman Nee Quotes

[StriperAddict]

The Secret of a Holy Life

If I put a dollar bill between the pages of a magazine, and then burn the magazine, where is the dollar bill? It has gone the same was as the magazine goes – to ashes. Where the one goes the other goes too. Their history has become one. But, just as effectively, God has put us in Christ. What happened to him happened also to us. All the experience he met, we too have met in him. ‘Our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away, that so we should no longer be in bondage to sin’ (Rom 6:6). That is not an exhortation to struggle. That is history: our history written in Christ before we were born. Do you believe it? It is true! Our crucifixion with Christ is a glorious historic fact. Our deliverance from sin is based, no on what we can do, nor even on what God is going to do for us, but on what He has already done for us in Christ. When that fact dawns on upon us and we rest back upon it (Rom 6:11), then we have found the secret of a holy life.


Watchman Nee
Sit, Walk, Stand, Tyndale House, 1957/1977, 21

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Feel free to add your fav W.N. quotes to this thread

 

[1gr8bldr]

Those old authors are the best. They wrote about the Gospel. These new authors today write about how to put makeup on a corspe, or how to white wash a wall. Nee's life was interesting. Lots of good stuff out there from Nee

 

[formula1]

I have 2 of his books, 'What Shall This Man Do?' and 'The Spiritual Man'. Great reads both of them but the 2nd one really deep. The latter one Nee later said after reading it again he thought it too perfect!

 

[Artfuldodger]

I have 2 of his books, 'What Shall This Man Do?' and 'The Spiritual Man'. Great reads both of them but the 2nd one really deep. The latter one Nee later said after reading it again he thought it too perfect!

I've only read his quotes and short passages on various occasions. It was actually on this forum that I heard about him years ago.

Also Witness Lee that I think was a part of his Church as well.

 

[Israel]

Brother Nee rarely wrote for the sake of writing a "book". With few exceptions (as "the Spiritual Man" mentioned) almost all that we have in book form is rather a collection of his speaking and sermons deemed worthy of preserving by men like Angus Kinnear, T. Austin Sparks, et al.

How such would speak to the "christian publishing industry" of today with its many notable authors and celebrities "Have an insight? Start your own ministry! Write a book!" leaves me considering.
I have little doubt brother Nee understood he was "in the making" not for celebrity...but for the last 20 years of life he spent in a Chinese prison, though he may not have known the particulars of the sufferings he was chosen to endure.

He, I believe, knew what he was inviting in his confessions of Christ. Yet, always more persuaded that the glory that shall be revealed is greater than any present suffering. And so one of his quotes lingers with me, the sobriety of which is a thing this pleasure loving man finds of some necessity.

(As a Facebook friend once declared "The problem is not with pleasure...it is in the fact that I love it so much!)

So this from brother Nee:

“God must bring us to a point – I cannot tell you how it will be, but he will do it – where, through a deep and dark experience, our natural power is touched and fundamentally weakened, so that we no longer dare trust ourselves… At length there comes a time when we no longer ‘like’ to do Christian work – indeed we almost dread to do things in the Lord’s Name. But then at last it is that he can begin to use us.”

I believe that Brother Nee might also find the chuckle (for I do appreciate his broad smile) that the more injurious (to ourselves) part of that understanding would be to think "Oh, I have already reached that point"...trusting in ourselves that we have endured anything of moment. Nevertheless, he never despised the faith that bids us speak. It is how the necessary things for growth...get invited.

 

[1gr8bldr]

My favorites were, Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Life, and Grace for Grace. Other old time favorites were Andrew Murry's Humility and Absolute Surrender. EM Bounds Power Through Prayer, Charles Trumbull Victory In Christ, William Law's The Power of The Spirit, Charles Jefferson's The Minister As Shepherd, and Roy hession's We Would see Jesus, When I saw Him, and Be Filled Now. This is the old, good stuff. Short reads. Before the days of John Mccarther getting rich from his whitewash. These are not books I have read, but rather my favorites from among likely 1000 books that I read during a 4 year period of searching for anything that resembled truth. Lots of self improvement books out there, but I elect to wait on the Holy Spirit to do his work in me rather than to try and clean the outside of the cup myself

 

[Artfuldodger]

I wonder if being from an ancient culture like China, he was able to use that to explain Christianity in a different form than say someone who had only heard the Gospel from a Southern Preacher his whole life?

Not that one is right and one is wrong, just worded differently from having a different cultural insight.

 

[Israel]