Publication Work in The Lord's Recovery aka The One Publication

[Cal]

Originally Posted by Trapped

Igzy, I understand when you say you are a person who needs to know what happened. I am too, but I also need to know why. I can't stand up after decades on the ground, shake it off, say "huh, that was weird" and walk off in another direction. I don't want to lose more decades lost in another wormhole group, missing the mark. Was there no point to those decades? Why did they happen if not for something? Otherwise what we go through in life is meaningless.

I totally get your whole post. I've been there. Let me just say the following:

1) Realize your value to the Lord has NOTHING to do with your status with the LC. He values you and loves you as his precious child and that has nothing to do with being affiliated with a church movement. You must get to a place where your self-esteem before the Lord is not fundamentally based on anything to do with the LC or any other group.

2) No group or person owns the Church. The church belongs to Christ. He "loans" aspects of the church to practical groups, but he can just as easily take back those things. The Lord never lets fallen people hold the church or its members hostage. Anyone who thinks he does is sadly deceived.

3) All church groups are imperfect. This is something we need to get. There have been many, many godly people in the Catholic church, but there have been some other things that are not good. It's a mixture. The LC is no different. When you ask what was that all about, what did it mean, it meant that the Lord works wherever he can as much as he can. But just because he is working in a place does not mean that is the only place he is working or can work. Because we were so committed to the Lord in the LC he was able to do many amazing things. But because it was eventually overwhelmed by a warped vision, it became toxic in some ways.

Lee clearly saw that the church has its good and bad sides. Where he went off the reservation was to look at the good in the LC and disregard the bad, and at the same time look at the bad in "Christianity" and disregard the good. In other words, he looked at the LC in an idealized way, at what he hoped it would become, while doing the exact opposite with any other groups. This bait-and-switch, equivocating mentality is rampant in LC thinking. But it's so subtle to them that they don't see it, because they believe they are special and chosen and so operating under a set of rules which favors them, which is the calling card of every errant group that ever existed.

4) The fact is there are contradictions in the LC. Some can take them, some can't. If you can't the Lord is not, in principle anyway, telling you to stay. That is, it is not fundamentally by his law and nature necessary for you to stay. He may be leading you practically to stay, he may be leading you to leave, he may even be leaving it up to you. But there is no bedrock principle that says you must stay.

5) So what did it mean? It meant God was working. It meant he was there with people that were meeting in his name, just as he said he would be. What was really good about the LC? The Lord, the Spirit, the brotherly love. Other stuff like being "the Recovery" or "bringing the Lord back" were exciting, but that probably isn't what kept you there. The Lord puts up with a lot of our silliness to be with us, but that doesn't validate the silliness. It was those basics that mattered: love, fellowship, relationship, purpose. All and only the things that are available anywhere.

So, again, my advice is get yourself to a place where you feel good about where you are. Don't feel like you have to figure everything out before you get there. The same approach must be taken with other things in life which don't make sense: the death of a loved one, a divorce, unfairly losing a job, any major challenge which doesn't make sense. You have to decide to be happy without having figured out why it happened. As I said, at some level madness is unexplainable, and you have to trust that the Lord sees and knows everything and will make known what we need to know when we need to know it. It always comes down to faith in him.

[Cal]

Let me put it this way:

What matters to the Lord is that which is available in any church group. What is only available in some or one does not matter to him.

[UntoHim]

Great summary by Igzy! Thank you brother for this thoughtful and insightful summation. I think it is not only a helpful answer to Trapped, but to all of us who struggle in trying to "make sense of the Lord's Recovery Movement". If none of us were concerned with trying to understand, and even make some sense of, all that we have gone through (some of us for our entire lives) then this forum would probably not exist in the first place.

I would like to piggyback off your last statement and change it to: "What matters to the Lord is what is available in the ministry of any true Christian minister. What is only available in some ministers or one minister does not matter to him." For our purposes here, I would like to apply this to Witness Lee. If the man was actually a true minister of the Gospel and the Word, then only the things that he preached and taught which were of value to the entire Body of Christ are what matters to the Lord, and the exclusive and self-promotional, self-aggrandizing things that he preached and taught are of no value to the Body of Christ, and mean nothing to the Lord.
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[Cal]

Originally Posted by Ohio

The message of this book [Job], written for all of God's people, is to save us from trying to figure everything out.

Amen to that!

Originally Posted by UntoHim

"What matters to the Lord is what is available in the ministry of any true Christian minister. What is only available in some ministers or one minister does not matter to him."

And Amen to that, too!

Of course we each are unique, and can present things in different ways. But each of our unique styles does not suggest a difference in content. We each describe what we see from different perspectives, but we each see the same common baseline of the Lord and the Spirit of Truth, which is available in any genuine Christian group. You can't hijack God's truth and make it uniquely your own. If you try you'll only end up with a bucket of sand where you thought your great unique ministry was.

[Ohio]

Originally Posted by Igzy

So, again, my advice is get yourself to a place where you feel good about where you are. Don't feel like you have to figure everything out before you get there. The same approach must be taken with other things in life which don't make sense: the death of a loved one, a divorce, unfairly losing a job, any major challenge which doesn't make sense. You have to decide to be happy without having figured out why it happened. As I said, at some level madness is unexplainable, and you have to trust that the Lord sees and knows everything and will make known what we need to know when we need to know it. It always comes down to faith in him.

Igzy, great words of wisdom here.

Last year I took a class to study the book of Job. Never studied that book before, in fact, in the LC I was told it was a waste of time. All the sages of the land gathered to help poor Job understand the unexplainable madness which had suddenly engulfed him. None could help him. Today mankind, with all its vast improvements in technology and learning, has no more wisdom to understand the often times unexplainable madness of life than any of Job's friends to answer these questions.

The message of this book, written for all of God's people, is to save us from trying to figure everything out. We are on a journey of faith. The number of days we have on this journey have been predetermined. God's way for us is to believe Him . . . regardless of what comes our way. Faith demands that we trust God, our creator and Father, and this faith, like everything else of value, needs testing. Nothing in human life can prove our faith except hardships and obedience to God.

James encourages us to "count it all joy brothers." Rejoicing in the Lord helps to save us from the disease of "I gotta understand what's goin' on," and strengthens our faith to love and know Him.

[Cal]

Originally Posted by Ohio

James encourages us to "count it all joy brothers." Rejoicing in the Lord helps to save us from the disease of "I gotta understand what's goin' on," and strengthens our faith to love and know Him.

Just thought of this. Inspired by Ohio:

The things in your life which make the least sense to you are the ones in which God is doing his greatest work in you.