Who Sets the Outcome of Man
When someone does their duty, when they’re being faced with all manner of circumstances, all manner of trials, what is the person’s attitude? How do they perform? How do they feel toward God in their heart? … God has an account of all of this, a record of all of it. Perhaps from your point of view, these issues are confusing. However, from where God stands, they’re all crystal clear, and there isn’t even the slightest hint of sloppiness. This is an issue that involves the outcome of each and every person, and their fates and future prospects as well. Even more, this is where God expends all of His painstaking efforts. Hence God doesn’t dare to neglect it in the slightest, and won’t tolerate any sloppiness. God is recording this account of mankind, recording an account of the entire course of man following God, from the beginning right up to the end. Your attitude toward God in this time will determine your fate. Is this not true? Up until now, do you believe that God is righteous? Are God’s actions appropriate? Do you still have any other picture of God in your heads? (No.) Then do you say that man’s outcome is for God to set or for man himself to set? (It’s for God to set.) Who is it that sets it? (God.) You’re not sure, are you? Brothers and sisters of the Hong Kong churches, speak up—who sets it? (Man sets it himself.) Man sets it himself? Then doesn’t that mean it has nothing to do with God? Who wants to speak up from the Korean churches? (God establishes man’s outcome based on all of their actions and deeds, and based on the path they walk.) This is a very objective response. There’s a fact here that I must inform all of you: In the course of God’s salvation work, He sets a standard for man. This standard is that man can obey the word of God, and walk in God’s way. It is this standard that is used to weigh man’s outcome. If you practice in accordance with this standard of God, then you can obtain a good outcome; if you don’t, then you cannot obtain a good outcome. Then who is it you say that sets this outcome? It’s not God alone who sets it, but rather God and man together. Is this correct? (Yes.) Why is that? Because it’s God who actively wants to engage in the work of mankind’s salvation, and prepare a beautiful destination for man; man is the target of God’s work, and this outcome, this destination, is what God prepares for man. If there was no target for His work, then God wouldn’t need to do this work; if God didn’t do this work, then man wouldn’t have an opportunity for salvation. Man is the target for salvation, and although man is the passive side in this process, it is the attitude of this side that determines whether or not God will be successful in His work to save mankind. If not for the guidance that God gives you, then you wouldn’t know His standard, and you would have no objective. If you have this standard, this objective, yet you don’t cooperate, you don’t put it into practice, you don’t pay the price, then you still won’t obtain this outcome. This is why we say that this outcome cannot be separated from God, and it cannot be separated from man. And now you know who sets man’s outcome.
People Tend to Define God Based on Experience
When communicating the topic of knowing God, have you noticed something? Have you noticed that God’s current attitude has undergone a change? Is God’s attitude toward mankind unchangeable? Will God always endure like this, extending all of His love and mercy to man indefinitely? This matter also involves the essence of God. Let’s return to the question of the so-called prodigal son from before. After this question was asked, your answers weren’t very clear. In other words, you still don’t well understand God’s intentions. Once people know that God loves mankind, they define God as a symbol of love: No matter what people do, no matter how they behave, no matter how they treat God, and no matter how disobedient they are, none of it matters because God has love, and God’s love is unlimited and immeasurable. God has love, so He can be tolerant with people; God has love, so He can be merciful toward people, merciful toward their immaturity, merciful toward their ignorance, and merciful toward their disobedience. Is this really the way it is? For some people, when they have experienced God’s patience once, or a few times, they will treat it as capital in their own understanding of God, believing that God will once and forever be patient toward them, be merciful toward them, and over the course of their life they will take God’s patience and regard it as the standard of how God treats them. There are also those people who, when they have experienced God’s tolerance once, will once and forever define God as tolerance, and this tolerance is indefinite, unconditional, and even totally unprincipled. Are these beliefs correct? Every time matters of God’s essence or God’s disposition are discussed, you seem bewildered. Seeing you like this makes Me a little angry. You have heard a lot of truth concerning God’s essence; you have also listened to many topics concerning God’s disposition. However, in your minds these issues, and the truth of these aspects, are just memories based on theory and written words. None of you are ever able to experience just what God’s disposition is in your real lives, nor can you see just what God’s disposition is. Therefore, you’re all muddleheaded in your beliefs, you all blindly believe, to the point that you have an irreverent attitude toward God, that you brush Him aside. What does your having this kind of attitude toward God lead to? It leads to you always making conclusions about God. Once you acquire a little bit of knowledge, you feel very satisfied, you feel like you have obtained God in His entirety. Afterward, you conclude that this is how God is, and you don’t let Him move freely. And whenever God does something new, you just don’t admit that He is God. One day, when God says: “I don’t love man anymore; I don’t extend mercy to man anymore; I don’t have any tolerance or patience toward man anymore; I am full of extreme loathing and antipathy toward man,” people will clash with this kind of statement from the bottom of their hearts. Some of them will even say: “You’re not my God anymore; You’re no longer the God that I want to follow. If this is what You say, then You’re no longer qualified to be my God, and I don’t need to keep following You. If You don’t give me mercy, don’t give me love, don’t give me tolerance, then I will not follow You anymore. Only if You are tolerant of me indefinitely, are always patient with me, and let me see that You are love, that You are patience, that You are tolerance, only then can I follow You, and only then can I have the confidence to follow to the end. Since I have Your patience and mercy, my disobedience and my trespasses can be forgiven indefinitely, be pardoned indefinitely, and I can sin anytime and anywhere, confess and be pardoned anytime and anywhere, and anger You anytime and anywhere. You shouldn’t have any of Your own ideas or conclusions concerning me.” Though you may not think about this kind of question in such a subjective and conscious manner, whenever you consider God to be a tool for having your sins forgiven and an object to be used for obtaining a beautiful destination, you have already imperceptibly placed the living God in opposition to you, as your enemy. This is what I see. You may keep on saying, “I believe in God”; “I seek after the truth”; “I want to change my disposition”; “I want to break free from the influence of darkness”; “I want to satisfy God”; “I want to obey God”; “I want to be faithful toward God, and do my duty well”; and so forth. However, no matter how nice whatever you say sounds, no matter how much theory you know, no matter how imposing that theory is, how dignified it is, the fact of the matter is that there are now many of you who have already learned how to use the regulation, the doctrine, the theory you’ve mastered to draw conclusions about God, and place Him in opposition to yourselves in a totally natural way. Although you have mastered letters and mastered doctrines, you have not really entered the reality of the truth, so it’s very hard for you to get close to God, to know God, to understand God. This is pathetic!
I saw this scene on a video: A few sisters were holding a book of The Word Appears in the Flesh, and they were holding it up very high. They were holding this book in the middle of them, higher than their own heads. Although this is just an image, what it evokes inside Me isn’t an image. Rather, it makes Me think that what every person holds high in their heart isn’t God’s word, but the book of God’s word. This is a very depressing matter. This way of practicing is simply not a case of holding God high. It’s because you don’t understand God such that an obvious question, a very small question, has you coming up with your own notions. When I ask things of you, when I’m being serious with you, you respond with conjecture and your own imaginings; some of you even adopt a doubtful tone and ask back. This confirms it even more clearly to Me that the God you believe in is not the true God. After reading God’s word for so many years, you use God’s word, use God’s work, and more doctrines to draw conclusions about God once again. Moreover, you never attempt to understand God; you never try to figure out God’s intentions; you don’t attempt to understand what God’s attitude toward man is; or how God thinks, why He is sad, why He is angry, why He spurns people, and other such questions. What’s more, even more people believe that God has always been silent because He’s just watching mankind’s actions, because He has no attitude toward them, nor does He have His own ideas. Another group takes it even further. These people believe that God doesn’t utter a sound because He has acquiesced, God doesn’t utter a sound because He is waiting, God doesn’t utter a sound because He has no attitude, because God’s attitude has already been elaborated fully in books, it has already been expressed in its entirety to mankind, and doesn’t need to be repeatedly told to people time and time again. Although God is silent, He still has an attitude, has a viewpoint, and has a standard He demands of people. Though people don’t try to understand Him, and don’t try to seek Him, His attitude is very clear. Consider someone who once passionately followed God, but at some point abandoned Him and left. Should this person want to come back now, surprisingly enough, you don’t know what God’s viewpoint would be, and what God’s attitude would be. Isn’t this pathetic? In fact, this is a fairly superficial matter. If you truly understood God’s heart, you would know His attitude toward this kind of person, and you wouldn’t give an ambiguous answer. Since you don’t know, allow Me to fill you in.
from The Word Appears in the Flesh
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