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CAN WE ASSUME TO BE THE ASSEMBLY OF GOD IN ANY PLACE

In reply to your letter on the subject of the assembly or church, you must first admit that the church is not now in any place, town, or country, as it was in Corinth, to which you refer. If you admit that the church as God’s house has lost its first estate, that it is now in disorder — a “great house”, where there are vessels to honour and to dishonour, you will see that you cannot speak of the church in any place as including all the professing Christians in that place. This is just what Rome aims at, and the parochial system fosters, because they do not allow that the church is morally a ruin. All the sects in Christendom originated with the express purpose of improving the state of things. Their mistake has arisen from thinking that they could reform. The only course open to you or to any one true to the Lord, is first to purge himself from the vessels to dishonour, and then to follow with them who call on the Lord out of a pure heart (2 Timothy 2: 22). When you are awakened to the corruption which you are mixed up with in the “great house”, you will separate yourself from the persons or vessels to dishonour. You do not seek to reform; you begin at the beginning; you go back to the Lord’s intention at the beginning. We learn from Matthew 14 - Matthew 16 how the Lord educated His disciples for the assembly. You start there; you seek to be of the remnant in a day when all around professing to be God’s house is in ruin and disorder. A remnant is characterised by fidelity to the Lord, which is the brightest trait of the original. The true remnant has a “little power”, has kept My word, and has not denied My name;

^[p. 58] it is for His eye and heart. It seeks no place among men, “as a teil tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in them, when they cast their leaves” (Isaiah 6: 13). No leaves, nothing for the human eye to acknowledge.

Thus drawn to the Lord, we enjoy Him in our midst, and as we do, we become a help and an attraction to every one truly seeking Him. The more separate we are the more the Lord is with us. We should really be a moral lifeboat in all the wreck around us. We are looking for nothing. Our hearts are on the Lord, and on all His, waiting for His coming. I hope you will understand all this. The Lord bless you.

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