God Is Willing - Are You?

God Is Willing—Are You?
by Watchman Nee (CFP)

God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3.16)

To be misunderstood is one thing on earth which most people greatly dislike. A person means well and yet what he does is misinterpreted as being for ill. He does something in love, but it is misconstrued as being just the opposite. Oh, how many things there are in the world which irk people, and to be misunderstood is certainly one of them. Yet, I want to speak to you today about the One who is most misunderstood—even God himself, who is so badly misunderstood by the entire world!

A few days ago I read in the newspaper about the story of an elderly pastor who recently met a young man on the street who said to him, “Alas, I have run up against a most unfortunate circumstance.” As he spoke, his tears flowed down his cheeks. “What is it?” asked the pastor. “It is most terrible,” replied the young man, and he continued to cry. Under further questioning, the young man pulled a letter from his pocket and said: “This is a letter sent me by a lawyer.” “Have you read it?” asked the pastor. “No, I dare not read it, for something terrible must have happened,” answered the young man. “Why don’t you read it and find out?” “A letter from a lawyer never conveys good news; it is always unlucky. And besides, I do not like to receive any lawyer’s letter.” So the pastor said, “Let me read it for you.” “All right,” responded the young man.

The pastor opened the letter, and after he had read it he asked the young man if he had truly not read the letter. Given an affirmative answer, he told the young man: “This letter from the lawyer is to notify you that one of your relatives is dead and has left a part of his estate to you. The executor is now in a certain place where you may go and claim over twenty thousand dollars of inheritance!”

Let me here observe that our attitude towards God is not any different from that of the young man towards the lawyer. As soon as we hear the word “God” we immediately become unhappy and grow uncomfortable, as though we believe, that this God were someone who had not one good thought towards men. We thus have two groups of people in the world: one group has already heard about God and has believed in the Lord Jesus; the other group has not yet believed in God and the Lord Jesus. I would think that all those who have already believed would most likely testify that before they believed, they had felt uneasy at the very mention of God or Jesus. They had most probably reacted just as the young man had towards the lawyer. But upon really believing, they without exception had most likely said, “How I wish I had believed earlier!”

The benefit of believing in the Lord Jesus far exceeds that of receiving an inheritance. What God says to the believer is far better than what the lawyer could ever say to the young man. For the word of God tells us that in believing the Lord Jesus we will go to heaven and have eternal life. I too dare to testify to the truthfulness of this statement. The first thing I would ask of you is for you not to be afraid of hearing about God, nor for you to think that His thought towards you is evil. For if you will hear me out, you will know what a good God He actually is.

Several years ago I was preaching the gospel in Southeastern Asia. There I met a boy whom I tried to persuade to believe in Christ. “Mr. Nee,” he said, “it is all right for us to be friends, but to believe in Jesus is not good.” The next time I met him, I talked to him again about believing in Jesus. And he gave me the same response. I asked him to explain. “I have a brother,” he said, “who believed in Jesus when he was six years old, but later he died. If I believe in Jesus, will not I die too like my brother? That is not good.” How this young lad misunderstood God! He misunderstood the very heart of God! Think for a minute. What kind of God do you think He is? Perhaps you conceive of Him as dark-faced, fierce and harsh. Or you may imagine Him as taking pleasure in seeing people sin so that He may send them to hell. How do you picture Him?

Once in my relative’s house, I met another kinsman of mine who was a PhD professor at Northeastern University. When I attempted to persuade him to believe in the Lord Jesus, I received the following reply: “Your God is bad. He has nothing to do in heaven but to pass His time scrutinizing the people on earth. He records whatever evil He sees in men and makes entries in a huge ledger. Then He judges them according to this record, condemning them to hell. So that your God is not good-hearted. He only records men’s evils and loves to see people go to hell.” What a misunderstanding this is! How he totally misinterpreted God’s heart! You may imagine that God hates you, that He wishes to condemn you to hell instead of saving you. But let me tell you, I know my God. Hence I wish to deliver a message to you, such, that by hearing it you will never let go of this God. Now hear His word!

“God so loved the world.” Please notice, God is love! How wonderful it is that God not only thinks of you, cares for you, notices you and is merciful to you, but He also loves you. Several days ago I was walking in the park. I ran into a former schoolmate whom I attempted to persuade to believe in the Lord Jesus. No matter how I tried, though, he would not believe. I was on the verge of crying. I thought to myself, If only he knew how much this God loves him! Yet what is most misunderstood concerning God is His love!

You may be wondering what kind of God He is. Will He save me? Can He save such a man as I am? You are therefore full of doubts. I wish to tell you that God not only pities you, cares for you and notices you, He even loves you! Ever since time began, the most difficult thing for God to do was to love men. Yet the very first thing He did after man had sinned against Him was to love. His thought towards men is good. How He longs for them to be saved. But you may entertain the thought that God is most fierce and cruel, that He desires you to be far away from Him. However, the Book which God gives to us declares that He is love! You are a sinner, yet God loves you. You are far away from Him, yet He loves you.

Again and again, God sent His servants to convey this very message to man. For example: “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that he should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, these may forget, yet will I not forget thee” (Is. 49.15). Oh, how He loves us! He even illustrates His love with an extreme example: “They say, If a man put away his wife, and she go from him, and become another man’s, will he return unto her again? will not that land be greatly polluted? But thou hast played the harlot with many lovers; yet return again to me, saith Jehovah” (Jer. 3.1).

How very willing God is to receive us sinners, yet this very fact—that God loves men—we are unwilling to believe. People are continually reflecting on how God could ever be so good. Nevertheless, I must tell you that God is indeed love! He so loved the world that He finally conceived a plan whereby He himself would come into this world as a man that He might tell us of His love.

A few years ago I was resting in Kuling Mountain. I love the flowers, the grass and the birds of the mountains. Moreover, I dislike putting birds in cages; I would rather see them freely flying about. One day many of them came and ate up the rice I had left on the veranda. I thought this was very sportive of them. So I went to fetch. another bowl of rice for them. But who would have thought they would all fly away when I returned! Yet as soon as I again left, the birds all came back. Now I had not the slightest idea of catching them or hurting them. On the contrary, I loved to have them feed on my rice. And I would have liked to have sat among them and allowed them to surround me. What a joy that would have been. Nevertheless, these birds did not understand my heart. They always avoided me.

But then I thought that if I wanted the birds to understand me, I must become a bird and chatter like them, and then I could fly into their midst and tell them of my heart desire. Only then would they not misunderstand me. But I could not turn myself into a bird; I therefore had no way to reveal my heart to these creatures.

It is the same with God towards us. He loves us, He likes us, He wants us to be near Him. But we do not understand His heart. The word of God informs us how in olden times through His servants God revealed to mankind His heart desire of love towards us by diverse portions and in diverse manners (see Hebrews 1.1,2), but man failed to comprehend. He thus had no other way but to come himself to this world to become a man, and this man is Him whom we know of as Jesus Christ. Had I been able to become a bird, I would have been acclaimed as having been humble. Yet for God to become a man, how much more humble He must be.

Please stop sending pompous rubbish like this to me. If you, all the time, are being misunderstood, then it's your own fault. God is not a very good communicator, it seems. He is not very honourable either, for he created Hell, and he sends people there for no good reason. If he exists, he will be reborn as some lowly creature, like a bug, once he dies.

I am not referring to me specifically, but people are often misunderstood. You knowing this, imagine how much God is misunderstood, even by you. Thus, you misunderstood the point. Don't blame God, for He has communicated well. So much so the cheapest book in the world is the Bible, it is the most widely distributed text in the world. He must be communicating Himself quite well don't you think?

He never said He created Hell for no good reason. How silly. You misunderstood Him again. It was quite honorable to do the right thing which is to send those to Hell who don't want to be saved from their sins. God is uncreated. He doesn't need to be reborn. He is all-knowing. God can never die. He is eternal. You so easily misunderstand Him. It is not honorable to misrepresent God of the Bible. That violates the 3rd Step in the 4 Step Proof for God, for you are arguing against something else that is not the characteristic of God.

God already entered into His creation and atoned for sins and give eternal life when the Son of God died on the cross, was raised up to the right hand of the Father and there He shall remain until the times of the gentiles are fulfilled. Then He shall return in Person to reign on earth for 1000 years. It would quite bizarre for Him to then get reborn. He was not even reborn when He entered into creation almost 2000 years ago. Rather, He entered into creation. This is not a rebirth. But a one time proposition, once and for all to die on the eternal cross for our sins.

You frequently hear us preachers declare that men have sinned and must go to hell but that the Lord Jesus bore our sins and died on the cross in our stead. Have you ever wondered why we choose to deliver such a message to you? It is because a person need only commit one single sin—even a sin of only one second’s duration—for that person to go to hell. Can it be that you have not sinned in a month, or a year? Can it be that you have never done anything bad nor said anything wrong? Perhaps within only a minute or even but a second, you entertained an improper thought which not even your parents or wife knew. Such a thought is enough to qualify you for hell. Let us all understand. that God hates sin intensely. Our human feeling against the grossest of sins cannot be compared with God’s abhorrence of even the tiniest little sin.

Our detestation of all the sins of the world is far less strong than God’s repugnance of our tiny lie. He knows men have sinned, and He is left with but one solution to the problem—which is, that He himself must come into the world and become a man and bear the sin of the world on a cruel cross. And this He did, showing forth His heart of love. And such was the first great thing God did on the earth.

In addition, though, God recognizes that in spite of the fact that the Lord Jesus has died for our sins, we still may transgress after believing in Him. So for this reason, God gives the Holy Spirit (His very own Spirit) to dwell in us that we may have the power not to sin. And such was the second great thing God did. And this too showed forth His heart of love and concern for mankind.

Hence God offers us two great graces: the one caused the Lord Jesus to die for us that our sins may be forgiven; and the other causes the Holy Spirit to indwell those of us who believe so that we may have the power not to sin in the future.

Therefore, aren't you being pompous by misrepresenting God? Why would the uncreated Creator die for bugs? Bugs don't have God-consciousness. Nobody dictates to God His Son's work on the cross. It is out of His great love and mercy He became one of us so that we could understand Him.

In order to have a conversation, I should not misrepresent your actual beliefs and you should not misrepresent my actual beliefs in believing in God of the Bible. That way we can discuss freely the merits, if any, of both our views and come to the realization who is right and who is wrong so that one of us can repent. I can tell you that I know I am right unequivocally and that you misrepresent God of the Bible should show you that you are sincerely wrong.

You don't want this information you said, so how can I help a stiff-lipped atheist such as yourself if you are not even willing to hear the information that is to help you?

So in other words, Yahweh sets impossibly high standards and then send people to Hell for not living up to them?

Don't misperceive God. It is not an impossibly high standard to do His will. He said don't eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. What did Adam and Eve do? They were deceived by the evil spirit through the serpent, and thought they could be like God, so they ate. They didn't trust God's love or revere His power against sin's consequences, just like you don't, because you are too selfish. But today, through His redemptive design there are spiritual Christians that are virtually sinless and selfless. Christ is given because nobody can keep the law, not even a law unto themselves they create. Those who are saved no longer live, but Christ lives in us by the Holy Spirit unto perfection.

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Don't misperceive God. It is not an impossibly high standard to do His will.

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Yes it is. By your own admission: Let us all understand. that God hates sin intensely. Our human feeling against the grossest of sins cannot be compared with God’s abhorrence of even the tiniest little sin. And also, see this quote: Our detestation of all the sins of the world is far less strong than God’s repugnance of our tiny lie. Furthermore, I am sure you think everyone is a sinner. Being a sinner means that you fail to live up to Yahweh's standards, right?

If you are saved, God does not see you as a sinner because your sins would have been washed by the precious blood. If what you say is true then spiritual Christians today would not be able to accomplish what they have in the righteousness of the saints.

You are misunderstand a key fact. Believers have Christ living inside us, so that it is no longer we that live but He lives in us. In other words, though we can't keep God's standards, with Christ in us, all things are possible.

Now nobody is completely free of sin, but we who are in Christ are being perfected towards sinlessness.