God is the God of reality: All of His work is real, all of the words He speaks are real, and all of the truths He expresses are real. Everything that is not His words is vacuous, non-existent, and unsound. Today, the Holy Spirit is to guide people into the words of God. If people are to pursue entry into reality, then they must seek reality, and know reality, after which they must experience reality, and live out reality. The more that people know reality, the more they are able to tell whether the words of others are real; the more people know reality, the less conceptions they have; the more people experience reality, the more they know the deeds of the God of reality, and the easier it is for them to leave their corrupt, satanic dispositions behind; the more reality people have, the more they know God, and the more they detest the flesh and love the truth; and the more reality people have, the closer they come to the standards of God’s requirements. People who are gained by God are those who are possessed of reality, and who know reality; those who are gained by God have come to know God’s real deeds through experiencing reality. The more actually you cooperate with God and discipline your body, the more you will acquire the work of the Holy Spirit, the more you will gain reality, and the more you will be enlightened by God—and thus the greater your knowledge of God’s real deeds. If you are able to live in the present light of the Holy Spirit, the present path to practice will become clearer to you, and you will be more able to separate yourself from the religious conceptions and old practices of the past. Today reality is the focus: The more reality people have, the clearer their knowledge of the truth, and the greater their understanding of God’s will. Reality can overcome all letters and doctrines, it can overcome all theory and expertise, and the more reality people focus on, the more they truly love God, and hunger and thirst for His words. If you always focus on reality, your life philosophy, religious conceptions, and natural character will naturally be expunged following the work of God. Those who do not pursue reality, and have no knowledge of reality, are likely to pursue that which is supernatural, and they will be easily tricked. The Holy Spirit has no means of working in such people, and so they feel vacant, and that their lives have no meaning.
The Holy Spirit can only work in you when you actually train, actually search, actually pray, and are willing to suffer for the sake of searching the truth. Those who do not seek the truth have nothing but letters and doctrines, and empty theory, and those who are without the truth naturally have many conceptions about God. People such as this long only for God to turn their fleshly body into a spiritual body so that they might return to the third heaven. How foolish these people are! All who say such things have no knowledge of God, or of reality; people such as this cannot possibly cooperate with God, and can only wait passively. If people are to understand the truth, and to clearly see the truth, and if, furthermore, they are to enter the truth, and put it into practice, they must actually train, actually search, and actually hunger and thirst. When you hunger and thirst, and when you actually cooperate with God, God’s Spirit will surely touch you and work within you, which will bring you more enlightenment, and give you more knowledge of reality, and be of greater help to your life.
If people are to know God, they must first know that God is the real God, and must know God’s words, God’s real appearance in the flesh, and God’s real work. Only after knowing that all of God’s work is real will you be able to actually cooperate with God, and only through this path will you be able to achieve the growth of your life. All those who have no knowledge of reality have no means of experiencing God’s words, they are ensnared in their conceptions, they live in their imagination, and thus they have no knowledge of God’s words. The greater your knowledge of reality, the closer you are to God, and the more intimate you are with Him; the more you seek vagueness and abstraction, and doctrine, the further you will stray from God, and so the more you will feel that experiencing God’s words is strenuous and difficult, and that you are incapable of entry. If you wish to enter the reality of God’s words, and onto the right track of your spiritual life, you must first know reality and separate yourself from vague and supernatural things—which is to say, first you must understand how the Holy Spirit actually enlightens and guides you from within. In this way, if you can truly grasp the Holy Spirit’s real work within you, you will have entered onto the right track of being made perfect by God.
Today, everything starts from reality. God’s work is the most real, and can be touched by people; it is what people can experience, and achieve. In people there is much that is vague and supernatural, which stops them from knowing God’s present work. Thus, in their experiences they always deviate, and always feel difficult, which is all caused by their conceptions. People are unable to grasp the principles of the Holy Spirit’s work, they do not know reality, and so they are always negative in their path to entry. They look at God’s requirements from afar, unable to achieve them; they merely see that God’s words really are good, but cannot find the path to entry. The Holy Spirit works by this principle: Through people’s cooperation, through them actively praying, searching and coming closer to God, results can be achieved and they can be enlightened and illuminated by the Holy Spirit. It is not the case that the Holy Spirit acts unilaterally, or that man acts unilaterally. Both are indispensable, and the more that people cooperate, and the more they pursue the attainment of the standards of God’s requirements, the greater the work of the Holy Spirit. Only people’s real cooperation, added to the work of the Holy Spirit, can produce real experiences and the substantive knowledge of God’s words. Gradually, through experiencing in this way, a perfect person is ultimately produced. God does not do supernatural things; in people’s conceptions, God is almighty, and everything is done by God—with the result that people wait passively, do not read the words of God or pray, and merely await the touch of the Holy Spirit. Those with a correct understanding, however, believe this: God’s actions can only go as far as my cooperation, and the effect that God’s work has in me depends on how I cooperate. When God speaks, I should do all I can to seek and strive toward God’s words; this is what I should achieve.
In Peter and Paul you can clearly see that it was Peter who paid the most attention to reality. From what Peter went through, it can be seen that his experiences drew upon the lessons of those who had failed in the past, and that he absorbed the strengths of the saints of the past—and from this it can be seen just how real Peter’s experiences were, that they were enough to allow people to touch, and to be capable of, and that they were achievable by people. Paul, though, was different: All that he spoke of was vague and invisible, things like going to the third heaven, the ascension to the throne, and the crown of righteousness. He focused on that which was external: on status, and reprimanding people, on showing off his seniority, being touched by the Holy Spirit, and so on. Nothing he pursued was real, and much of it was fantasy, and thus it can be seen that all that is supernatural, such as how much the Holy Spirit touches people, the great joy that people enjoy, going to the third heaven, or regular training and enjoying it to a certain extent, reading God’s words and enjoying them to a certain extent—none of this is real. All of the Holy Spirit’s work is normal, and real. When you read God’s words and pray, inside you are bright and steadfast, the external world cannot interfere with you, inside you are willing to love God, are willing to engage with positive things, and you detest the evil world; this is living within God, and is not, as people say, enjoying so much—such talk is not real. Today, everything begins from reality. Everything God does is real, and in your experiences you should pay attention to really knowing God, and to searching for the footprints of God’s work and the means by which the Holy Spirit touches and enlightens people. If you eat and drink the words of God, and pray, and cooperate in a way that is more real, assimilating what was good from times gone by, and rejecting what was bad like Peter, if you listen with your ears and observe with your eyes, and often pray and ponder in your heart, and do all you can to cooperate with God’s work, then God will surely guide you.
from The Word Appears in the Flesh
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