Have You Come Alive?

When you have achieved the living out of normal humanity, and have been made perfect, although you will be unable to speak prophecy, nor of any mysteries, you will be living out and revealing the image of a human. God created man, after which man was corrupted by Satan, and this corruption has made people into “dead bodies”—and thus, after you have changed, you will be different from these dead bodies. It is the words of God that give life to people’s spirits and cause them to be reborn, and when people’s spirits are reborn they will have come alive. Mention of the “dead” refers to corpses that have no spirit, to people in whom their spirit has died. When people’s spirits are given life, they come alive. The saints that were spoken of before refer to people who have come alive, those who were under Satan’s influence but defeated Satan. The chosen people of China have endured the cruel and inhumane persecution and trickery of the great red dragon, which has left them mentally ravaged and without the slightest courage to live. Thus, the awakening of their spirits must begin with their substance: Bit-by-bit, in their substance their spirit must be awakened. When, one day, they come alive, there will be no more obstructions, and all will proceed smoothly. At the moment, this remains unachievable. Most people’s living out contains much of the atmosphere of death, they are shrouded in an aura of death, and they lack too much. Some people’s words carry death, their actions carry death, and almost everything they live out is death. If, today, people publicly bear testimony to God, then this work will fail, for they have yet to fully come alive, and there are too many dead among you. Today, some people ask why God doesn’t show some signs and wonders so that He can quickly spread His work among the Gentile nations. The dead can’t bear testimony to God; only the living can, but most people today are dead, too many of them live in the cage of death, they live under the influence of Satan, and are unable to gain victory—and so how could they bear testimony to God? How could they spread the work of the gospel?

Only Those Who Know God Can Bear Testimony to God

It is Heaven’s law and earth’s principle to believe in God and know God, and today—during an age when God incarnate is doing His work in person—is an especially good time to know God. Satisfying God is something that is achieved by building on the foundation of understanding God’s will, and in order to understand God’s will, it is necessary to have some knowledge of God. This knowledge of God is the vision that one who believes in God must have; it is the basis of man’s belief in God. In the absence of this knowledge, man’s belief in God would exist in a vague state, in the midst of empty theory. Even if it is the resolution of people like this to follow God, they will gain nothing. All those who gain nothing in this stream are the ones who will be eliminated—they are all freeloaders. Whichever step of God’s work you experience, you should be accompanied by a mighty vision. Otherwise, it would be difficult for you to accept each step of new work, for the new work of God lies beyond man’s capacity to imagine, and is outside the bounds of his conception. And so, without a shepherd to tend to man, without a shepherd to engage in fellowship about visions, man is incapable of accepting this new work. If man cannot receive visions, then he cannot receive the new work of God, and if man cannot obey God’s new work, then man will be unable to understand God’s will, and so his knowledge of God will amount to nothing. Before man carries out the word of God, he must know the word of God, that is, he must understand God’s will; only in this way can God’s word be carried out accurately and in accordance with God’s will. This is something that everyone who seeks the truth must possess, and it is also the process that everyone who tries to know God must undergo. The process of coming to know the word of God is the process of coming to know God, and also the process of coming to know the work of God. And so, knowing visions not only refers to knowing the humanity of God incarnate, but also includes knowing the word and the work of God. From the word of God people come to understand God’s will, and from the work of God they come to know God’s disposition and what God is. Belief in God is the first step to knowing God. The process of advancing from this initial belief in God to the most profound belief in Him is the process of coming to know God, and the process of experiencing the work of God. If you only believe in God for the sake of believing in God, and not for the sake of coming to know Him, then there is no reality to your faith, and your faith cannot become pure—of this there is no doubt. If, during the process by which he experiences God’s work, man gradually comes to know God, then his disposition will gradually change, and his belief will become increasingly true. In this way, when man achieves success in his belief in God, he will have completely gained God. The reason why God went to such great lengths to become flesh for the second time to do His work in person was so that man would be able to know Him and to see Him. Knowing God[a] is the final effect to be achieved at the conclusion of God’s work; it is the last requirement God makes of mankind. The reason why He does this is for the sake of His final testimony; it is in order that man may finally and completely turn to Him that He does this work. Man can only come to love God by knowing God, and to love God he must know God. No matter how he seeks, or what he seeks to gain, he must be able to achieve knowledge of God. Only in this way can man satisfy God’s heart. Only by knowing God can man have true faith in God, and only by knowing God can he truly revere and obey God. Those who do not know God will never arrive at true obedience and reverence of God. Knowing God includes knowing His disposition, understanding His will, and knowing what He is. Yet whichever aspect one comes to know, each one requires man to pay a price, and requires the will to obey, without which no one would be able to continue following to the end. The work of God is too incompatible with the conceptions of man, God’s disposition and what God is are too difficult for man to know, and everything that God says and does is too incomprehensible to man: If man wishes to follow God and yet is unwilling to obey Him, then man will gain nothing. From the creation of the world until today, God has done much work that is incomprehensible to man and that man has found hard to accept, and God has spoken much that makes the conceptions of man difficult to heal. But He has never ceased His work on account of man’s having too many difficulties; rather, He has carried on working and speaking, and even though great numbers of “warriors” have fallen by the wayside, He is still doing His work, and continues without intermission to choose one group after another of people who are willing to submit to His new work. He has no pity for those fallen “heroes,” and instead treasures those who accept His new work and words. But to what end does He work in this way, step-by-step? Why is He always eliminating some people and choosing others? Why is it that He always employs such a method? The aim of His work is to allow man to know Him, and thus be gained by Him. The principle of His work is to work on those who are able to submit to the work He does today, and not to work on those who submit to the work He has done in the past while opposing the work He does today. Herein lies the reason why He has been eliminating so many people.