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Twelve Baskets Full, Vol. 2
Various Messages by W.Nee Vol. 2
161 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1966
About the author
Watchman Nee
637 books652 followersWatchman Nee (Chinese: 倪柝聲; pinyin: Ní Tuòshēng; Foochow Romanized: Ngà̤ Táuk-sĭng; 1903–1972) was a Chinese Christian author and church leader during the early 20th century. He spent the last 20 years of his life in prison and was severely persecuted by the Communists in China. Together with Wangzai, Zhou-An Lee, Shang-Jie Song, and others, Nee founded The Church Assembly Hall, later which would be also known as the "Local churches" (Chinese: 地方教會). or more commonly as (聚會所) meaning "assembly hall"
Born into a Methodist family, Watchman Nee experienced a religious revival, and joined the Church of Heavenly Peace, Fuzhou in 1920 at age 17 and began writing in the same year. In 1921, he met the British missionary M. E. Barber, who was a great influence on him. Through Miss Barber, Nee was introduced to many of the Christian writings which were to have a profound influence on him and his teachings. Nee attended no theological schools or Bible institutes. His knowledge was acquired through studying the Bible and reading various Christian spiritual books. During his 30 years of ministry, beginning in 1922, Nee traveled throughout China planting churches among the rural communities and holding Christian conferences and trainings in Shanghai. In 1952 he was imprisoned for his faith; he remained in prison until his death in 1972.
Born into a Methodist family, Watchman Nee experienced a religious revival, and joined the Church of Heavenly Peace, Fuzhou in 1920 at age 17 and began writing in the same year. In 1921, he met the British missionary M. E. Barber, who was a great influence on him. Through Miss Barber, Nee was introduced to many of the Christian writings which were to have a profound influence on him and his teachings. Nee attended no theological schools or Bible institutes. His knowledge was acquired through studying the Bible and reading various Christian spiritual books. During his 30 years of ministry, beginning in 1922, Nee traveled throughout China planting churches among the rural communities and holding Christian conferences and trainings in Shanghai. In 1952 he was imprisoned for his faith; he remained in prison until his death in 1972.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 11, 2024
This may be the first Christian book of my dad's that I've ever wrestled with, or at least wrestled with to this extent. It's okay for me to disagree with his positions, from time to time, and I'm aware of some of those, but this one came as a surprise to me.
There is no evidence that my dad actually read this book, although I do know that he did like Watchman Nee. My dad did not also have Vol 1, so I suppose I am also starting in the middle, which I know can lead to confusion and misreadings.
First, I have to comment about Watchman Nee's testimony, then the positive things I gleaned from this book, and lastly, the things I wrestled. I can wrestle with the positive things, too, but that's more that they challenge me.
Watchman Nee had an amazing testimony, and anything that I say or do pales in contrast. He was imprisoned for his beliefs in China for many years, to the point that he eventually died there. So, his Jesus must've been very dear to him and very worth dying for. That makes me feel like anything I say makes me more of an "armchair quarterback" in that I don't have as much skin in the game, or that I'm not taking as serious risks when I profess faith in Jesus. I mean only respect to Watchman Nee and his legacy.
On serving God verses serving the church:
"Service to the Lord and service to the House appear so much alike that it is often difficult to differentiate between the two.
"If an Istaelite came along to the Temple and wanted to worship God, those Levites would come to his aid and help him offer his peace offering and his burnt offering. They would help him drag the sacrifice to the alter and they would slay it. Surely that was a grand work to be engaged in, reclaiming sinners and leading believers closer to the Lord! And God took account of the serice of those Levites who helped men bring their peace offerings and their burnt offerings to the altar. Yet He said it was not ministry to Himself." - Watchman Nee
"But the Levitical priests, the sons of Zadok, who kept the charge of My sanctuary when the people of Israel went astray from Me, shall come near to Me to minister to Me. And they shall stand before Me to offer me the fat and the blood, declares the Lord God." - Ezekiel 44:15
On time alone with God:
"How hard we often find it to drag ourselves into His presence! We shrink from the solitude, and even when we do detach ourselves physically, our thoughts still keep wandering outside. Many of us can enjoy working among people, but how many of us can draw near to God in the Holy of Holies? Yet it is only as we draw near to Him that we can minister to Him. to come into the presence of God and kneel before Him for an hour demands all the strength we possess. We have to be violent to hold that ground.
"But every one who serves the Lord knows the preciousness of such time, the sweetness of waking at midnight and spending an hour in prayer, or waking very early in the morning, and getting up for an hour of prayer before the final sleep of night. Let me be very frank with you. Unless we really know what it is to draw near to God, we cannot know what it is to serve Him. We cannot serve Him from a distance. There is only one place where ministry to Him is possible and that is the Holy Place. In the outer court you approach the people; in the Holy Place you approach the Lord."
On being thankful:
"Do you see the ways of God? Oh, let me tell you if only you will learn to recognize God in all His dealings with you, you will surely worship Him. If you request Him to do this and that and look trustfully to Him, and thing things fall out as you asked, you will adore Him for His ways with you ..."
"Brothers and sisters, do you see what it means to worship God? It is to render all glory to Him. When you are faced with some difficulty about which you have sought Him and are carried through, do you just rejoice in the prosperity of your way?"
"To bring glory to the Lord is to worship Him and it is our bowing before Him that is true worship. The proud in heart cannot worship Him because they do not bow to Him. When their way is prosperous they attribute it to their own ability or to chance; they do not give the glory to God. To be a true worshiper is to offer praise and thanksgiving to Him for everything we meet."
On prayer requests:
"Many Christians cannot be used of God in this prayer ministry because they are overburdened. They have let their burdens accumulate instead of seeking relief in prayer, and ultimately they are so crushed by the weight of them that they cannot pray ... Our failure to release the burdens God has placed upon us will eventually cost us our prayer ministry. Let us therefore give ourselves deliberately to it."
On praying in secret, and giving in secret:
"What is root? It is growth beneath the soil. What are leaves? Growth above the soil. Root is hidden life; leaves are manifest life. The trouble with many Christians is that, while there is much apparent life, there is very little secret life ... If all your spiritual life is exposed, then all your growth is upward, and because there is no downward growth you lack root."
"The trouble with Christians today is that they cannot keep any spiritual experience undisclosed. As soon as they have a little bit of experience, they have to tell it abroad; they have to live their lives in the limelight; they have to uproot everything."
"The measure in which we display things to others will be the measure of our own loss."
"And let us remember that if we display all our treasure, captivity cannot be averted."
"As your secret life deepens, you will discover that 'deep calleth unto deep'. When you can bring forth values from the depths of your inner life, you will find that other lives will be deeply affected. Without any mighty outward movement - just a quiet response to the moving of life within you will reach out to another life, and that other life will be helped, and into his life will come the awareness that in a depth deeper than consciousness he has met depth: deep has answered deep."
That references Psalm 42:7 "Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me." I've only ever thought of it before as the greater deepness of God calling to the depths within us, not as us responding to the depths in each other before.
On temptations and obedience:
"But you can recall other occasions when He spoke and you failed to respond; yet strangely, after a time you just found yourself in a way of obedience. At certain times you may have put up a resistance to the Lord's will and may have persisted in this resistance; then somehow - quite unaccountably - you found the resistance had gone. Such is the fruit of the Holy Spirit's government of our lives. Praise God, if His Spirit is handling these lives of ours, even if we seem totally unable to obey and cannot even exercise faith, a day comes when the resistance has vanished and we are trusting the Lord in simplicity of heart. It is the tireless energy of the Holy Spirit that has accomplished this. He has the resources to work in us the obedience we lack."
"There are two aspects of the Spirit's government. The one is, to order our affairs in such a sway that through His circumstantial dealings with us we come to a point where we offer our willing obedience. The other is that, even when we have no intention to obey, His activity in our lives makes good what we lack so that, despite our unwillingness, we become obedient."
On difficulties & temptations:
"Many people take the Word of God as their meat and the doing of His will as their meat, but they reject the Anakim as unpalatable food... Some brothers and sisters have met few difficulties, but they are spiritually feeble. The explanation is, they have not consumed enough Anakim. On the other hand, there are those who have met and overcome difficulty after difficulty, temptation after temptation; and they are full of vigor. The reason is, they have fed well on Anakim. Every difficulty and every temptation Satan puts in our way is food for us. This is a divinely appointed means of spiritual progress." This references Joshua 14:12-15.
"All our trials, without exception, are bread for us, and as we accept one trial after the other, we are more and more richly nourished and the result is a continuous increase of strength."
On worship:
"If we truly intend to be worshippers of God, then a day must come in our history when we realize that merely to know Him as our Father and ourselves His children is totally inadequate. We need to know God as God and ourselves as His bondservants."
I had never thought before that Psalm 8 was written as if the fall into sin had never happened.
I also like the idea of someone spending so much time with God and in His grace, that the person can act and speak things of God without even realizing it, having built up a reservoir of God's grace within.
Things I can't quite agree with:
Reading Watchman Nee reminds me a little of reading Oswald Chambers, but to a lesser extent. They tend to speak in absolutes as if God always works in particular ways, and some times He does, but there are Biblical examples where He does not. With Oswald Chambers, it was chronic. With Watchman Nee, it's just something to be careful about.
He says we should not be governed by right and wrong, or good and evil, but by the "life within," by which I suppose He means the Holy Spirit. It is true that Jesus leads us into an even more difficult fulfilling of the law (not for salvation, but for obedience, not just refraining from murder, but also from anger and hatred, etc), but I am afraid of it going the other direction, and people thinking that it's God leading them into sin when it's really their own spirits.
It is true that sometimes we can do a good thing in a wrong way or with a wrong attitude, but I don't think we can do an evil thing in a good way.
I found the chapter "Expecting the Lord's Blessing" discouraging, but I feel vaguely like a friend of mine whom I felt just didn't read another book quite right when it discouraged her. The author was trying to encourage her, and she felt discouraged that she wasn't already "there."
Nee talks about people working long, hard years without producing any fruit because God hasn't blessed them. And I may be a little defensive here, but sometimes people's hearts are just hard, and we are called to faithfulness and patience in spite of it all. It doesn't mean that God's opposed to the work, or the worker, either. I often think of faithful Jeremiah, thrown in that miserable well.
Nee also talks about our sins causing God to remove his blessings from our service to God. Yes, He can and has done such a thing in the Bible, but just because we aren't seeing fruit in someone's faithful sowing of the Word of God doesn't mean either that God has removed the blessing or that person has sinned in some fashion.
"Brothers and Sisters, have you never asked God to do what you knew was contrary to His ways of working? Have you never besought Him to forgive a certain brother and cease to chasten him even when you knew that His dealings with that brother were right? That is not worshipping God. How often our prayers amount to requesting God to change His ways!"
It might be, and often is, right for God to correct and chasten us in this life, but I do ask God to forgive both myself and people I love, and I ask He will do it in His way, bringing them to faith and to repentance, because I know it is consistent with Who He is, because He said, "Say unto them: 'As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live." - Ezekiel 33:11
"You visit a certain home and find a sick child there, and you pray with the parents for the healing of the child, though you are aware that God is not being glorified in the home; but because the parents plead with Him for healing you join in their request. To pray like that is to ask God to change His ways."
I don't see that as asking God to change His ways, either. It's not the child's fault that the parents aren't living right. I could pray on behalf of the child. And we don't know if but the child's healing will draw the parents to glorifying God well after all. I'm not sure that Jesus asked anyone whether they were worthy enough before He healed them, or none of us would be good enough.
"In prayer words are essential ... Our words must be to the point; they should be words that touch the heart of God and so move Him that they leave Him no alternative but to grant our requests."
But Romans 8:26 says, "For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words," so I don't think that words are always necessary. The Holy Spirit is interceding for us. He's got us covered.
I also don't think there are magic words that leave God no alternative ... He can do what He likes. He is God, we are not, and we can't control Him.
There is no evidence that my dad actually read this book, although I do know that he did like Watchman Nee. My dad did not also have Vol 1, so I suppose I am also starting in the middle, which I know can lead to confusion and misreadings.
First, I have to comment about Watchman Nee's testimony, then the positive things I gleaned from this book, and lastly, the things I wrestled. I can wrestle with the positive things, too, but that's more that they challenge me.
Watchman Nee had an amazing testimony, and anything that I say or do pales in contrast. He was imprisoned for his beliefs in China for many years, to the point that he eventually died there. So, his Jesus must've been very dear to him and very worth dying for. That makes me feel like anything I say makes me more of an "armchair quarterback" in that I don't have as much skin in the game, or that I'm not taking as serious risks when I profess faith in Jesus. I mean only respect to Watchman Nee and his legacy.
On serving God verses serving the church:
"Service to the Lord and service to the House appear so much alike that it is often difficult to differentiate between the two.
"If an Istaelite came along to the Temple and wanted to worship God, those Levites would come to his aid and help him offer his peace offering and his burnt offering. They would help him drag the sacrifice to the alter and they would slay it. Surely that was a grand work to be engaged in, reclaiming sinners and leading believers closer to the Lord! And God took account of the serice of those Levites who helped men bring their peace offerings and their burnt offerings to the altar. Yet He said it was not ministry to Himself." - Watchman Nee
"But the Levitical priests, the sons of Zadok, who kept the charge of My sanctuary when the people of Israel went astray from Me, shall come near to Me to minister to Me. And they shall stand before Me to offer me the fat and the blood, declares the Lord God." - Ezekiel 44:15
On time alone with God:
"How hard we often find it to drag ourselves into His presence! We shrink from the solitude, and even when we do detach ourselves physically, our thoughts still keep wandering outside. Many of us can enjoy working among people, but how many of us can draw near to God in the Holy of Holies? Yet it is only as we draw near to Him that we can minister to Him. to come into the presence of God and kneel before Him for an hour demands all the strength we possess. We have to be violent to hold that ground.
"But every one who serves the Lord knows the preciousness of such time, the sweetness of waking at midnight and spending an hour in prayer, or waking very early in the morning, and getting up for an hour of prayer before the final sleep of night. Let me be very frank with you. Unless we really know what it is to draw near to God, we cannot know what it is to serve Him. We cannot serve Him from a distance. There is only one place where ministry to Him is possible and that is the Holy Place. In the outer court you approach the people; in the Holy Place you approach the Lord."
On being thankful:
"Do you see the ways of God? Oh, let me tell you if only you will learn to recognize God in all His dealings with you, you will surely worship Him. If you request Him to do this and that and look trustfully to Him, and thing things fall out as you asked, you will adore Him for His ways with you ..."
"Brothers and sisters, do you see what it means to worship God? It is to render all glory to Him. When you are faced with some difficulty about which you have sought Him and are carried through, do you just rejoice in the prosperity of your way?"
"To bring glory to the Lord is to worship Him and it is our bowing before Him that is true worship. The proud in heart cannot worship Him because they do not bow to Him. When their way is prosperous they attribute it to their own ability or to chance; they do not give the glory to God. To be a true worshiper is to offer praise and thanksgiving to Him for everything we meet."
On prayer requests:
"Many Christians cannot be used of God in this prayer ministry because they are overburdened. They have let their burdens accumulate instead of seeking relief in prayer, and ultimately they are so crushed by the weight of them that they cannot pray ... Our failure to release the burdens God has placed upon us will eventually cost us our prayer ministry. Let us therefore give ourselves deliberately to it."
On praying in secret, and giving in secret:
"What is root? It is growth beneath the soil. What are leaves? Growth above the soil. Root is hidden life; leaves are manifest life. The trouble with many Christians is that, while there is much apparent life, there is very little secret life ... If all your spiritual life is exposed, then all your growth is upward, and because there is no downward growth you lack root."
"The trouble with Christians today is that they cannot keep any spiritual experience undisclosed. As soon as they have a little bit of experience, they have to tell it abroad; they have to live their lives in the limelight; they have to uproot everything."
"The measure in which we display things to others will be the measure of our own loss."
"And let us remember that if we display all our treasure, captivity cannot be averted."
"As your secret life deepens, you will discover that 'deep calleth unto deep'. When you can bring forth values from the depths of your inner life, you will find that other lives will be deeply affected. Without any mighty outward movement - just a quiet response to the moving of life within you will reach out to another life, and that other life will be helped, and into his life will come the awareness that in a depth deeper than consciousness he has met depth: deep has answered deep."
That references Psalm 42:7 "Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me." I've only ever thought of it before as the greater deepness of God calling to the depths within us, not as us responding to the depths in each other before.
On temptations and obedience:
"But you can recall other occasions when He spoke and you failed to respond; yet strangely, after a time you just found yourself in a way of obedience. At certain times you may have put up a resistance to the Lord's will and may have persisted in this resistance; then somehow - quite unaccountably - you found the resistance had gone. Such is the fruit of the Holy Spirit's government of our lives. Praise God, if His Spirit is handling these lives of ours, even if we seem totally unable to obey and cannot even exercise faith, a day comes when the resistance has vanished and we are trusting the Lord in simplicity of heart. It is the tireless energy of the Holy Spirit that has accomplished this. He has the resources to work in us the obedience we lack."
"There are two aspects of the Spirit's government. The one is, to order our affairs in such a sway that through His circumstantial dealings with us we come to a point where we offer our willing obedience. The other is that, even when we have no intention to obey, His activity in our lives makes good what we lack so that, despite our unwillingness, we become obedient."
On difficulties & temptations:
"Many people take the Word of God as their meat and the doing of His will as their meat, but they reject the Anakim as unpalatable food... Some brothers and sisters have met few difficulties, but they are spiritually feeble. The explanation is, they have not consumed enough Anakim. On the other hand, there are those who have met and overcome difficulty after difficulty, temptation after temptation; and they are full of vigor. The reason is, they have fed well on Anakim. Every difficulty and every temptation Satan puts in our way is food for us. This is a divinely appointed means of spiritual progress." This references Joshua 14:12-15.
"All our trials, without exception, are bread for us, and as we accept one trial after the other, we are more and more richly nourished and the result is a continuous increase of strength."
On worship:
"If we truly intend to be worshippers of God, then a day must come in our history when we realize that merely to know Him as our Father and ourselves His children is totally inadequate. We need to know God as God and ourselves as His bondservants."
I had never thought before that Psalm 8 was written as if the fall into sin had never happened.
I also like the idea of someone spending so much time with God and in His grace, that the person can act and speak things of God without even realizing it, having built up a reservoir of God's grace within.
Things I can't quite agree with:
Reading Watchman Nee reminds me a little of reading Oswald Chambers, but to a lesser extent. They tend to speak in absolutes as if God always works in particular ways, and some times He does, but there are Biblical examples where He does not. With Oswald Chambers, it was chronic. With Watchman Nee, it's just something to be careful about.
He says we should not be governed by right and wrong, or good and evil, but by the "life within," by which I suppose He means the Holy Spirit. It is true that Jesus leads us into an even more difficult fulfilling of the law (not for salvation, but for obedience, not just refraining from murder, but also from anger and hatred, etc), but I am afraid of it going the other direction, and people thinking that it's God leading them into sin when it's really their own spirits.
It is true that sometimes we can do a good thing in a wrong way or with a wrong attitude, but I don't think we can do an evil thing in a good way.
I found the chapter "Expecting the Lord's Blessing" discouraging, but I feel vaguely like a friend of mine whom I felt just didn't read another book quite right when it discouraged her. The author was trying to encourage her, and she felt discouraged that she wasn't already "there."
Nee talks about people working long, hard years without producing any fruit because God hasn't blessed them. And I may be a little defensive here, but sometimes people's hearts are just hard, and we are called to faithfulness and patience in spite of it all. It doesn't mean that God's opposed to the work, or the worker, either. I often think of faithful Jeremiah, thrown in that miserable well.
Nee also talks about our sins causing God to remove his blessings from our service to God. Yes, He can and has done such a thing in the Bible, but just because we aren't seeing fruit in someone's faithful sowing of the Word of God doesn't mean either that God has removed the blessing or that person has sinned in some fashion.
"Brothers and Sisters, have you never asked God to do what you knew was contrary to His ways of working? Have you never besought Him to forgive a certain brother and cease to chasten him even when you knew that His dealings with that brother were right? That is not worshipping God. How often our prayers amount to requesting God to change His ways!"
It might be, and often is, right for God to correct and chasten us in this life, but I do ask God to forgive both myself and people I love, and I ask He will do it in His way, bringing them to faith and to repentance, because I know it is consistent with Who He is, because He said, "Say unto them: 'As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live." - Ezekiel 33:11
"You visit a certain home and find a sick child there, and you pray with the parents for the healing of the child, though you are aware that God is not being glorified in the home; but because the parents plead with Him for healing you join in their request. To pray like that is to ask God to change His ways."
I don't see that as asking God to change His ways, either. It's not the child's fault that the parents aren't living right. I could pray on behalf of the child. And we don't know if but the child's healing will draw the parents to glorifying God well after all. I'm not sure that Jesus asked anyone whether they were worthy enough before He healed them, or none of us would be good enough.
"In prayer words are essential ... Our words must be to the point; they should be words that touch the heart of God and so move Him that they leave Him no alternative but to grant our requests."
But Romans 8:26 says, "For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words," so I don't think that words are always necessary. The Holy Spirit is interceding for us. He's got us covered.
I also don't think there are magic words that leave God no alternative ... He can do what He likes. He is God, we are not, and we can't control Him.
November 18, 2015
The Key to Prayer — "Circumstances should only be a means of driving us into the presence of God to wait on Him; they should not control our prayer. And thoughts should only serve to crystalize our inner registrations; they should not be the source of prayer. Prayer according to the will of God is only possible when we ourselves are in harmony with His will." (pg. 133-134)
So many of my favourite short-reads in this volume: Ministering to the House or to the Lord; Special Grace and Reserve Grace; Worshipping the Ways of God; The Key to Prayer; The Life of the Altar and the Tent; Deep Calleth Unto Deep.
So many of my favourite short-reads in this volume: Ministering to the House or to the Lord; Special Grace and Reserve Grace; Worshipping the Ways of God; The Key to Prayer; The Life of the Altar and the Tent; Deep Calleth Unto Deep.
January 12, 2016
'What do we mean when we talk of God's blessing? We mean divine activity that is not based on human activity. We mean a working of God that is not based on our work. The blessing of God is not something we can buy with our money... Divine work is not built by human power or human gifts; it is built up by the divine blessing.' pg 58
'We need to be brought to the the point where we say to Him: "Lord, I am willing to submit to Thee even if that which I hold dearest is taken away." Such submission is worship.' pg 120
2 Cor 4:12. pg 60
'We need to be brought to the the point where we say to Him: "Lord, I am willing to submit to Thee even if that which I hold dearest is taken away." Such submission is worship.' pg 120
2 Cor 4:12. pg 60
October 28, 2019
Most books are rated related to their usefulness and contributions to my research.
Overall, a good book for the researcher and enthusiast.
Read for personal research
- found this book's contents helpful and inspiring - number rating relates to the book's contribution to my needs.
Overall, a good book for the researcher and enthusiast.
Read for personal research
- found this book's contents helpful and inspiring - number rating relates to the book's contribution to my needs.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews