Relevant Words of God:

In believing in God, you must at least resolve the issue of having a normal relationship with God. If you do not have a normal relationship with God, then the meaning of your belief in God is lost. Establishing a normal relationship with God is done entirely through quieting your heart in God’s presence. Having a normal relationship with God means being able not to doubt and not to deny any of His work and being able to submit to His work. It means having correct intentions in God’s presence, not making plans for yourself, and considering the interests of God’s house first in all things; it means accepting God’s scrutiny and submitting to God’s arrangements. You must be able to quiet your heart in God’s presence in all that you do. Even if you do not understand God’s intentions, you must still fulfill your duties and responsibilities to the best of your ability. Once God’s intentions have been revealed to you, practice according to them, and it will not be too late. When your relationship with God has become normal, then you will also have normal relationships with people. To build a normal relationship with God, all must be built on the foundation of God’s words, you must be able to do your duty according to God’s words and what God asks, you must set your views straight, you must seek the truth in all things, and you must practice the truth when you understand it. Regardless of what happens to you, you must pray to God and seek with a heart of submission to God. Practicing thus, you will be able to maintain a normal relationship with God. At the same time as doing your duty properly, you must also ensure that you do nothing that does not benefit the life entry of God’s chosen people, and say nothing that is not edifying to the brothers and sisters. At the very least, you must do nothing that goes against your conscience and must absolutely not do anything shameful. In particular, you absolutely must not do that which rebels against or resists God, nor anything that disturbs the work or life of the church. Be upright and honorable in everything you do and ensure that your every action is presentable before God. Although the flesh may sometimes be weak, you must be able to put the interests of God’s house first, without greed for personal profit, without doing anything selfish or despicable, often reflecting on yourself. In this way, you will be able to often live before God, and your relationship with God will become completely normal.

—The Word, Vol. 1. The Appearance and Work of God. How Is Your Relationship With God?

In everything you do, you must examine whether your intentions are correct. If you are able to act according to the requirements of God, then your relationship with God is normal. This is the minimum standard. Look into your intentions, and if you find that incorrect intentions have arisen, be able to rebel against them and act according to the words of God; thus will you become a right person before God, which in turn demonstrates that your relationship with God is normal, and that all that you do is for God’s sake, not your own. In all you do and all you say, be able to set your heart right and be just in your actions, and do not be led by your feelings, nor act according to your own will. These are principles by which believers in God must conduct themselves. Small things can reveal a person’s intentions and stature, and so, for someone to enter onto the path of being made perfect by God, they must first rectify their intentions and their relationship with God. Only when your relationship with God is normal can you be made perfect by Him; only then can God’s pruning, discipline, and refinement achieve their intended effect in you. That is to say, if human beings are able to keep God in their hearts and do not pursue personal gain or give thought to their own prospects (in a fleshly sense), but instead bear the burden of life entry, do their best to pursue the truth, and submit to God’s work—if you can do this, then the goals you pursue will be correct, and your relationship with God will become normal. Making right one’s relationship with God can be called the first step of entry into one’s spiritual journey. Although man’s fate is in God’s hands and is predestined by God, and cannot be changed by man, whether you can be made perfect by God or be gained by Him depends on whether your relationship with God is normal. There may be parts of you that are weak or rebellious—but as long as your views and your intentions are correct, and as long as your relationship with God is right and normal, then you are qualified to be made perfect by God. If you do not have the right relationship with God, and act for the sake of the flesh or your family, then regardless of how hard you work, it will be for nothing. If your relationship with God is normal, then everything else will fall into place. God looks at nothing else, but only at whether your views in your belief in God are correct: whom you believe in, for whose sake you believe, and why you believe. If you are able to see these things clearly and practice with your views well disposed, then you will make progress in your life, and you will also be guaranteed entry onto the right track. If your relationship with God is not normal, and the views of your belief in God are deviant, then all else is in vain, and no matter how hard you believe, you will receive nothing. Only after your relationship with God becomes normal will you gain His approval when you rebel against the flesh, pray, suffer, endure, submit, help your brothers and sisters, expend more of yourself for God, and so on.

—The Word, Vol. 1. The Appearance and Work of God. How Is Your Relationship With God?

When people believe in, love, and satisfy God, they touch the Spirit of God with their hearts and thereby obtain His satisfaction, they use their hearts to engage with God’s words, and are thus moved by His Spirit. If you wish to live a normal spiritual life and establish a normal relationship with God, then you must first give your heart to Him. Only after you have quieted your heart before Him and poured your whole heart into Him will you be able to gradually develop a normal spiritual life. If in people’s belief in God, they do not give their hearts to Him, if their hearts are not with Him, and they do not treat His burden as their own, then all that they do is an act of cheating God, an act typical of religious people, and it will not receive God’s approval. God cannot gain anything from this kind of person, they can only serve as a foil to His work. These people are like decorations in the house of God—they are placeholders and they are trash, and God does not make use of them. Not only is there no chance of the Holy Spirit working in them, there is no value in perfecting them. This type of person is a veritable walking corpse. No part of them can be used by the Holy Spirit—they have been thoroughly dominated and deeply corrupted by Satan. God will eliminate these people. When the Holy Spirit makes use of people today, He not only employs the desirable parts of them to get things done—He also perfects and changes the parts of them that are undesirable. If you are able to pour your heart into God and quiet it before Him, then you will have the opportunity and the qualifications to be used by the Holy Spirit, and to receive His enlightenment and illumination. Even more than that, you will have the opportunity for the Holy Spirit to remedy your shortcomings. When you give your heart to God, on the positive side, you will be able to gain deeper entry and attain a higher plane of insight. On the negative side, you will have greater knowledge of your deficiencies and shortcomings, and you will yearn more and seek more to satisfy God’s intentions. Furthermore, you will not be negative, you will be able to actively enter in. This shows that you are a right person.

—The Word, Vol. 1. The Appearance and Work of God. It Is Very Important to Establish a Normal Relationship With God

If you want to establish a normal relationship with God, your heart must be turned toward Him; with this as a foundation, you will then have normal relationships with other people too. If you do not have a normal relationship with God, then no matter what you do to maintain your relationships with other people, no matter how hard you work or how much energy you put in, it will all belong to a human philosophy for worldly dealings. You will be protecting your position among people and attaining their praise through human perspectives and human philosophies, rather than establishing normal interpersonal relationships according to the word of God. If you do not focus on your relationships with people, and maintain a normal relationship with God instead, if you are willing to give your heart to God and learn to submit to Him, then your interpersonal relationships will naturally become normal. These relationships will then not be built upon the flesh, but upon the foundation of God’s love. You will have almost no fleshly interactions with other people, but on a spiritual level, there will be fellowship and mutual love, comfort, and provision between you. All of this is done upon the foundation of a desire to satisfy God—these relationships are not maintained through human philosophies for worldly dealings, they are formed naturally when one carries a burden for God. They do not require any artificial, human effort from you, you need only to practice according to the principles of God’s words. Are you willing to be considerate of God’s intentions? Are you willing to be a person who is “without reason” before Him? Are you willing to completely give your heart to God and to disregard your position among other people? Of all the people you interact with, whom do you have the best relationships with? With whom do you have the worst relationships? Are your relationships with people normal? Do you treat all people equally? Are your relationships with others maintained according to your philosophy for worldly dealings, or are they built upon the foundation of God’s love? When people do not give their hearts to God, their spirits become sluggish, numb, and unconscious. Such people will never understand God’s words, they will never have a normal relationship with God, and they will never achieve a change in their disposition. Changing one’s disposition is the process of giving one’s heart completely to God, and of receiving enlightenment and illumination from His words. God’s work allows people to actively enter in, and it enables them to cast off the negative parts of themselves after gaining knowledge of them. When you have given your heart to God, you will be able to sense every time that your spirit is slightly moved, and know every part of God’s enlightenment and illumination. If you persevere, you will gradually enter onto the path of being perfected by the Holy Spirit. The quieter your heart is before God, the more sensitive and delicate your spirit will be, the more it will be able to perceive how the Holy Spirit moves it, and the more normal your relationship with God will become. Normal interpersonal relationships are established upon the foundation of turning one’s heart toward God, not through human effort. If God is absent from a person’s heart, then their relationships with other people are merely relationships of the flesh. They are not normal, they are lustful indulgences, and they are hated and loathed by God. If you say that your spirit has been moved, but you are only willing to fellowship with people whom you like and respect, and you are biased against and refuse to speak with people whom you dislike when they come to seek from you, this is even more proof that you are ruled by your feelings and that you do not have a normal relationship with God at all. It shows that you are attempting to fool God and cover up your own ugliness. You may be able to share some of your knowledge, but if your intents are wrong, then everything you do is only good by human standards, and God will not approve of you. Your actions will be driven by your flesh, not by God’s burden. You are only fit for God’s use if you are able to quiet your heart before Him and have normal interactions with all those who love Him. If you can do that, then no matter how you interact with others, you will not be acting out a philosophy for worldly dealings, you will be considering God’s burden and living before Him.

—The Word, Vol. 1. The Appearance and Work of God. It Is Very Important to Establish a Normal Relationship With God

Read God’s every utterance and put them into practice as soon as you understand them. Perhaps there were occasions when your flesh was weak, or you were rebellious, or you resisted; regardless of how you behaved in the past, it is of little consequence, and it cannot hinder your life from maturing today. So long as you can have a normal relationship with God today, there is hope. If there is change in you every time you read God’s words, and others can tell your life has changed for the better, it shows that your relationship with God is now normal, that it has been put right. God does not treat people according to their transgressions. Once you have understood and become aware, as long as you can cease to rebel or resist, then God will still have mercy on you. When you have the understanding and the resolve to pursue being perfected by God, then your state in God’s presence will become normal. No matter what you are doing, consider the following when you are doing it: What will God think if I do this? Will it benefit my brothers and sisters? Will it be beneficial to the work in God’s house? Whether in prayer, fellowship, speech, work, or in contact with others, examine your intentions, and check if your relationship with God is normal. If you cannot discern your own intentions and thoughts, this means you lack discrimination, which proves that you understand too little of the truth. If you are able to understand clearly everything God does, and can perceive things through the lens of His words, standing on His side, then your views will have become correct. Therefore, establishing a good relationship with God is of the utmost importance to anyone who believes in God; everyone should regard it as a task of paramount importance and the biggest event in their life. Everything you do is measured by whether you have a normal relationship with God. If your relationship with God is normal and your intentions are correct, then act. To maintain a normal relationship with God, you must not be afraid of suffering losses to your personal interests; you cannot allow Satan to prevail, you cannot allow Satan to gain a purchase on you, and you cannot allow Satan to make you a laughing stock. Having such intentions is a sign that your relationship with God is normal—not for the sake of the flesh, but rather for peace of spirit, for gaining the work of the Holy Spirit, and for satisfying the intentions of God. To enter the right state, you must establish a good relationship with God and put right the views of your belief in God. This is so that God may gain you, and so that He may manifest the fruits of His words in you and enlighten and illuminate you even further. In this way, you will have entered into the right manner. Continue eating and drinking God’s words of today, enter into the Holy Spirit’s present manner of working, act according to God’s demands of today, do not observe old-fashioned methods of practice, do not cling to old ways of doing things, and enter into today’s manner of working as soon as possible. Thus, your relationship with God will become completely normal and you will have embarked on the right track of belief in God.

—The Word, Vol. 1. The Appearance and Work of God. How Is Your Relationship With God?