Before you can bear testimony for God and put the great red dragon to shame, you have to follow a principle and meet a condition: You have to love God in your heart and enter into God’s word. If you do not enter into God’s word, you cannot possibly put satan to shame. Only if you grow up in life, forsake the great red dragon, and put it to utter shame will it mean that you truly put the great red dragon to shame. The more you are willing to practice God’s word, the more it proves that you love God, and the more it proves that you hate the great red dragon. The more you obey God’s word, the more it proves that you thirst for the truth. Those who do not thirst for God’s word do not have life. Such people are outside God’s word and are religious people. Those who truly believe in God will have a deeper and deeper knowledge of God’s word through eating and drinking it. If you do not thirst for God’s word, you will not possibly eat and drink it with a sincere heart. If you do not have the knowledge of God’s word, you won’t be able to testify about God or satisfy God.

How should you know God when believing in God? You should know him according to his present word and present work and not in a deviant or erroneous way, and you should know his work first. This is the basis for knowing God. All kinds of fallacies that are not pure understandings of God’s words are religious notions and erroneous understandings. Religious people like most to measure God’s words of today against their understandings of God’s words before. If people stick to the inspiration they received from the Holy Spirit before and serve the God of today according to it, their service is a frustration and an old practice and is completely a religious ritual. If you think that a person who serves God must be humble and patient outwardly...and you practice according to such knowledge today, your knowledge is religious notion, and such practice of yours is an expression of being hypocritical. By religious notions, I mean the outdated and obsolete things (including people’s understandings of the words God spoke before and the light they received directly from the Holy Spirit before). If they practice according to those things today, it will be frustrating God’s work and will do no good to them. If people cannot cast off the religious notions they have, they will cause great hindrance to their service. People with religious notions cannot possibly keep up with the pace of the Holy Spirit’s working, and they will fall behind at every step if they fall behind at one step, because those religious notions will cause them to be extremely self-right and arrogant. God does not even keep what he spoke and did before but discards them when they are outdated, so can’t you drop your notions? You stick to the words God spoke before. Does it prove that you know God’s work? You cannot accept the present light of the Holy Spirit but stick to his previous light. Does it prove that you are following God’s footsteps? Can’t you drop your religious notions now? If not, you will be a person who resists God.

If you can drop your religious notions, you will not measure God’s present word and work with your mind but will obey them directly, and even if God’s present work is obviously different from his former work, you will drop your former viewpoints and directly obey God’s work of today. If you can realize that you should pay your most attention to God’s present work no matter what God did before, you are a person who drops his notions, who obeys God, and who obeys God’s word and work and keeps up with God’s footsteps. You are a person who truly obeys God. If you do not analyze or research God’s work, as if you have “forgotten” God’s former work as he has “forgotten” it, and you obey God’s work of today and do not remain in his former work, and you do not hold on to what God did before since he no longer does it now, you are a person who fully obeys God and who completely drops his religious notions.

God’s work has been continuously advancing, so when he does a new work, his former work will become outdated and old. His old work and new work do not contradict each other but complement each other, and they are done one stage after the other. As he has done a new work, of course the old things will be discarded, such as, the practices people have kept for many years, the conventional sayings they have been using for many years, and the experience and teachings they have learned over many years, which have produced various kinds of notions in their mind. Because God has never fully made known to people his true image and his inherent nature, and because the traditional theories have been spread throughout the ages, it is easier for people to have notions. In the course of people’s believing in God, because they are influenced by various kinds of notions, they have been producing and developing various kinds of knowledge of God according to those notions. Consequently, many religionists who serve God have become God’s enemies. Therefore, the more religious notions people have, the more they resist God, and the more they are God’s enemies. God has always been doing his work in a new way and never in a set pattern, and it has been constantly changing and renewed in different degrees. His working in such a way is an expression of his inherent nature, the original principle of his working, and his way of accomplishing his management—if he did not do his work in such a way, people could not be transformed or know him, and satan could not be defeated. So, his work has been constantly changing in a seemingly irregular but periodic pattern. However, people have been believing in God in a greatly different way—observing their old habitual regulations and rules. And the older those things are, the more they like to observe them. How can people’s foolish head that is hard like a rock take in so many incomprehensible new works and words of God? People all dislike the God who is ever-new and never-old but like a hoary-haired god that is old, aged, and unable to move. Thus, as God and people have their own “likes,” people have become God’s enemies, and many conflicts between them have remained until today, today when God has done his new work for nearly six thousand years, and these conflicts have become insoluble. Perhaps because people are incorrigibly obstinate and because God’s administrative decrees are intolerant of anyone’s offense, the religious officials and their wives still stick to the old musty books and papers, while God continues his unfinished management work without being affected by them. Although there are conflicts between God and people, which are even unsolvable, God is simply “indifferent” to such conflicts as if they exist and yet do not exist. However, people still hold on to their “beliefs” and “notions” and never drop them. But there is one thing that is obvious. Although people take a firm “stand,” God is always moving his “foot,” and he is always changing his “stand” according to the circumstances. However, people will eventually be defeated by themselves, while God will be the greatest “enemy” of all the defeated ones and the “champion” over all the defeated and undefeated people. Who can compete against God and win? It seems as if people have their notions because of God, because many of their notions gradually come into being as God does his work. But God does not excuse people for that reason, much less compliment them for their producing “for him” batches of additional products as he does his work. On the contrary, he is extremely disgusted with their notions and their old devout beliefs, and he does not even want to know when those “notions” came into being. He does not acknowledge at all that those notions result from his work, because those notions result from human influence, and they come from human mind and brain, not from God but from satan. God’s intention in doing his work is that people may become new and alive rather than old and dead. What he asks people to keep is according to the age and the stage of his work, not everlasting or unchangeable, for he is a God who makes people alive and new, not the devil that makes people dead and old. Are you still unclear about this? You have notions about God and cannot drop them because you are unenlightened in mind, not because God’s work is unreasonable or unfeeling, much less because God always “neglects his duty.” You cannot drop your notions because you have too little obedience and are not at all like a created being, not because God makes things difficult for you. All this is caused by yourself, and it has nothing to do with God. All your sufferings and scourges are caused by yourself. God’s thoughts are always good. He does not wish that you have notions but you be renewed and transformed as the age has changed. However, you do not know what is good for you but research or analyze. It is not because God makes things difficult for you, but because you have no fear for him and you are too disobedient. You a little creature even dare to attack God with the few small things he gave to you before. Doesn’t this show that you are disobedient? I can say that man is simply not qualified to express his views before God, much less qualified to voice his worthless, stinking, and putrid words at will. Aren’t his musty notions utterly valueless?