[aron]

I don`t know what to say, Aron. I just want to understand the God`s will for our times - to go unbiblical denominations and love the brothers there, to go to local churches or to sepa-rate oneself from the modern christian world and walk alone with Lord without any fellow-ship. It`s just so different to what we see in the Acts and in the rest of the NT that I have literary no idea how to actually practice fellowship or build relationship with other believers in our age. If I would know for sure that our Lord guides me even to the worst church in the world or to the most imperfect believers I would go there but at the moment my conscience simply does not allow to do so.

Esostaks,
I once was thinking very similar to you, so I can relate to your dilemma. Actually my thinking, very similar to yours, led me into the “local churches of Witness Lee” for several years, and then I went to an even stricter group, who tried to recreate the first-century church life. I also was not very impressed with Witness Lee and considered him to be an inferior copy of Watchman Nee, whom I admired very much. But I accepted a lot of things in the local church that my conscience was not okay with, because, “it’s the church”. Ironically we were taught to give grace to the “messy local church life” but we had no grace in our hearts for “Christianity”, or “the denominations”. Eventually, as Ohio said, “What you judge with others will be judged against you.”

Let me simply ask two questions, which helped me: First, if the first-century church life was so “normal” then why was the aged apostle John writing to seven churches in Asia and telling five of them to “repent”? Secondly, if things were so bad (“Jezebel’s teaching” [2:20] was there, and the “throne of Satan” [2:13], and so forth) why didn’t John leave and start his own “pure” or “recovered church”? Why did John stay with the degraded saints?

Look at Revelation 1:5,6 “and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a king-dom and priests to serve his God and Father—to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen.”

Jesus freed “us” from our sins by his blood. We are all imperfect, and we are all freed by his blood. Eventually I stopped looking for “proper” people and realized that all these “improper” people were opportunities to minister.
Also, I realized that Watchman Nee didn’t really see that much. Yes, he realized that “the de-nominations were degraded”. But was his model better? Jesus taught that it is very easy to see the splinter in your neighbor’s eye and miss the beam in your own. It is very easy to see the splinter in “Christianity”. Yes, it is degraded. But anyone who thinks they have “laid hold” on this side of the Judgment Seat of Christ is, in my opinion, deluded. By the time Watchman Nee and Witness Lee were old enough to realize their shortcomings they were too busy trying to prop up their empires to do anything about it. Remember in the story of the sinful woman in John 8, it was the older ones who became ashamed first and left (v.9). When I was younger I would agree with all your statements concerning the “unbiblical denominations” and would probably leave (I did, for many years); today I still agree but feel that God loves them as much as he loves you or me.

As I said, showing mercy to others is an opportunity for God to show mercy. And the Bible is much deeper than Watchman Nee realized. But he got caught up in “church building” and never got around to reading the whole thing. He just read the parts that he could use for “church build-ing.” So he ended up with a rather small Bible.

When you are in first grade, the third-graders seem very sophisticated and mature. And it is easy for the third-graders to judge the first graders. Nee was like a third-grader, judging the first-graders. But who wants to stay in third grade forever?

All the above is of course just my opinion, which is biased, and based on my experience, which is limited.