The Release of the Spirit • Introduction

Watchman Nee (born Nee Shu-Tsu) was a Chinese Christian who ministered in the first half of the 20th century. Although his grandfather was a Christian minister, Nee became a Christian through the influence of a female evangelist (Dora Yu) in 1920, at the age of 17. Although he had no formal pastoral or theological training (he was self-taught through studying the Bible and reading over 3,000 books), Watchman began ministering in 1922. For 30 years he planted churches in rural China and pastored in Shanghai. A few years after the Chinese Communist takeover (Communists came to power in 1950 after 23 years of civil war), he was imprisoned for his faith, but not before he had planted 700 churches with a total attendance of over 700,000. He remained behind bars twenty years until his death in 1972.

The Release of the Spirit is a short book – ten chapters in only 94 pages. We will be looking at one chapter per week, and these posts will generally come on Tuesdays. I have an old edition printed in 1965 by Sure Foundation. If you have a newer copy, our page numbers might not always agree. Just keep in mind that as long as we’re in the same chapter, it shouldn’t be too hard to synchronize our reading.

Watchman sees humans in three parts, what he calls the Inner Person, the Outer Person and the Outermost Person. We would call these the spirit, the soul, and the body. [1] It is his conviction that God wants to live in a person’s spirit but that, until the soul (outer person) is broken and submits to the spirit (inner person) it hinders us from fully engaging Christ. It is the natural state of the soul to force its will on the spirit, but only in serving and submitting will the soul find its greatest joy.

Read chapter one for next week.

Have you experienced your outer person (soul) in conflict with your inner person (spirit)? Is the battle resolved? What happened?

[1] While Watchman Nee uses the terms inner man, outward man, and outermost man, I believe for today’s audience, replacing the term man with person clarifies and is congruent with his intended thought.