Have you read the Book of Job? When you were reading it, did you feel moved? Did you experience a kind of longing that made you wish to become a person like Job? (Yes.) How long can this kind of state and mood last for? A day or two, or a month or two, or perhaps a year or two? (Two or three days.) So this kind of state and mood will disappear after two or three days? You must pray when you feel moved, and tell God that you wish to be a person like Job, that you wish to understand the truth, attain knowledge of God, and become a person who fears God and shuns evil. You must implore God to bring this about in you, imploring Him to guide you, to provide you with the right environments, to give you strength, and to protect you so that you may stand firm in every situation that you meet, not resist God, and instead perform acts of fearing God and shunning evil, and satisfy His will. You must always pray and supplicate to God for the sake of this goal and for the things that you hope to achieve, and when God sees your genuine heart, He will act. Do not be afraid when God acts. God could not possibly cover your body with boils and strip you of everything you have, as He did when He tested Job. God will not do that; He will gradually place more upon you according to your stature. You must call upon God earnestly—don’t just call upon Him for two days after you’ve read the Book of Job and are still feeling moved by it, and then forget about it on the third day when you’re no longer reading it, and cease to keep it in your heart. If you do, that spells trouble for you! If you admire people like Job, and you want to be that kind of person, then you must have a path for how to become that kind of person, you must lay your heart before God and then pray for this often, and ponder on it often, and then eat and drink the words that God has spoken about Job, consistently and repeatedly contemplating them, and after that you must fellowship with people who have experience and knowledge of this kind. You must work hard toward this goal. How should you work hard? If you merely sit watching and waiting, that is not working hard. You must put it into practice, you must dedicate effort to it, at the same time harboring a resolve to endure suffering and a heart of longing, and then offer up your prayers for this, asking God to act. If God does not act, then no matter how much drive people have, it will be of no avail. How will God act? God will begin to orchestrate and arrange environments for you as befits your stature. You must tell God what goal you wish to achieve in your faith, and what kind of resolutions you have. Have you prayed and supplicated to God for this? How long did you pray and supplicate to God for? If you just say a couple of prayers, once in a while, and when you see that God has not acted, you think, “Forget it, I’ll just let things be. Whatever happens, happens, I’ll just go with the flow. I don’t care what befalls me,” that won’t do, and you are not sincere. If all you have is two minutes of enthusiasm, can God act for you and help to arrange environments for you? God would not do that! God wants to see your sincerity, and to see how long your sincerity and perseverance can hold up, and whether your heart is genuine or false. God will wait. He hears your prayers and supplications, He hears the resolutions and desires that you confide in Him, but until He has seen your resolve to endure suffering, He will not act. If, after you’re done praying to God, you just disappear without having done anything, would God act under these circumstances? Most definitely not. You have to pray and supplicate to God more, putting effort into this and pondering on it, and then savor in detail the environments that God has prepared for you; they will come upon you, little by little, and God will begin to act. If you do not have a genuine heart, then this will not work. You may say, “How I admire Job, and how I admire Peter!” but what good is your admiration? You can admire them all you like, but you are not them, and all your admiration will not make God do the same work on you as He did on them, because you are not the same kind of person as them. You do not possess their resolve, or their humanity, or the hearts with which they yearned for and pursued the truth. Only when you come to possess these things will God endow you with more.

Do you now have the resolve to pursue the truth, to gain the truth, and to achieve salvation and be perfected by God? (Yes.) How great is your resolve? How long can you maintain it? (When I am in a good state, I have resolve, but when I encounter things that do not correspond with my notions or the interests of my flesh, or when I undergo some refinement or have some difficulties, I get trapped in a state of negativity, and the faith and resolve that I had in the beginning disappear bit by bit.) This will not do. You are too weak. You must reach a place where, no matter what circumstances you encounter, they cannot change your resolve. Only then will you be someone who truly loves and pursues the truth. If, when something befalls you and you encounter a little difficulty, you retreat, become negative and dejected, and let go of your resolve, this will not do. You must have the strength of one who is ready to put their life on the line, and say, “No matter what happens—even if I die, I will not abandon the truth or my goal to pursue the truth.” Then nothing will be able to stop you. If you really encounter difficulties, and you are driven into a corner, God will act. In addition, you must have this understanding: “No matter what I encounter, they are all lessons that I must learn in my pursuit of the truth—they have been arranged by God. I may be weak, but I am not negative, and I am grateful to God for giving me the opportunity to learn these lessons. I am grateful to God for setting out this situation for me. I cannot let go of my resolve to follow God and gain the truth. Were I to give it up, that would be the same as conceding to Satan, ruining myself, and betraying God.” This is the kind of resolve you must have. Whatever small matters you encounter, they are all little episodes in the development of your life. You must not let them block the direction of your progress. When you meet with difficulties you can seek and wait, but the direction of your progress must not change, is that not right? (It is.) No matter what others say, or how they treat you, and no matter how God treats you, your resolve must not change. If God says, “You do not accept the truth at all, I loathe you,” and you say, “God loathes me, so what meaning does my life have? I may as well die and be done with it!” you would be misunderstanding God. It is true that God loathes you, but you should fight on, you should accept the truth, and you should fulfill your duty. Then you will not be a good-for-nothing and God will not spurn you. Right now, your stature is still too small and you have not yet achieved the standards required for God to test you. What is the only thing that you can do? You must pray: “God, please guide me and enlighten me so that I understand Your will, and have the faith and perseverance to walk the path of pursuing the truth, and so that I may fear God and shun evil. Although I am weak and my stature is immature, I beg You to give me strength and protect me so that I can follow You to the end.” You must come before God often to pray. Other people may crave worldly things, indulge their flesh, and follow worldly trends, but you must not accompany them—just focus on performing your own duty. When others are feeling negative and they do not perform their duties, you must not feel constrained, and you should seek the truth to help them. When others indulge in comfort you must not envy them, you must only concern yourself with living before God. When others pursue fame, gain, and status, you should pray for them and help them, quiet your heart before God and not let these things influence you. No matter what happens around you, you should pray to God about all things. You should always seek the truth, restrain yourself, ensure that you are living in the presence of God, and have a normal relationship with God. God scrutinizes people at all times, and the Holy Spirit works within these kinds of people. How does God scrutinize a person’s heart? He not only looks with His eyes, He sets up environments for you and touches your heart with His hand. Why do I say this? Because when God sets up an environment for you, God sees whether you resent and detest it, or like and submit to it, whether you passively wait or actively seek the truth. God watches how your heart and your thoughts change, and in which direction they develop. The state in your heart is sometimes positive, and sometimes negative. If you can accept the truth, you will be able to accept from God the people, events and things, and the various environments that He sets out for you, and you will be able to approach them correctly. By reading God’s words, and through contemplation, all of your thoughts and ideas, all of your opinions, and all of your moods will change based on God’s words. You will be clear about this, and God will also scrutinize all of it. Even though you will not have spoken of it to any person, or prayed about it, and you will only think this in your heart and in your own world, from God’s perspective it will already be very clear—it will be obvious to Him. People look at you with their eyes, but God touches your heart with His, that is how close to you He is. If you can feel God’s scrutiny, you are living in the presence of God. If you cannot feel His scrutiny at all, you are living in your own world, and you are living by your own feelings and corrupt dispositions, and then you are in trouble. If you do not live in the presence of God, if there is a great distance between you and God, and you are far from Him, if you do not give any consideration at all for God’s will, and if you do not accept God’s scrutiny, God will know all this. It will be all too easy for Him to perceive this. So, when you have resolve and a goal, and you are willing to be perfected by God, and to become a person who follows God’s will and fears God and shuns evil, when you have this resolve, and you can pray and supplicate for these things often, and live in the presence of God, never distancing yourself from God or leaving Him, you are clear about these things, and God knows them too. Some people say, “I am clear about it myself, but does God know it or not?” This question is invalid. If you say this, it proves that you have never fellowshipped with God and that there is absolutely no relationship between you and God. Why do I say there is no relationship between you and God? You have not lived before God and therefore you cannot sense if He is with you or not, whether He is guiding you, whether He is protecting you, and whether He has rebuked you when you have done something wrong. If you have no sense of these things, then you do not live before God, you are just imagining this and indulging yourself—you are living in your own world, and not before God, and there is no relationship at all between you and God.

How can people maintain a normal relationship with God? What does maintaining it depend on? It depends on them supplicating, praying, and interacting with God in their hearts. This kind of relationship allows people to always live before God. Therefore, in order to establish a normal relationship with God, people must first be quiet. Some people are always doing things outside, and only busying themselves with external affairs. If they do not have any spiritual life for one or two days, they will not be aware of it. They will still not be aware of it after three or four days, or even after one or two months. This is because they have not prayed, or supplicated, or fellowshipped with God. Supplicating is when something happens to you and you want God to help you, to guide you, to provide for you, to enlighten you, to make you understand His will, know what the truth is, understand what the truth principles are, and know how to practice the truth—this is the kind of supplication that accords with God’s will. Prayer covers a relatively broad range. Sometimes you may talk about things that are in your heart—when you encounter difficulties or when you are feeling negative and weak, you can talk to God about these things from the heart; you can also pray to God at times when you are being rebellious, or you can talk to God about the things that befall you every day, both those that you can see through to, and those that you cannot—this is called prayer. Prayer is talking to God about what is in your heart or seeking the truth from God. Sometimes it is carried out at a fixed time, sometimes it is not at any fixed time; you can pray anytime and anywhere. Fellowship in the spirit does not take any particular form: There may be something bothering you, or there may not; you may have something you want to say, or you may not. When there is something bothering you, you should talk to God about it, and say a prayer. Ordinarily, you should try to contemplate on questions like how God loves man, how He worries about man, why He prunes man, what it really means to submit to God, and so on, communicating with God at all times and all places, praying to God, and seeking from Him. This is fellowship in the spirit, or “spirit fellowship” for short. Sometimes, you may think of something that upsets you very much while you are on the road; you do not need to kneel down or close your eyes. You can just speak to God in your heart, “God, this thing has befallen me and I don’t know the proper way of dealing with it, so I ask Your guidance in this matter.” When you feel a movement in your heart, and you speak a few heartfelt words about it to God, then He will know. Sometimes you may feel homesick and you say, “God, I am so homesick.” You do not say who you are missing specifically, it is just that you feel sad and you are telling God about it. You can only solve your problems if you pray to God and tell Him what is in your heart. Can you solve your problems by talking to another person? It will not be so bad if you meet with someone who understands the truth—not only will you be able to solve your problems, you will also benefit from it. But if you meet with someone who does not understand the truth, you will not be able to solve your problems, and it may also impact them. If you speak to God, God will comfort you and move you. If you can quiet yourself before God, and read His words, and then contemplate and pray, you will be able to understand the truth and solve your problems. God’s words can help you to find a path to overcome your difficulties, and when you cross this small hurdle, you will not stumble, and it will not constrain you, nor will it influence your performance of your duty. There will be times when you suddenly feel low in spirit and a little bit dark. When this happens, you should pray to God immediately, and draw close to Him, which means speaking to Him about what is in your heart and confiding in Him at all times and wherever you are. In this way your state can be reversed. You must have faith: “God is by my side at every single moment, He has never left me, I can feel it. No matter where I am or what I’m doing—whether I am in a gathering or performing my duty—I know in my heart that God is leading me by the hand, and that He has never left me.” Sometimes, when you recall how you passed each day like this over the years, you will feel that your stature has grown, that God has been guiding you, and God’s love has always been protecting you. As you think of these things, you will then pray in your heart, offering thanks to God: “Oh God, I thank You! I am too weak, timid, and too profoundly corrupt. If I did not have You to guide me like this, there is no way that I could have made it to today by myself.” Is this not spiritual fellowship? If people can fellowship with God often in this way, will they not have much to say to God? They would not go many days without having a single thing to say to God. When you have nothing to say to God, God is absent from your heart. If God is in your heart, and you have faith in God, then you will be able to speak all of the words in your heart to Him, including those things you would speak of to your confidants. God is, in fact, your closest confidant. If you treat God as your closest confidant, as the family that you depend on the most, that you find the most dependable, the most trustworthy, and that you are most intimate with, then it will be impossible for you to have nothing to say to God. If you always have something to say to God, won’t you always be living in His presence? If you always live in God’s presence, then you will be able to sense at every moment how God enlightens and guides you, how He cares for and protects you, and brings you peace and joy, how He blesses you, and how He rebukes you, disciplines you, chastens you, and judges and chastises you. All of this will be clear and evident to you. If you just muddle through every day, believing in God in word only, without having God in your heart, and if you just perform your duty and attend gatherings on an external level, and read the words of God and pray every day, simply going through these motions, then this is not belief in God—none of these religious rituals that you observe have any relationship to the truth. Those who believe in God should carefully read a passage of God’s words every day, and pray and fellowship within these words. They should gain a little illumination from God’s words every day, and understand a bit of the truth. In particular, they should be able to seek the truth and handle matters according to the principles while performing their duties, and be able to gain life experience every day, and experience God’s work. That is a true believer and a person who follows God.

Which issue is the most important and the most in need of resolution in your belief in God? It is the issue of your normal relationship with God. If you believe in God, but He is not in your heart, and you have disconnected your relationship with Him, and you do not treat God like your most intimate, trusted, and closest family member and confidant, then God is not your God. Practice according to My words for a period of time and look to see if your inner state has changed. By practicing according to My words you can ensure that you live in the presence of God, that you have a normal condition and a normal state. When a person’s state is normal, and they are not influenced by any people, events, and things, or different environments that befall them in all stages of their life experience, and they are able to persist in performing their duty normally, they have true stature and they are someone who has entered into the truth reality.

July 13, 2017