I was formerly a leader of the True Jesus Church. After I believed in the Lord through grace in 1996, I studied the Bible assiduously and preached in the church. Not long afterward, I was promoted to an important position where I was responsible for shepherding a church of over 1,000 believers. While serving the Lord, I was earnestly expecting the second coming of the Savior Jesus, expecting him to take us back to the heavenly home sooner. But I had never thought that when the Lord really returned, I actually became an arch-criminal resisting God.

At a co-worker meeting in 1997, the elder said to us, “Now there arise a band of people preaching ‘Eastern Lightning.’ They say that God has come and has done a new work. They are very aggressive. If they preach to you yet you do not accept, they will cut off your nose, gouge out your eyes, break your legs, or even take your life. They are purely ‘heretics,’ ‘cultists.’ They are of an ‘underworld organization.’ You must tell the brothers and sisters never to come into contact with them. Once you come into contact with them, you will be trapped; once you are trapped, you cannot get out.” I had always believed the elder’s words without any doubt, and this time was no exception. So I immediately passed his words on to the brothers and sisters in the church, and I warned them, “Without my permission, no one is allowed to receive any outsider, even if he is your relative. We must firmly believe in the elder’s words: Only the True Jesus Church is the holy mountain of God, and all sects and denominations will be reunited into our denomination.” The brothers and sisters all believed those to be true, and they all acted on whatever I said. Even so, I still felt insecure. So I went to other parts of the country to find some materials that slandered “Eastern Lightning” and spread the information exaggeratedly and wantonly among the brothers and sisters. And I warned the co-workers again and again, “We must protect the flock properly and must not allow ‘Eastern Lightning’ to intrude into our church. This is to be faithful to the Lord and to defend the true way. We must treat it as our first priority.” Just like that, we closed the whole church at all levels to outsiders to a watertight extent and kept the brothers and sisters completely under our control. Although the believers in Almighty God came one after another to preach the gospel to our church, they were driven away and shut out by us one by one. I rejoiced in my heart at this, thinking that this was definitely acceptable to the Lord. However, just when I was very pleased with myself, God’s discipline came upon me.

One day in January 2000, when I was at a co-worker’s home discussing how to prevent “Eastern Lightning” “stealing the sheep” from our church, I suddenly felt my fingers go numb, my head swim, and my vision dim, and that I couldn’t sit or stand steadily. The brother hurriedly sent me to the hospital. After the examination, the doctor said that I had got cerebral thrombosis which was caused by acute high blood pressure and that my life was in danger. Hearing that, I was very surprised. “How could I suddenly get this disease?” Not knowing what to do, I prayed vehemently to the Lord, asking him to heal me. But no matter how hard I cried out, I didn’t get any better, and taking medicines didn’t help either. I didn’t realize then that I was disciplined by God for having resisted him, so I still persisted in my mistaken ways and did evil to resist Almighty God. Gradually, I found my relationship with God became more and more distant. I had no moving in prayer, did not know what to say when preaching, and felt particularly depressed in spirit. Besides, the condition of the church got worse and worse: The co-workers scrambled for fame and profit among themselves, passed judgment on each other, and were apparently of one accord but divided in heart. Many preachers were so weak that they could not pick themselves up. Among the brothers and sisters, those who had once been sick and were healed later and those who had once been possessed by demons and were released later suffered a relapse; healing the sick and driving out demons in the name of the Lord were of no avail. The believers’ faith and love faded away; of them, some no longer attended meetings, some went to run businesses, some gave up their belief in God, and some accepted “Eastern Lightning.” The number of believers in the church of over one thousand gradually decreased to only about one hundred. In the face of such a condition in the church and my own illness, I fell into a very weak state and had no strength to carry on anymore. I prayed to the Lord in bitter tears, “Lord! How come the church has become like this? The church is your body, and the brothers and sisters are all whom you have bought back with your precious blood. Why don’t you care about them anymore? Lord! Where are you exactly? Please come back among us and revive your church! I really don’t know how to walk my future path now. Please guide me!”

One day in June 2000, thanks to God’s wonderful arrangement and preparation, I met two brothers by chance at my cousin’s home when I visited her with my mother. So we had a fellowship. During the fellowship, I found what they talked about was what I had never heard before. They fellowshipped about the inside story of God’s work in the Age of the Law and that in the Age of the Grace according to the Bible, which really broadened my horizons and made me receive great supply in spirit. Later, when they fellowshipped that in the end time God had been incarnated the second time and had done a new work, my head “buzzed.” “I’m finished! Aren’t they of ‘Eastern Lightning’?” I immediately stood up, called my cousin aside, and said to her nervously, “Do you know what they are preaching? They are of ‘Eastern Lightning,’ an underworld organization. They go everywhere to deceive people. Why don’t you discern them before you receive them? We can’t listen anymore!” But my cousin said to me, “Brother, those words you heard are all lies fabricated by the people with ulterior motives. You have also heard their fellowship. Have you found anything wrong with it? Besides, how can you tell whether it’s right or wrong if you don’t hear them out?” Hearing her words, I thought to myself, “I’m here at my cousin’s home anyway. They can do nothing to me if I don’t accept it after listening. Besides, even if what they preach is false, I can gain some discernment from it.” So, I continued to listen to their fellowship as if nothing had happened. The brother fellowshipped about God’s work of selecting, judging, purifying, and reuniting all into one in the last days and also looked up many relevant verses. Outwardly I echoed what he said, but inwardly I had another plan. “No matter how nice your words are and how reasonable your preaching is, I will not accept it.” Later, when they read God’s words to me, I purposely interrupted and found faults with them. The brother said to me earnestly with tears in his eyes, “Brother! I once also led a church of more than one thousand people like you, and I had also resisted God’s new work greatly. Later, it was God’s love that led me into his presence. The facts that I had seen with my own eyes woke me up and made me know that what I had heard before were all rumors and slanders. It was just as when Jesus did the work, some people said that it was by the prince of demons that he drove out demons, yet no matter how ‘authoritative’ the rumors were, and no matter how many people believed them, the rumors still collapsed by themselves and the work of God’s redeeming mankind succeeded in the end. So, if today we don’t quiet our heart to seek and investigate but blindly believe the rumors, we will very easily make the same mistake as the Pharisees made at that time, condemning and resisting the returned Lord Jesus, and thus miss the opportunity to be saved.”