Practice of the Vital Groups

For over 3 years, the church slowly read the book “The Fellowship Concerning the Urgent Need of the Vital Groups” during the last part of the church prayer meeting. Read along, pray and consider our practical entrance into the practice of the vital groups.  

Focus on chapters 10, 11, 15, 16 

Encouragement to pick up the burden: Prayers

Read through the prayers at the beginning of chapters 3-8.

Overview of chapters 1-9: There is a need to be grouped together and contact people to gain them according to God’s ordained way.  We need to reconsider our way, thoroughly open ourselves to the Lord through much repentance and confession for our dullness and lack of feeling for the proper increase and become alive before the Lord.  Then pray to be grouped together with a few companions.  Learn to open ourselves to one another, praying and considering our visiting new ones, practicing and laboring, considering how to bring the new ones to the church meetings,

Overview of chapters 10,11,15, 16: We need to live in the new creation, be transformed in our prayer and open to the Lord in your group not practicing to be “good” saints but seeking to be blended in our groups through much and thorough prayer and absolute and clear and thorough fellowship to gain the increase for the building up of the Body.

Five points for our seeking:

  1. To be blended,

  2. To be filled with the Spirit inwardly and outwardly, 

  3. Praying unceasingly by exercising our spirit to redeem the time, 

  4. Not doing things by our own way but taking the coordinated way, 

  5. Dealing with our disposition, character, and peculiar traits. 

Two additional points to be burdened for others:

  1. To be burdened for sinners to be saved.

  2. To become members of Christ.

Keeping the oneness of the body

  1. Condemning all self-exalting views

  2. Dropping all divisive opinions

  3. Forsaking all self preferences

  4. Disregarding all personal tastes

  5. Following the Spirits direction

  6. Respecting your fellow members feeling

7 Items of Confessing:

  1. Confessing the sins of individualism and individuality

  2. Confessing all your defects, shortcomings, wrongdoings, mistakes, transgressions, trespasses, outward sins, and inward evils, and asking for the Lord’s forgiveness

  3. Confessing your sinful nature, Its defilements, its attachment to the contamination of the world, and its oldness, and asking for the Lord’s cleansing with His precious blood.

  4. Confessing your dispositional problems and your peculiarity in your character

  5. Denying yourself, your habit, and your old way of doing things

  6. Having no more confidence in yourself and no more trust in your natural ability

  7. Loving all the members of your group with an equal love in the love of God