O glorious Christ, Savior mine

Stanza 1 of Hymns, #501 says concerning Christ: "God infinite, in eternity, / Yet man in time, finite to be." He was God in eternity without limitation, but He became a man on this earth limited by time and space. He was limited to the village of Nazareth in His living for about thirty years. Can we be limited in such a way? We may have the burden to visit many places, but the Lord may not want us to. We must learn the lesson to be limited.

As we have seen, the Holy Spirit, who is the consummated Triune God, is of two aspects—the essential aspect and the economical aspect. This is not for doctrine but for our experience. We have at least two hymns on this matter, Hymns, #609 and #501. Hymn #609 not only speaks of our spiritual experience but also has many references to the Bible. Stanza 3 says, "The Triune God the Spirit is,/And comes as breath and wind to me." In John 20:22 the Holy Spirit as breath is of the essential aspect, while in Acts 2:2-4 the Holy Spirit as wind is of the economical aspect. Essentially, the Holy Spirit as breath enters into us as life; economically, the Holy Spirit as a rushing violent wind is poured upon us as power. Therefore, the Holy Spirit as the consummation of the Triune God is as breath and wind.

Stanza 4 of Hymns, #609 says, "All that the Father is and has/In His beloved Son doth rest,/And all the riches of the Son/Are by the Spirit now possessed." This is based on John 16:15, which says, "All that the Father has is Mine; for this reason I have said that He receives of Mine and will declare it to you." Verses 13-14 say, "But when He, the Spirit of reality, comes, He will guide you into all the reality; for He will not speak from Himself, but what He hears He will speak; and He will declare to you the things that are coming. He will glorify Me, for He will receive of Mine and will declare it to you." The "He" in verse 15 is clearly the "Spirit of reality" in verse 13. The Spirit's declaring to the disciples is His glorifying of the Son in verse 14 and His guiding of them into all the reality in verse 13. Therefore, the meaning of verses 13 through 15 is that all that the Father has is the Son's, and all that the Son has is received by the Spirit, and after the Spirit receives, He declares everything to the Son's disciples. Such a declaring is the glorifying of the Son, and it is the guiding of the disciples into all the reality. This reality is all that the Son has and all that the Father has. Therefore, stanza 3 of Hymns, #501 says, "All things of the Father are Thine;/All Thou art in Spirit is mine;/The Spirit makes Thee real to me,/That Thou experienced might be."

I have studied and even experimented with the new way very much. I can assure all of the saints in the churches that they will be successful if they will be faithful to go out for two to three hours every week, week after week, for forty-four weeks a year. While the saints are practicing this, they will learn many things. In the past sixty years, I did not learn many things from others. I learned simply by my practice. No one taught me how to write the footnotes. No one taught me how to write a poem, a song, or a hymn. Over sixty years ago I began to write; I wrote a tract on the wonderful way to save souls. That writing was somewhat childish, but I continued throughout the years to practice and practice and practice. Eventually, I wrote the hymn, "O glorious Christ, Savior mine" (Hymns, #501). If you will practice persistently, you will eventually learn the proper way.

If we have not seen God's economy and dispensing, even if we were to abandon everything of the world for the Lord, He would still ask us one day, "For what purpose do you want Me?" Perhaps we would say that we want Him because we want to enjoy Him. But if we remain in the first two layers, we may enjoy the Lord, but the Lord cannot have His enjoyment. If we remain only in the first two layers, even if we love the Lord, enjoy Him, are revived every morning, and overcome every day, and even if we love the church and are for the church, when the crucial moment comes, we will be exposed and will be shown to be only for ourselves and not for the Lord or His church. If we see God's economy and dispensing, we will not care for our own achievements and gains. God's economy is not for our achievement, but for us, the chosen and regenerated ones, to be filled by the Spirit to the extent that the Lord becomes everything in us, so that we may be delivered from the old man and may be built up with all the saints to be God's habitation (Hymns, #501). This is a matter of God's habitation; it has nothing to do with our personal gain or loss. In the church we must have the discernment and the insight to see God's economy and dispensing. Never listen to or talk about right and wrong. All rights and wrongs are based on personal profit and loss. Those things that are profitable to a person will be considered by him as right, and the things that are disadvantageous to a person will be considered by him as wrong. How terrible this is!

Ephesians 1 reveals the Father's choosing and predestinating, the Son's redeeming, and the Spirit's sealing (v. 13b). The sealing of the Spirit can be likened to a seal with ink being pressed upon a sheet of paper. The more the ink is applied, the more the paper is saturated and permeated with the ink. Eventually, the entire paper will be sealed, saturated, and permeated with the substance of the ink in the image of the seal. In the same way, the Spirit is saturating and permeating us. The last stanza of hymn #501 in Hymns says:

Thy Spirit will me saturate,

Every part will God permeate...

The secret of learning anything is to do it again and again. In learning to do something, we make mistakes, and we are perfected by learning from those mistakes. I wrote hymn #501—"O glorious Christ, Savior mine"—and then I polished, corrected, and adjusted it close to one hundred times. Now it is very hard to improve this hymn because it has been polished and adjusted to the uttermost. Some of the hymns that others among us wrote in the past were written in a quick and light way. This is not proper. The spiritual songs and hymns are the cream of a person's writing, thought, learning, life experience, and spiritual experience. If I did not have the experience of living Christ, I could not have composed that hymn—"Oh, what a life! Oh, what a peace!" That hymn is the cream of my experience, my thought, my learning, and my writing.

The hymns are especially rich in life experience and in truth. The poetic language is so pure. In our ordinary speaking none of us can utter the purified words that are in the hymns. This is because the hymnal was written with much consideration. Hymn #501 has seven verses. If we read and speak it to one another, we will see the riches. If we speak properly, we can render a message by our speaking. We should learn to use complete clauses, phrases, or expressions in our speaking and speak so that others can follow our speaking.

We need to learn to speak the hymns in many ways. Sometimes we need to repeat and stress. In the chorus of hymn #501 there is the phrase, "Inexhaustible, rich, and sweet!" We need to read this phrase by stressing it and by repeating it. We all have to learn to stay away from our natural way, that is, our natural reading and our natural hearing. We need to learn something new according to the Scriptures. Do not speak too loud, too low, too fast, or too slow. Exercise to speak like an expert. A person who takes piano lessons from a teacher and who practices frequently will eventually be able to play the piano properly.

In his ministry Brother Nee emphasized Christ as our life (Col. 3:4). In the introduction to some of his books he expressed that his burden was not on other matters, not even on the normal practice of the church life. Instead, he strongly stated that all our co-workers must know Christ as life. When I began to minister in Taiwan, my stress was always on Christ and the church. After I came to the United States, we began to compile our hymnal. Previously, Brother Nee had selected one hundred eighty-five hymns for our use out of about ten thousand that he considered. I realized that we were short of proper hymns on Christ, the life-giving Spirit, life, and the church as the Body of Christ. In order to fill the gap, I wrote approximately two hundred hymns. Within two months in 1961 alone, I wrote eighty-five new hymns, many of which were translated into English. These include "Oh, what a life!" (Hymns, #499), "O glorious Christ, Savior mine" (Hymns, #501), and "Not the law of letters, / But the Christ of life" (Hymns, #541). These hymns stress Christ as life very much. In addition to those selected by Brother Nee, I selected six hundred more from the hymns of Christianity. Including the new hymns that I had written, the number of hymns in our new hymnal was one thousand eighty. At the beginning of the hymnal we added an introduction and a table of contents. By reading the table of contents of our hymnal, anyone can see that we have a proper knowledge of theology. Among the denominations there is not a hymnal with as complete a collection of hymns as ours, covering many items of truth and experience from the preaching of the Triune God to the consummation of the New Jerusalem. Thus far, no one has been able to criticize or condemn this collection.

Colossians 2:9 says, "In Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily." In one of our hymns we say, "The fullness of God dwells in Thee" (Hymns, #501, verse 2), but Colossians 2:9 says "the fullness of the Godhead," not the fullness of God. Godhead means God Himself. The Godhead is triune. That the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Christ really denotes that the divine Trinity is dwelling in Christ in full. The fullness of the Trinity dwells in Him bodily.

In 1961, within a period of two months, I wrote eighty-five new hymns in Chinese. These hymns include "Oh, what a life! Oh, what a peace!" (Hymns, #499), "O glorious Christ, Savior mine" (Hymns, #501), and "What mystery, the Father, Son, and Spirit" (Hymns, #608). In the same year I studied Ezekiel thoroughly in order to see the revelation concerning the move of the Spirit. In my fellowship with the co-workers and elders I also emphasized the need to be filled with the Spirit. However, I still did not feel that the saints in the churches in Taiwan were filled with the Spirit to a sufficient degree.