The Local Church

Holding to Truth

By the Lord's mercy I was brought up in a loving Christian home in Oklahoma and was saved when I was a teenager. By the time I was in my early twenties I had slowly drifted away from the Lord, never reading my Bible or attending “church”. Within my heart I had become disillusioned about the goal of my Christian life and was pretty much a worldly believer. I had made arrangements to move to Louisiana in a week or two, where my parents now lived, hoping to have a new beginning in my life. During my last week at work, I overheard a conversation between two Christians about the transformation of the soul, our human spirit, and the eternal purpose of God. I told them I was a believer but had never heard any messages nor could I remember any Scripture that talked of these things. After asking them about their beliefs, I was amazed that all their answers concluded with Christ as our life and enjoyment and the church as the Body of Christ to be our daily living for God's practical expression and testimony on the earth today. They invited me to come to one of their Christian meetings that weekend. I asked them, “What's the name of your church?” They said, “We don't have a name, we just meet as the church.” I had to go and see what this was all about, so that night I went to their meeting. What I remember most was the light from the truth in the Bible and the expression of their love for God and the genuine oneness they all shared with one another. There was a harmony in all their speaking and they all spoke in mutuality. Many things were new to me that night, but they were all like water on the dry ground of my heart. At the end of the meeting there was a time for testimonies and I was so deeply impressed by everything I had heard and seen that I stood up and testified how I knew in my heart after being there that night that I would have to make a definite decision that would alter the course of my life forever. On the way home, alone in my car, I began to repent to the Lord for being so cold in my feelings for Him. I was praying so strongly, like never before, and crying so much that I was unable to drive and had to pull over and stop on the side of the road. After a time of confessing all my oldness before the Lord, I renewed my love to Him. A week or so later I moved to Louisiana. I shared the experience of finding the church with my mother, who had been praying faithfully for me to find God's will for my life. I felt this was the answer to her prayers. She said that she had heard of a Christian group like this that had it's beginnings with the ministry of Watchman Nee, not taking a particular name but simply called the local church of whatever city they were meeting in. She even had one of his books entitled, Song of Songs, and gave it to me that night to read. It was the greatest Christian writing I had ever held in my hands. With every page I read I was brought deeper into the truth and further in love with God. I soon began reading my Bible again and praying that the Lord would place me into His desire for my life and lead me in the direction that would match the longing of His heart. I went to a Christian bookstore to try to find some of Watchman Nee's other books. They didn't have much, but I did find two books, The Normal Christian Life and Assembling Together. From these two books I began to see that the Christian life is altogether based on allowing Christ to live His life through me, by the exercise of my human spirit and the transformation of my soul and that a proper Christian meeting is this same Christ whose life is expressed in oneness in a corporate way for His local testimony, according to the eternal purpose of God. This view really matched the experience I first had earlier in Oklahoma.

Several months went by and it was during this time that I met my wife, who was also my sister's best friend, and soon we were married and working and buying a house and were planning on starting a family. We were very close to my sister and her husband. We attended their Sunday school together and were involved in many social activities for young married couples. At this time my wife was an unbeliever, but she began to question me about what it meant to be saved. Deep inside of me there was a struggle going on. I wanted her to be saved but I also knew that there was much more to the Christian life than just salvation. I wanted her to be saved all the way into God's eternal purpose. This became my prayer for her, and also for myself. One night a friend of ours from Sunday school, a very precious believer, came by to pick me up to go to the hospital to visit his father. Before we left, my wife expressed her desire to be saved. Our friend shared a few verses of salvation from the Bible and we all had some prayer together. My wife received the Lord as her Savior there in our home.

That same night at the hospital, we met two Christians passing out gospel tracts in the waiting room. As soon as I saw them I recognized that same expression of love and oneness I had seen at my first church meeting in Oklahoma. I said, “Hey, are you from the church with no name?” It kind of shocked them. especially when I said that they expressed the same oneness as the Christians I had met two years ago in another state. I gave them my phone number and they invited me to their weekend meeting. After that meeting I was convinced that this was the direction that the Lord was leading us. In the spring of the next year, my wife and I went to a weekend conference in Irving, Texas to hear Witness Lee, a co-worker of Watchman Nee. The messages were given from the book of Ephesians and verses 15 and 16 from chapter four was inscribed on our hearts forever. “Holding to truth in love...causes the growth of the Body unto the building up of itself in love.” Over 15 years have passed since then, and I can say with all my heart that I am full of thanksgiving to the Lord that according to His great mercy He has continued to keep me holding to truth in love for the building up of the church as the Body of Christ for the fulfillment of God's eternal purpose through all these years.

Jerry McGuire | Back to List

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