The Governing Principles of the Practice of the Local Church

3. Taking Christ as Life

In this short passage from The Christian Life, Witness Lee confirms that one of the governing principles of the practice of the church is twofold: the believers’ individual living and magnifying of Christ is for a corporate, local expression of the Body of Christ in the local church.

The Christian life is a mystery. I cannot tell you that I know what the Christian life is in an absolute way. Some may ask, “Since you don’t know, why do you speak about it?” I am still endeavoring to know. On the one hand, I say that I do not know. On the other hand, I can say that I do know what the Christian life is to some extent. We need to see what the Christian life is from the Bible. Furthermore, I hope that what I have seen and experienced in the Christian life can be a help to you.

In this message, I want to cover two main points. The first point is that the Christian life is the life in which the believers of Christ live Christ and magnify Christ. The second point is that the Christian life is the life in which the Christians live Christ and magnify Him corporately in their locality as a local church to be a local expression of Christ as a part of the universal Body of Christ. The Christian life is and should always be in these two aspects—the individual aspect and the corporate aspect. We need to live an individual Christian life for a corporate Christian life. The corporate Christian life is the church life. This refers specifically to the local church. If we do not have a local church life, we cannot experience anything of the universal Body of Christ.

(Witness Lee, Christian Life, 8)

In the following excerpt Witness Lee interprets the Christian’s experience of spiritual thirst according to the history of the children of Israel while wandering in the wilderness in search of water. Just as Moses was led by the Lord to a particular tree which he cast into the bitter waters of Marah to make them sweet, so, he teaches, we in the local churches need the resurrected Christ, our living tree, to be added to our bitter situation.

The history of the children of Israel started with the eating of the Passover lamb in Exodus 12. Soon after they had eaten the Passover and crossed the Red Sea to come out of Egypt, they became short of water. Exodus 15:22 tells us that “they went three days in the wilderness, and found no water.” They came to Marah, which means bitter, because the waters of Marah were bitter and not good for drinking. It is significant that the journey from the Red Sea to Marah was exactly three days. Their being three days in the wilderness in thirst means that they were buried for three days, that they were in death. The third day may be considered as the day of resurrection since the Lord Jesus was raised on the third day (1 Cor. 15:4). When the children of Israel came to the bitter waters of Marah on the third day, the Lord showed Moses a tree, and when Moses cast this tree into the waters, the waters were made sweet (Exo. 15:25). We may say that the tree is the resurrected Christ because this tree was cast into the bitter waters of Marah after the children of Israel had traveled three days in the wilderness.

Because the children of Israel were short of water and came to a place of bitter waters, they began to murmur and complain. This is a good picture of the people of God when they are short of water. If a local church is short of spiritual water, be sure that there will be fighting, chiding, murmuring, and complaining there. If chiding, complaining, and murmuring are present in a local church, that is a proof of dryness, a proof of thirst. If we had no water to drink for three days, no doubt, many of us would be chiding, fighting, and murmuring because of the shortage of water. We need to realize that we have a living tree, the resurrected Christ. If we would put this resurrected Christ into our bitterness, allowing the resurrected Christ to come into our situation, the bitter waters will become the sweet waters. (36)

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