By Watchman Nee

Excerpt taken from, What Shall This Man Do?, Watchman Nee (pp. 140-146)

“Thy kingdom come!”  We are to pray for this.  If His Kingdom would come of itself, we should not have been given that command.  But God’s people are to pray, for His work is always done in response to His people’s cry.  The Lord’s prayer is not just a model prayer for me; it is a revelation of God’s heart.  “True prayer begins at the heart of God, is made known to the hearts of men, is prayed back to God again, and God answers.”  That is more than a definition; it is, I believe, the principle of God’s working in the universe.

“Thy will be done!”  Yes, but where?  “On earth”, for this is the only place where to-day God’s will is not done.  Then how can God’s Kingdom be brought in down here?  By the created will, in union with the Uncreated Will, seeking the displacement of the rebellious will of the devil.  For prayer is always three-sided.  It involves someone prayed to, someone prayed for, and someone prayed against; and on earth there is someone to pray against – a will that is opposed to God’s.  Against that rebellious will, God will not act alone.  He awaits our prayers.  

There are many passages in the Gospels which affirm that God has subjected Himself to limitations.  We find Jesus prevented from entering a Galilean city, or refused passage through a Samaritan village, or again, powerless to do any mighty work in Nazareth (Mark 1:45; Luke 9:53; Mark 6:5).  “How am I straitened!”  He could cry; “How often would I have gathered thy children…and ye would not.”  “Ye will not come to me, that ye may have life”.  (Luke 12:50; Matt. 23:37; John 5:40).  So the grain of wheat has no other course than to “fall into the earth and die”; and still to-day the word of God must be sown “among thorns” (John 12:24; Matt. 13:22).  The same thing continues on into the later New Testament history, as well as being found, of course, everywhere in the Old.  The water of divine deliverance depends upon the provision of human ditches.  The oil of the Spirit flows until “there is not a vessel more”.  “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear: but your iniquities…” (2 Kings 3:16,18; 4:6; Isaiah 59:1,2).

How did it come about that Omnipotence became limitable by man?  And will it continue throughout eternity?  For surely, God is El Shaddai, “God Almighty”; eternity past and eternity to come hold nothing able to limit Him, nothing to arrest or hinder or delay.

But God has a will.  He seeks communion with a people who will share His life and manifest His Son.  To that end He created heaven and earth – and man; and then the trouble started.  For, in keeping with His purpose, God had created man a being with free-will, and He has determined not to accomplish that purpose without the free co-operation of man’s will.  This is a solemn principle; none more so.  It means that, whereas in the eternities God was absolute, here in time He has chosen, instead of compelling His creatures, to limit His own omnipotence to their free choice.  Man has been given power to make way for, or to obstruct, the power of God.

To such limitation God was prepared to subject Himself, knowing the triumph of divine love that would as a result be manifest in the future of eternity.  He works towards that goal.  His glory is that, in the ages to come, man’s free-will will be one with the will of God.  The omnipotence then will be morally greater even than in eternity past, because there will be a possible limitation.  Man will still be able to disobey, but he will never choose to do so.  The separate, created will of man will be wholly set for God; and that is glory.

We know the risk God was willing to run in order to gain this end, and that when man’s first choice led him in a wrong direction, the Father sent the beloved Son to redeem the loss.  Here was One whose will was absolutely identified with God’s, and, praise God! through His death and resurrection and by the power of the Spirit, a Body was formed whose members will be no less committed to that Uncreated Will.  In them the divine limitations will be for ever done away.  The Church is to secure for God the release of His power into the world, by bringing it to bear on evil situations in the realm of the spirit, for their overthrow.  The Church is – I speak reverently – to restore to God His own omnipotence.

Prayer is the present exercising of my will in God’s favour; declaring that His will shall be done.  For this is true prayer, that what God makes known, we express.  Man wills something that God has already willed, and gives it utterance.  We do not ask ourselves “Is my prayer according to God’s will?” but “Is it God’s will?”  The will of God is the starting-point; we voice it; God does it.  And if we do not voice it, it will not be done.  Our prayers thus lay the track down which God’s power can come.  Like some mighty locomotive, His power is irresistible; but it cannot reach us without rails.  When men cease to pray, God ceases to work, for without their prayer He will do nothing.  It is they who direct heaven’s power to the place of need.

Read again Matthew 18:18-20 and see the tremendous range of the church’s responsibility in prayer.  The measure of the Church is the measure of God in the earth to-day.  As once He was revealed through Jesus Himself in Jerusalem and Galilee, so now He is revealed through His Church wherever it is found world-wide.  He cannot go beyond the extent of the church, for the church alone represents the coming race.  She stands for God on the earth, and what she looses and binds, heaven looses and binds.  On earth to-day God’s power is as great as her prayers; no greater.  All that He does in relation to his eternal purpose, He does through her, and where she falls behind in her work, to that extent He is limited.  

The Church cannot increase God’s power, but she can limit it.  She cannot make Him do what He does not will to do, but she can hinder that which He does will.  There are many things that he would bind and loose in heaven – things which hinder to be bound, things of spiritual value to be loosed – but movement on earth must precede movement in heaven, and God always waits for His Church to move.  

“What things soever” (referring to Matt. 18): these are precious words.  Here heaven is measured by earth, for there is always more power in heaven than the measure of our asking; there is always more to be loosed or bound in heaven than we ask down here.  Why do we want deliverance from sin?  Why do we cry to God for enduement?  To pray “Thy will be done in me” is a good beginning, but we must go on to “Thy will be done on earth”.  The children of God to-day are taken up with far too small things, whereas their prayer is intended for the release of heaven’s mighty acts.  Prayer for myself or my own immediate concerns must lead on to prayer for the Kingdom.  Here is the answer to the question:  What is the ministry of the church?  She is to be heaven’s outlet, the channel of release for heaven’s power, the medium of accomplishment of God’s purpose.  Many things have accumulated in heaven because God has not yet found His outlet on earth; the church has not yet prayed.

How is God to get this?  How is He going to have His church on His side?  Only by every one of us remembering, in the solemn conditions of to-day, that this ministry of being God’s outlet is our greatest possible work.  God shows what He wants, we stand and ask, and God acts from heaven: this is true prayer, and this is what we must see fully expressed in our prayer meetings.  If the Church here in Shanghai [where he is speaking at], not to speak of other places, does not know this ministry of prayer, may God forgive us!  Without it, all else is empty; God has no vessel here.  “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Matt. 7:21).  With the Kingdom in view, all we have and all we are must be set for the will of God.  God needs this.  He must have a few throughout the nations who hold on in prayer, and who, by driving a wedge into the power of the enemy, bring in the next age.  That is overcoming.  Whether the members be many or few, may God maintain our strength to work for Him in deep, strong, prevailing prayer.  

SPOILING THE STRONG MAN’S GOODS

“And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword.  And five of you shall chase an hundred, and an hundred of you shall chase ten thousand: and your enemies shall fall before you” (Lev. 26:7,8).  This was the promise of God to Israel as a people; but in the event, the reckoning seems to have been even more astounding, for one is said to have chased a thousand, and two to have put ten thousand to flight (Deut. 32:30).  Here surely is a picture of prayer, individual or corporate, alone or with two together.  For where two agree on earth, heaven binds ten thousand foes.  How often have the people of God, in an hour of crisis, taken these words of Jesus at their face value and proved them!  So on the night when Peter lay in prison, the church throughout Jerusalem got to its knees and prayed earnestly, and all Herod’s authority was as nothing before the response of heaven to that prayer.  Another Kingdom had invaded his territory, and even the great prison door yielded and gave way of itself.  

Another Kingdom had invaded his territory.  To elaborate this statement, let me take an illustration from modern history.  As most Westerners are aware, a century ago the great foreign powers trading with China used their force of arms to impose on the Chinese people a principle against which they have ever since harboured a deep resentment.  I refer to what is usually termed “extraterritoriality”.  By this principle, areas of Chinese territory were ceded to the foreign powers, and the citizens of those powers were made immune from legal action by the Chinese authorities for any personal infringement of the laws of China.  They could be tried only by a consul or other public functionary of their own country, and according to that country’s foreign laws.  It was a high-handed way of doing business, and to-day all recognize the imposition as having been unjust.  Yet perhaps, without fear of misunderstanding, we may use it to illustrate something quite different and in no sense unjust, namely, the present invasion of this earth by heaven’s gracious rule.

How does this illustration apply to us?  It does so in two ways.  First as to ourselves, God has “made us to be a kingdom” (Rev. 1:5,6).  As far as this world is concerned we are citizens of a “foreign” power.  Delivered from the kingdom of darkness we are no longer subject to the prince of this world, under whose sway it lies.  Instead we own allegiance to another King and are subject to another law.  As to our persons, we have “extraterritorial rights”.

But secondly, as to this world itself, here too we have claims to make.  For over it man was created to have dominion, and what he lost, the Son of man has recovered.  To-day, spiritual world-rulers have usurped that dominion, and the Church’s vocation is to reclaim it from them.  Though he is its “prince”, Satan is in fact a usurper – an illegal squatter on God’s inheritance.

Suppose a man somehow gets into your house and occupies it without your authority.  What do you do?  You go to the magistrate, and, appealing to the law of the land, you get a verdict against him.  You return armed with a court order, and you turn him out.  He may be fortunate not to go out in chains!  But the situation in this world is no different.  God’s “statute book” has already ruled against this world’s illegal occupant.  He is to go!  What matters it that in Satan’s eyes the law of the Kingdom of heaven is a “foreign” law?  Calvary has established the superiority of that Kingdom.  At the Cross, Christ overthrew Satan’s whole legal standing.  Now it is the Church’s task to see that other law is put into effect.  Crying to God like the widow in the parable, “Avenge me of my adversary!” she is to obtain the order for his eviction, and throw him out.  God waits for that cry.  In a given situation, and at His word, we are to put down our foot on a piece of spiritual territory occupied by evil powers, and to lay claim to it for God.

What kind of men are needed for this task?  I say again: just simple believers, it may be only two or three together, but with the Lord in the midst.  For we do not ourselves have to bind the strong man – that is already done – but only to remind him that he has no real escape from his bonds!  Let me illustrate by telling you a story.

In a certain city in China there were two sisters.  They were unlearned, and, humanly speaking, not “bright”, but they had known the Lord for some while.  One day they were confronted with a woman possessed with a demon, violent and dangerous, and in great distress.  Having sought the Lord together, they approached her, and in the name of Jesus commanded the demon to go out.  To their dismay, nothing happened, and their inclination was to go away and seek the help and advice of someone more experienced.  But as they hesitated and lifted their hearts to the Lord, asking Him what they should do, a sudden thought came to them.  Going back and again addressing the evil spirit, they preached to it Jesus.  At once, through the woman but in its own peculiar voice, the spirit replied, “Oh yes, I know Jesus!  I have worshipped him all my life!”  And with that the possessed woman arose, and crossing the room pointed them to an idol shrine in the courtyard.  

Then they understood!  The demon was, as we say, “trying it on” with them.  Now they knew what to do.  Beginning again from the beginning: “Do you remember two thousand years ago”, they said, “Jesus of Nazareth cast out many of your fellow-demons, until at length they all turned on Him and slew Him?  Nevertheless He rose again, stripping off principalities and powers, and is now exalted far above all rule and authority.  And there was a proclamation made: In that Name every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth shall bow!  Do you remember?  Now, in that Name we command you to go!”  And the demon obeyed. 

When I asked them afterwards from where they got this light, they could not explain.  They could only say that the Lord Himself had come to their aid and exposed the subtlety of the enemy.  But this incident surely disposes of our question: What sort of people are needed for this task?  The answer is that no sort of people can stand up to Satan.  Demons only recognize Christ.  “If I by the Spirit of God cast out devils, then is the kingdom of God come upon you” (Matt. 12:28).  Our enemy is too subtle and dangerous for us, but the Body of Christ not only provides for us; it covers us.  We can all put on Christ as our armour.  Against Him Satan’s shafts are of no avail!