(1) It is necessary to choose which of God’s words to eat and drink of, and which truths to fellowship on, in light of work arrangements. Only in this way can one come gradually to understand the truth and enter reality;

(2) It is necessary to know the current work of the Holy Spirit on the basis of the sermons and fellowship of God and of the man He uses, and to train oneself in using the truth to solve practical problems;

(3) It is necessary to base one’s fellowship of the truth in each person’s stature, caliber, and practical difficulties. Do not employ one-size-fits-all methods, but suit your approach to your audience;

(4) God’s words must be read in a congregation, and corruption rectified through fellowshiping on the truth in a way that synthesizes people’s real states and actual problems, thereby giving them a path on which to practice.

Relevant Words of God:

As leaders and workers in the church, if you want to lead God’s chosen people into truth reality and to serve as God’s witnesses, most importantly, you must have a deeper understanding of God’s aim in saving people and the purpose of His work. You must understand the will of God and His various requirements of people. You must be practical in your efforts; practice only as much as you understand and communicate only on that which you know. Do not boast, do not exaggerate, and do not make irresponsible remarks. If you exaggerate, people will detest you and you will feel reproached afterward; this is just too inappropriate. When you provide the truth to others, you don’t necessarily have to deal with them and scold them in order for them to attain the truth. If you yourself don’t have the truth and only deal with and scold others, they will fear you, but that doesn’t mean they understand the truth. In some administrative work, it’s fine for you to deal with and prune others and discipline them to a certain degree. But if you cannot provide the truth and know only how to be overbearing and to chide others, your corruption and ugliness will be revealed. With the passage of time, as people are unable to obtain the provision of life or practical things from you, they will come to detest you and feel disgusted by you. Those who lack discernment will learn negative things from you; they will learn to deal with and prune others, to get angry, and to lose their temper. Isn’t that tantamount to leading others onto the path of Paul, onto a path toward perdition? Is that not an evildoing? Your work should focus on communicating the truth and providing life to others. If all you do is blindly deal with and lecture others, how will they ever understand the truth? As time goes by, people will see you for who you really are, and they will abandon you. How can you expect to bring others before God in this way? How is this doing the work? You will lose everyone if you keep working in this way. What work do you hope to accomplish anyway? Some leaders are incapable of communicating the truth to resolve problems. Instead, they just blindly deal with others and flaunt their power so that others come to fear them and obey them—such people are of the false leaders and antichrists. Those whose disposition has not changed are incapable of performing church work, and are unable to serve God.

—“Only Those With Truth Reality Can Lead” in Records of Talks of Christ of the Last Days

You should spend more time talking of those essential things to do with life entry, such as fellowshiping on the truth, life entry, changes in disposition, and knowledge of oneself. Do not talk of matters that have nothing to do with the truth. If you frequently practice in this way, you will gain some truth reality. Given your current stature, you are not able to do work that provides life or use the truth to resolve problems. All you can do is coax and exhort people, saying, “Do not disobey or resist God. Despite our being so corrupt, God still saves us, so we should heed His words and submit to Him.” After hearing this, people understand doctrines, but they still lack energy and do not know how to practice or experience God’s words. This proves that you, as leaders and workers, are also not in possession of truth reality. If you yourselves have not achieved entry, then how can you provide for others? You cannot get to the root of other people’s difficulties and corrupt dispositions, you cannot grasp what is key, for you still do not know yourself. As such, providing for life in the church is beyond you, and you can only exhort people, telling them to be good and obey in earnest. You are incapable of solving actual problems, which is sufficient evidence that you have not truly understood the truth or achieved any life entry. Most of you know only how to preach spiritual doctrine and empty theological theories, but you cannot provide life; as such, you are too small of stature. There has yet to be a change in your view of faith in God. Your understanding and motivations remain the same. You ask that others change, but you offer no path, and you have nothing to provide them with. You can only lecture and exhort people with letters and doctrines. Ultimately, the chosen ones of God led by you will still not understand the truth, nor will they have true knowledge of God’s work. If that is the case, how will they be able to perform their duties well? How will they become energized as followers of God? As leaders and workers, you should understand and grasp just what kind of understanding the brothers and sisters in the church have of God’s words, and what kind of knowledge they have of themselves. This rests on whether you, as leaders and workers, possess truth reality.

—“How to Cross Into the New Age” in Records of Talks of Christ of the Last Days

You need to have an understanding of the many states that people will be in when the Holy Spirit performs work on them. In particular, those who coordinate in service to God must have an even stronger grasp of the many states brought about by the work that the Holy Spirit performs on people. If you only talk about a lot of experiences or ways of attaining entry, it shows that your experience is overly one-sided. Without knowing your true state and grasping the truth principle, it is not possible to achieve a change in disposition. Without knowing the principles of the Holy Spirit’s work or understanding the fruit it bears, it will be difficult for you to discern the work of evil spirits. You must expose the work of evil spirits, as well as the notions of man, and penetrate straight to the heart of the issue; you must also point out many deviations in people’s practice and problems they might have in their faith in God, so that they may recognize them. At the very least, you must not make them feel negative or passive. However, you must understand the difficulties that objectively exist for most people, you must not be unreasonable or “try to teach a pig to sing”; that is foolish behavior. To resolve the many difficulties people experience, you must first comprehend the dynamics of the work of the Holy Spirit; you must understand how the Holy Spirit performs work on different people, you must have an understanding of the difficulties people face and of their shortcomings, and you must see through to the key issues of the problem and get to its source, without deviating or making any errors. Only this kind of person is qualified to coordinate in service to God.

Whether or not you are able to grasp the key issues and see many things clearly depends on your individual experiences. The manner in which you experience is also the manner in which you lead others. If you understand letters and doctrines, then you will lead others to understand letters and doctrines. The way that you experience the reality of God’s words is the way in which you will lead others to attain entry to the reality of God’s utterances. If you are able to understand many truths and clearly gain insight into many things from God’s words, then you are capable of leading others to understand many truths, too, and those whom you lead will gain a clear understanding of the visions. If you focus on grasping supernatural feelings, then those whom you lead will do the same. If you neglect practice, instead placing emphasis on discussion, then those whom you lead will also focus on discussion, without practicing at all or attaining any transformation in their dispositions; they will only be enthusiastic superficially, without having put any truths into practice. All people supply others with what they themselves possess. The type of person someone is determines the path onto which they guide others, as well as the type of people that they lead.

—The Word, Vol. 1. The Appearance and Work of God. What an Adequate Shepherd Should Be Equipped With

You have deviated in your summing up the truth; after you do all this summing up, it has yielded only rules. Your “summing up the truth” is not done so that people gain life or attain changes in their dispositions from the truth. Instead, it causes people to master some knowledge and doctrines from within the truth. They appear to have understood the purpose behind God’s work, when actually they have only mastered some words and doctrines. They do not understand the intended meaning of the truth; it is no different from studying theology or reading the Bible. You compile these books or those materials, and so people become in possession of this aspect of doctrine and that aspect of knowledge. They are first rate speakers of doctrines—but what happens when they are done speaking? They are incapable of experiencing, they have no understanding of God’s work, nor do they have any understanding of themselves. Ultimately, all they will have gained are formulas and rules, and they can talk about those few things but nothing else. If God did something new, would you be able to match up all the doctrines that you know with that? Those things of yours are just rules and you are just having people study theology, not allowing them to experience the word of God or the truth. Therefore, those books that you compile can bring others only into theology and knowledge, into new formulas, and into rules and conventions. They cannot bring people before God or allow them to understand the truth or God’s will. You are thinking that by raising those questions one after another, which you then answer and for which you write down outlines and summaries, brothers and sisters will find it easy to understand, and you think that apart from being easy to remember, these issues are clear at a glance, and that this is a great way of doing things. But what people are understanding is not the real intended meaning of the truth and does not match up with reality—it is just words and doctrines. So it would be better if you did not do these things at all. Doing this is leading people to understand and master knowledge. You bring others into the doctrines, into religion, and have them follow and believe in God within religious doctrines. Isn’t that being just like Paul? You think that mastering knowledge of the truth is particularly important, and so is learning by heart many passages of God’s words. But how people understand the word of God is not important at all. You think it is extremely important for people to be able to memorize many of God’s words, to be able to speak much doctrine and to discover many formulas within God’s words. Therefore, you always want to systematize these things so that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet, saying the same things, and talking about the same doctrines, so they have the same knowledge and keep the same rules—this is your objective. Your doing this appears to be for the sake of people gaining understanding, when on the contrary you have no idea that this is bringing people into the midst of rules that are outside of God’s word the truth. To allow people to have a real understanding of the truth, you must link it up with reality and with the work, and solve practical problems according to God’s word the truth. Only in this way can people understand the truth and enter into reality, and only achieving such a result is really bringing people before God. If all you talk about are spiritual theories, doctrines, and rules, if you only put effort into the literal words, all you can achieve is getting people to say the same things and follow rules, but you will not be able to guide people to understand the truth. You will be particularly unable to have people better understand themselves, and achieve repentance and transformation. If being able to talk about spiritual theories could substitute for people’s entering truth reality, then you would not be needed to lead the churches.

—“Without the Truth, One Is Liable to Offend God” in Records of Talks of Christ of the Last Days

When, in your fellowship together, you do not fellowship about the doctrines you have heard or remembered, or the spiritual theories you have grasped, but are able instead to fellowship about your own recent states, about the ways in which your views and positions on some event have undergone change and been informed by new discoveries and new understandings, about things of yours that are contrary to God’s requirements and the truth, then, at such time as you are able to fellowship such things, you will have stature. If you have never examined all aspects of your views, positions, motives, and thoughts, or if, having examined them, you are unable to tell if they are right or wrong, and your accounting of them is muddled, then, were you to lead the church, with what would you water others? (The letters and doctrines.) It seems to Me that you would water others not only with spiritual theories and the letters and doctrines, but also, perhaps, with your absurd views and your personal notions of God, and, more than that, with your one-sided views and understandings of God, in total discord with the true state of things and God’s essence. And what happens to everyone brought up under such leadership? They become able only to speak on the letters and doctrines. If God truly wanted to effect something in them, their not resisting it would be a satisfactory outcome; they would be quite incapable of regarding it correctly. What does this show? It shows that what you instill in others is notions and imaginings. If others have not increased their understanding and diminished their misunderstandings of God due to your watering and leadership, then how has your performance of your duty been? Have you done it adequately or not? (Inadequately.) Are you now able to determine which parts of your watering and which parts of the work you do are truly helpful and beneficial to others, have truly resolved others’ misunderstandings of God, and have afforded others a true understanding of God and a normal relationship with Him? If you can achieve these results in your work, then you are able to do practical work and perform your duty adequately.

—“The Attitude Man Should Have Toward God” in Records of Talks of Christ of the Last Days

As your life progresses, you must always have new entry and new, higher insight, which grow deeper with every step. This is what all humanity should enter into. Through communing, listening to sermons, reading the word of God, or handling some matter, you will gain new insight and new enlightenment, and will not live within the rules of old and times of old; you will always live in the new light, and will not stray from the word of God. This is what is meant by embarking upon the right track. Paying a price on some superficial level will not do; day by day, the word of God enters a higher realm, and new things appear every day, and man, too, must make a new entry every day. As God speaks, so He brings to fruition all that which He has spoken, and if you cannot keep up, then you will fall behind. You must go deeper in your prayers; eating and drinking of the word of God cannot be intermittent. Deepen the enlightenment and illumination you receive, and your notions and imaginings must gradually recede. You must also strengthen your judgment, and whatever you encounter, you must have your own thoughts about it and have your own viewpoints. By understanding some things in the spirit, you must gain insight into the outward things and grasp the essence of any issue. If you are not equipped with these things, how will you be able to lead the church? If you only speak of letters and doctrines without any reality and without a way of practice, you will only be able to get by for a short period of time. It may be marginally acceptable when speaking to new believers, but after a time, when new believers have had some actual experience, you will no longer be able to supply them. Then how are you fit for God’s use? Without new enlightenment, you cannot work. Those without new enlightenment are those who do not know how to experience, and such people never gain new knowledge or new experience. And, in the matter of supplying life, they can never perform their function, nor can they become fit for God’s use. This kind of person is good for nothing, a mere wastrel. In truth, such people are wholly incapable of performing their function in the work, they are all good for nothing. Not only do they fail to perform their function, but they actually place much unnecessary strain on the church. I exhort these “venerable old men” to make haste and leave the church, so that others no longer have to look upon you.

—The Word, Vol. 1. The Appearance and Work of God. Those Who Obey God With a True Heart Shall Surely Be Gained by God