20 Quotes from Love Not the World

 

Before the Fall there was an earth; after the Fall there was a “world”; at the Lord’s return there will be a kingdom. –p. 63

Through the grace of God and the indwelling Spirit [the Church] possess an inherent life-power capable, if she responds to it, of keeping her constantly moving Godward, or of recalling her Godward if she strays. –p. 71

For the Church depends for its very existence upon a ceaseless impartation of fresh life from God, and cannot survive one day without it. –p. 73

Understanding never moves us; only revelation does that… Once we see it, and we shall never be the same again. As Christians therefore we bank everything on that opening of eyes. –p. 87

Today, through Christ, God plans in the heart of His redeemed people an Eden to which, in triumphant fact, Satan will at last have no moral access whatever. –p. 88

Every glory that is not glory to God is vainglory, and it is amazing what paltry successes can produce vainglory. –p. 89

Our deliverance from the world begins, not with our giving up this or that but with our seeing, as with God’s eyes, that it is a world under sentence of death as in the figure with which we opened this chapter, “Fallen, fallen, is Babylon the great!” –p. 90

There is no such thing as a call from God that is not a call “out of” the world. The church is ekklesia. In the divine intention there is no klesia which lacks the ek. –p. 96

Here [in 1 Cor. 1:30] are examples of the whole range of human need that God has met in His Son… God does not distribute to us these qualities of righteousness, holiness, and so on in installments “to be taken as required.” What He does is to give us Christ as the inclusive answer to all our needs. –p. 97

Show the world the fruits of Christianity and it will applaud; show it Christianity and it will oppose it vigorously. –p. 98

The divine life planted in us, which itself is so utterly foreign to the world all around it, is a light-source designed to illumine to mankind the world’s true character by emphasizing through contrast its inherent darkness… To separate ourselves from the world today, and thus deprive it of its only light, in no way glorifies God. It merely thwarts His purpose in us and in mankind. –p. 101

In God Himself there is a peace, a profound undisturbedness of spirit, which keeps Him untroubled and undistressed in the face of unspeakable conflict and contradiction. –p. 102

Far from seeking to avoid the world we need to see how privileged we are to have been placed there by God… The Church is Jesus’ successor, a divine settlement planted here right in the midst of Satan’s territory… It is a colony of heaven, an alien intrusion on his territory, and one against which he is utterly powerless. –p. 104

There is no need for us to give up our secular employments. Far from it, for they are our mission field… We do not live our lives in separate compartments, as Christians in the Church and as secular beings the rest of the time. There is not a thing in our profession or in our employment that God intends should be dissociated from our life as His children. –p. 105

[The Lord] set Himself to show His disciples what He meant by ministry. It is not platform work. It is serving one another with a basin and a towel. –p. 119

I do not know how it strikes you, but I think there is no greater power for God than to be fresh from Him before the world. Do you not find it to be the greatest manifestation of the power of the divine life? In a world-system darkened with the smoke of the pit, how we rejoice to meet saints who are fresh with the clean air of heaven. Such freshness brings anew to you and me the divine breath of life. –pp. 119-120

Thus the principle of the Body is, quite simply, refreshing and being refreshed. The more we go on with the Lord the more we need the brethren. For in this ministry not one of us is insignificant, and not one of us ever reaches the point where he has no need to be ministered to by another. –p. 121

The purpose revealed in Genesis 1 and lost in Genesis 3 is not lost for good. What God could not secure in the first man He obtained in the second; and that second Man is on the throne. –p. 134

The Church has a definite responsibility before God to register the victory of Christ in the devil’s territory. –p. 135

God’s object is still that man should “have dominion.” Our work for Him does not stop with proclaiming a Gospel that was designed merely to undo the effect of Genesis 3, marvelous as was that undoing. God wants also to take us back further to Genesis 1 itself. –p. 136

(Page numbers are from the Collected Works of Watchman Nee edition, Vol. 39, published by Living Stream Ministry).

Related articles:

• Twenty Quotes from Augustine’s Confessions (lifeandbuilding.com)
• Twenty Quotes from the Law of Revival (lifeandbuilding.com)