A Digital Newsletter from Living Stream Ministry
The seven years of famine began to come, as Joseph had said...And when the famine was over all the face of the earth, Joseph opened all the storehouses of grain and sold grain...And all the earth came to Joseph in Egypt to buy grain, because the famine was severe in all the earth. (Gen. 41:54-57)
Many of us have heard this ministry compared to the storehouses of Joseph, and it’s easy to see that we are living in a time of spiritual famine that can be likened to the famine in the time of Joseph. Just as Joseph threw open the doors to the storehouses, so also has Christ opened the way for His hungry seekers to be fed and supplied today. Brother Lee charged us all, saying, “We have seen the need among God’s children; therefore, we should rise up and distribute the food in our storehouse. If we do not go out to distribute food, our food will breed worms and stink…We should not merely sit in Joseph’s storehouses and enjoy the food. We need to distribute and propagate these riches” (Guidelines for the Propagation of the Lord’s Recovery, pp. 110-111).
Since its beginning, Living Stream has endeavored to gather riches of this ministry into the storehouses. Our efforts through 2020 were focused on getting the ministry of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee collected, edited, and published. Having now completed this, we are turning our focus to the distribution of these riches. In the past, we have used many means to distribute this ministry. Today, we are thankful to the Lord for opening another “door” to these storehouses: LSM’s digital distribution section is laboring to provide digital access to the riches of this ministry.
Social media is our main avenue for digitally promoting the ministry, and for this, we are looking to the many believers who appreciate this ministry for help. We now have accounts on Instagram (@living.stream.ministry) and Twitter (@livingstream), which we use to post announcements of new books and services. (We do not have a Facebook account, but we appreciate any who would share our posts, links, and products on their own Facebook accounts.) Every interaction we get on these posts—every “like,” every save, every share, every retweet—increases the reach of our posts. In other words, the more our followers like, save, and share a post, the more often that post will be seen by people who don’t follow our account. In this way, we hope this ministry can reach out to a wider group of seeking people. This edition of the newsletter includes a video about our social media accounts, and we invite you to watch it for more information.
Presently, we are using social media to promote the distribution of a series of free eBooklets. Formerly referred to as the “Rainbow Booklets,” these “Nuggets and Gems from the Bible” comprise a set of eBooklets taken from the Life-study messages. These booklets focus on particular treasures from the Bible revealed in the Life-study messages, and we hope that they will whet the readers’ appetite for the ministry. Regarding these booklets, Brother Lee said:
Put some booklets into your pocket and go to your neighbor…If you would spend five minutes with your neighbor to give him these booklets and read the titles to him, you have done a marvelous job. We should go out to saturate all the homes with these booklets, and we have to do this to the uttermost. We should fill, saturate, and soak the homes in our localities with all the truths we have in our hands, in our hearts, and on all the tapes. The publications are the weapons and the bullets to fight the spiritual warfare...But we need some soldiers to use them. (The Way to Practice the Lord’s Present Move, p. 487)
Thanks to the advances in technology, it is even easier today to be these soldiers. A simple email, a shared link, or a forwarded post will do much, and we hope many of you will join us in trying to spread these riches.
Our hope is that the eBooklets will stir up a hunger in many Christians for this ministry, and to that end, we are also offering readers the chance to preview our eBooks before purchasing. Currently all the Life-study messages and many individual books are available as eBooks, and these epublications now include an option to preview 5-10% of the text. Sample reading pages and eBooks can be shared via links to our online bookstore or any of our vendors (Apple Books, Google Play, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo).
Finally, thanks to the rise of podcasts and the ubiquity of phones in our daily life, there is an increasing demand for audio material. In response to this need, we are in the process of releasing audio readings of the books of the Bible and audiobooks of the Life-study of the Bible. Audio recordings of the Life-study messages are available on Apple Books and Audible by Amazon. New titles are announced on Twitter and in this newsletter.
We are sharing audio programming on our YouTube channel as well (youtube.com/LivingStreamMinistry). Currently, the channel features sixty-eight audio programs on the book of Revelation, with titles such as “The Coming Again of Christ,” “The Rapture of the Believers,” “The War at Armageddon,” and “The New Jerusalem.” These programs are from LSM Radio’s “Life-study of the Bible with Witness Lee,” thirty-minute audio programs composed of excerpts from Brother Lee’s spoken ministry on each book of the Bible. The programs present a ministry portion, a discussion of that portion, and relevant questions and answers. The programs on the book of Revelation are the first of many such programs that we plan to post on YouTube. For updates and announcements regarding YouTube, please subscribe to our channel or follow us on Twitter or Instagram.
In Matthew a hungry crowd descended upon the Lord, and the disciples urged Him to send the crowd away. They wanted the hungry people to find their own food, but the Lord answered them with a charge, a charge that still echoes today: “You give them something to eat” (14:16). Here the Lord did not feed the crowd directly, nor did He send them off to fend for themselves. Rather, He commanded His disciples to distribute food. Later He also asked who would be a “faithful and prudent steward,” giving people “their portion of food at the proper time” (Luke 12:42). Surely a famine is the proper time to give food to the hungry. Today’s famine, like that in Joseph’s day, is “severe in all the earth,” and the storehouses in our possession are full of food that can meet this great need. We hope that these means of digital distribution will help us all as we endeavor to be the faithful and prudent stewards, distributing God’s riches to a needy world at a critical time.
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