• The local churches preach the gospel of grace and of the kingdom to sinners that they may be saved.

• The local churches minister the life supply to believers that they may grow in Christ.

• The local churches establish the church in each city that the believers may become a local corporate expression of Christ in practicality.

• The local churches release the living and rich word of God from the Holy Scriptures that the believers may be nourished to grow and mature.

• The local churches build up the Body of Christ so that the Bride may be prepared for the coming back of Christ as the Bridegroom.

• The local churches hope that as many as are ordained by God to eternal life will believe in the Lord Jesus.

• The local churches hope that all regenerated Christians will seek the growth in life, not the mere increase of knowledge.

• The local churches hope that all seeking Christians will see the vision of the church and come into the practical church life in their locality.

• The local churches hope that the Lord will have a remnant of overcomers that His Bride may be prepared.

• The local churches hope that the coming back of the Lord will be hastened by our growth and that we may participate in the blessed rapture and in His coming kingdom.

CONCERNING THE RECOVERY

• The word “recover” means to obtain again something that has been lost, or to return something to a normal condition. “Recovery” means the restoration or return to a normal condition after a damage or a loss has been incurred. To say that God is recovering certain matters means that in the course of church history they have been lost, misused, or corrupted and that God is restoring them to their original state or condition.

• Because the church has become degraded through the many centuries of its history, it needs to be restored according to God’s original intention. Concerning the church, our vision is governed not by the present situation nor by traditional practice, but by God’s original intention and by His unchanging standard as revealed in His Word. We regard the New Testament revelation of the church not merely as a historical antecedent, but as the norm for church practice in the present day.

• God’s recovery did not begin in the twentieth century. Although it is difficult to fix an exact date for its beginning, it is convenient to set it at the time of the Reformation. The recovery has gone through several stages since the Reformation, passing through the partial recovery of the church life in Bohemia under the leadership of Zinzendorf, moving on to the unveiling of the many precious Bible truths through the Plymouth Brethren, and then going on to the genuine experience of the inner life. Now it has reached its present stage with the establishment of genuine local churches as the expression of the Body of Christ.

• In His recovery today the Lord is doing two things. He is recovering the experience of the riches of Christ – that is, the enjoyment of Christ as our life and our everything – and He is recovering the practice of the church life. These two matters go hand in hand, for the practical church life is the issue of the enjoyment of the riches of Christ. We in the Lord’s recovery today testify that Christ is unsearchably rich, that He is the all-inclusive One for our enjoyment. Furthermore, we testify that the Lord has burdened us for the practice of the church life according to the revelation of the pure Word of God.

CONCERNING SALVATION

• In Christ God has provided for man a full and complete salvation. This full salvation includes our whole being: spirit, soul, and body. In God’s salvation, man’s spirit is regenerated, his soul is being transformed, and his body will be transfigured.

• In order to be saved, one must have a living faith in the Person and work of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Every genuinely saved one has what the Bible calls the “common faith” (Titus 1:4), which includes what we must believe in order to be saved: we must believe that the Bible is the complete divine revelation wholly inspired by God; that there is a unique Triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit; that Jesus Christ is the Son of God incarnated to be a man; that Christ died on the cross for our sins, shedding His blood for our redemption; that on the third day He was bodily raised from the dead; that He has been exalted to the right hand of God and made the Lord of all; and that He is coming again for His own and to set up His kingdom on earth.

• Eternal salvation is by grace through faith, not by our works.

• In order to be saved, one must have a living contact with Jesus Christ. Therefore, in bringing unbelievers to salvation, we emphasize prayer and calling on the name of the Lord. According to Romans 10:9 and 10, if a man is to be saved, he must believe in his heart and confess with his mouth.

• Once a person has been saved, he may have both the assurance of salvation and the security of salvation. Once we are saved, we are saved forever