[MINISTRY]
[Watchman Nee]
"Out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you ... that ye might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you" (2 Corinthians 2.4).
A ministry that is to bring healing and life must spring essentially from experience. This fact is strikingly displayed in the apostle Paul. The ministry of 1 Corinthians, for example, is based firmly on the man revealed to us in 2 Corinthians.
In 1 Corinthians Paul writes of God's choice of "the weak things"; 2 Corinthians shows in grim reality his own experience of a divinely imposed weakness. In the first letter Paul appeals to his readers for unity; in the second he shows how, in spite of their rebuffs, he still counts himself one of them.
Chapter 13 of the fist letter offers his classic treatment of love; in 2 Corinthians 12.15 he affirms "I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls."
Finally, 1 Corinthians 15 gives us the clearest teaching anywhere in the New Testament on the subject of the resurrection: yet 2 Corinthians makes plain his own desperate need to trust from hour to hour in "God which raiseth the dead".
At every point his doctrine is backed with experience. Nothing else really constitutes a basis for a ministry of Christ. - W. N. [22/23]
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