Throughout the centuries of church history the Lord has progressively carried out His work of recovery. In this book, Witness Lee shows that the Lord's present advance is to recover the priesthood of the gospel, the organic building up of the Body of Christ, the perfecting of the believers, and the speaking of God's word for the building of the Body of Christ. He concludes with help as to how we can practice these four matters.

The way of recovery is to recover Christ as our life and everything, to recover the vitality and functioning of every member of the Body of Christ, and to recover the ground of the oneness of the church. For this, there are several important things that we must carry out in our service, including preaching the gospel, endeavoring to lead people to salvation and the knowledge of Christ, and leading the brothers and sisters to function in a living way, coordinate in service, and maintain the testimony of the Lord on the ground of oneness. All this service must be for the church. The ultimate goal of our service is to build up the church, because the church is what God wants to obtain in the universe.

This writing is a transparent rendering of the history of "the local churches" under the leadership of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee and their ministry(s), which now is in the hands of a group of "blending brothers" who were mentored by Lee and are fully engaged in promoting his ministry in and through the "local churches" associated with them and with Living Stream Ministry. "Living Stream Ministry publishes the works of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee providing the authoritative and definitive collections of treasures from these two servants of the Lord Jesus Christ. The writings of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee focus on the enjoyment of the divine life, which all the believers possess, and on the building up of the church, the goal of God's work with man in this age." (from LSM Home page)The term "local church" is to be applied to Christians in a locality who meet on a ground of understanding that they are one in Christ with every true believer and desire practically to be built up with believers in their own locality according to Christ alone and God's own receiving of them. This is the view seen in the New Testament. It is also the vision we see at the beginning of the Lord's recovery in the Watchman Nee era, but toward the end his view had changed dramatically as the threat of Communist interference rolled across China. The era of Witness Lee parallels that of his mentor: They both began with 1) Christ as life for building up local churches, with "administration local each answering to the Lord"; but ended up inspiring a movement in the churches to 2) "hand over" the reins of leadership to one man and his ministry. This book is to inspire them to come back to the vision at the beginning of the Lord's recovery.

The most important work of God on earth is the speaking out of His word through man. In the Old Testament God's word was released through the ministry of the prophets, and in the New Testament it was released through the ministry of the Lord Jesus and later through the apostles. Even though God is pleased to allow us to speak His word, the greatest measure of our usefulness as a minister of the Word is not the amount of our Bible knowledge or even the ability to eloquently present the truth; rather, it is the degree to which our inward parts have been molded and shaped by the Holy Spirit. The Ministry of God's Word contains a series of messages given by Watchman Nee in 1948 and 1949 after nearly thirty years of ministry. These messages are deep, profound, subjective, and full of light, revealing both the depth of his experience and extent of our need to open to the Holy Spirit's inward operation.