To all concerned (reply to BrentB below),
You are classically misreading Watchman Nee as typically of the flesh of any man
without a spirit of discernment. This happens when you read with your mind and
were not reached in your spirit, because you didn't allow yourself or because
you are not regenerated in reality.
http://www3.telus.net/trbrooks/Misreading.htm
Watchman Nee does not say the human consciousness is exclusively in the spirit.
Watchman Nee writes in the Spiritual man, that you have God-consciousness of
your spirit, and self-consciousness of the soul, and world-consciousness through
your body.
You may be confusing the word "conscience" with consciousness. We do not say
your spirit is your conscience, but that your spirit has the function of
conscience, along with communion and intuition, as the 3 major aspects of our
spirit.
We should not be introspective in the spirit by locating ourselves in our
spirit, but rather, sense that still small voice of the spirit where God's
movements occur by the Holy Spirit. These inner registrations is where God's
Spirit makes contact with our spirit. This is articulated in the Scriptures.
When we pray we do not pray to our spirit, but to the Father. Nee writes on page
15 of volume 2 (white covers, CFP) in The Spiritual Man, "Our prayers are
directed to 'our Father who art in heaven,'" but the heavenly Father
guides from within us. If our Counsellor, our Paraclete, resides in our
spirit then His guidance must come from within. How tragically deceived we will
be if we seek dreams, visions, voices, and sensations in our outer man rather
than seeking Him in our inner man!"
"Frequently many children of God turn within
themselves, that is, they look into their soul to determine whether they have
peace, grace or spiritual progress. This is most harmful and it is not of faith.
It diverts them from gazing upon Christ to a looking at themselves" (p. 16)
- I recommend reading the rest of page 16 and 17.
We do not reject man's soul for the soulical functions are very legitimate. What
we do do is not try to contact God through the natural self, but instead we
contact God through our inner man in truth and spirit, not inordinate reasoning,
dogmatism or emotion. These are rough in character whereas the spirit is the
organ that is sensitive enough to make contact with God's Spirit. First we are
regenerated in the spirit, not the soul. While Satan works from the outer to the
inner, God works from the inner to the outer, that is, from spirit to soul.
Watchman Nee was not a calvinist. There is a cult out there by a person of the
name Witness Lee who started a cult off of Nee altering his writings, and this
W. Lee person was a calvinist. But Watchman Nee was OSAS arminian and he was
blamed for being osas arminian too. Amazing eh?
Also this Witness Lee person was modalist also, while Watchman Nee was not but
for some reason people marry that cult leader to Watchman Nee only because they
overassume and don't know any better.
If you had read The Spiritual Man Nee was very against praying to the Holy
Spirit or to our inner man, but to praying to God above.
How people love to bear false witness against Watchman Nee. The common theme in
doing this is never to show it, only self-declare these things that Watchman Nee
himself does not believe, but he is blamed for them because Witness Lee,
unregenerated, takes Nee's name falsely and bears false witness. For example,
look at this brutal alteration of Watchman Nee's writings in the lsm/lc cult
version (not the CFP white covers),
http://www3.telus.net/trbrooks/Spiritual_Man.htm
I really appreciate God's 10 commandments, one of them being not to bear false
witness for that is all men of the flesh do who are in the world.
In The Spiritual Man Watchman Nee gives a full proof of the spirit having these
3 specific functions. Watchman Nee has made this full proof and intuitively it
is right too as testified by the Holy Spirit in the believers spirit in
agreement with the Word of God.
This affords God love to truly manifest God's life in the spirit of the man and
communicated to the soul to have renewed emotion instead of men worshipping with
their soul life, smothering the spirit of the man. This is worshipping God with
the good self, and God considers such efforts equally deplorable as defiling sin
for God cares about the source of all things.
Watchman Nee teaches the heart of man is the mind of the soul and the conscience
of the spirit, but it is not incurrably wicked as is being accused of him. He
does not teach that. He shows that the heart is deceitful, but not all
overcomable.
How man naturally loves with his own desires without regard to God's leading
first in His love. The problem with natural love is that it wants something in
return, but with God's love it is selfless.
It is a spiritual man that senses the inner registrations of his spirit and
God's leading in therein as the lamb of the Lord where the ark of the covenant
type can now enter into man behind the veil rent. Praise the Lord!
In Heb. 4.12 there is spirit, soul and body. Same as in 1 Thess. 5.23. It is the
fallen bipartite man that can't understand man has a spirit, soul and body,
because his flesh totally controls him, and is without a spirit of wisdom and
revelation from God. We are to worship God according to Luke 10.27, and what is
really intriguing about this verse is that God pulls out the soul the mind first
to worship, then states the soul in total to worship God with, then the heart,
going deeper, which is the mind of the soul and the conscience of the spirit,
and then finishes even deeper referring to the "strength" speaking of the
strength of the spirit's inner man, and certainly not forcing anything bodily or
soulically, but spiritual strength. Praise the Lord.
Feelings play a very important role, for they interact and stimulate the spirit
and the spirits renews emotion as the Holy Spirit works within the spirit to
cleans emotion also.
We must not send emotions to the sky otherwise we are no different than pagans
who exhibit all kinds of antics to stimulate themselves like a drug. Let our
emotion remain calm as the Holy Spirit renews emotion and calms its inordinate
untrustworthy oscillations.
The reasonings of the thoughts with their rationalizations are a problem but
with God's working through the spirit He is is afforded a line of communication
to contact the soul which before had been smothering man's spirit.
The body of sin is dirty and God knows it is utterly unrepairable so His
solution is different then most would expect. God simply has the old man die on
the cross rending the body of sin unemployed. This does not mean the body is not
got its proper functions? Watchman Nee does not teach that, so to accuse him of
this, is a sin, the sin of bearing false witness.
This shows you how different a life in Christ is and is uninfluenced by eastern
religions and philosophies. This is even more spectacular given the fact that
Watchman Nee comes from China.
What a testimony of the Holy Spirit! Praise the Lord!
Troy Brooks
> Another book is "The Spiritual Man"
by Watchman Nee.
Although I would not
> recommend Nee as a "pillar of the faith"
to help cultivate a christian in a
> strong walk, this work is specifically
devoted to the topic you are asking
> about. Hope it's useful.
The problem is that the work is errantly devoted to the topic. I studied Nee and followed his teachings (never follow a man's teachings) for many years. My dad was a pastor and encouraged his materials. I was very deeply indoctrinated with Nee's tripartite dissected man philosophy. This teaching is a heresy. To imagine the human conciousness as capable of locating itself exclusively in the "human spirit" is not only ludicrous and unscriptural, but results in a mindless, easily led herd of sheep. I beg of you to reconsider including this man's philosophy in your faith. It is quite pernicious to the real experience of Jesus as a sentient being, a seperate person to whom one directs prayer and converstion. In Nee's theology, one must locate themselves in their "spirit" to contact God. This is never articulated in scripture. While the word says that we worship God in spirit and in truth - that was refering to the non-physical nature of his worship - not a relocation of awareness into a dissected isoalted "organ" - which is only accomplished through the rejection of one's SOUL. This, of course, is the very person of the individual - which is now rendered void through an extreme Calvanism. Thus the misled and hapless Christian is futily "turning" to a fantasy realm not depicted in scripture (not to Jesus). This is the irony. Through a modalistic conversion of Christ to "the Spirit" (I Cor 15:45), the Christian, in Nee's imagination, must become 'one' with the Christ spirit IN you spirit. Thus, one no longer directs prayers to heaven as the Lord suggested in his example prayer - but to an INTERNAL location where, through the magic of mingling, you are one with Jesus. This is the exclusive conceptualization of the interface with God. An internalized, unscriptural worship of man's own spirit instead of God. The Bible does not say much about the spirit in terms of defining its function and describing how we are to interact with it. It is called the Lamp of the Lord. But nowhere in the Word is there this concept of a dissected trichotomized tripartite man which functions through the voluntary and selective use of his internal compenents. This may sound overblown, but it is the exact theology you will find in
Watchman Nee's
writings. This cold philosophic deconstruction of man ultimately destroys his capacity to love, since the heart of man is defined as permanently "incurably wicked." Of course we are instructed in scripture to Love God with all our mind, soul, heart and strength. That's funny, the spirit is not mentioned! Since God is Love and the main commandment is to love, you can understand how a philosophy which cripples ones ability to love is quite misguided. Only in the pure clean sterile world of one's own spirit can God be known. Your feelings must be denied. Your thoughts cannot be trusted. Only by locating yourself in this fictionally defined human spirit can you escape the filth of material existence. As you know, this is all derivative of most Eastern religions and philosophies. Brent. -- |