Love One Another

Love One Another is the sixth volume of Watchman Nee’s Basic Lesson Series, a set of foundational teachings on practical Christian living given for the growth of believers and the building up of the Body of Christ. Its ten messages move from God’s dealings with individual believers to the corporate life, fellowship, service, oneness, and authority of the Church. The book is therefore broader than its title alone might suggest: brotherly love is one major lesson within a larger training in how Christians live before God and with one another in the Church.

The first lesson distinguishes governmental forgiveness from the believer’s eternal forgiveness and restored fellowship with God. Nee explains that forgiveness does not automatically remove every consequence of conduct within God’s government. Matthew 6 and Matthew 18 contribute to this teaching, and David’s experience in 2 Samuel 12 illustrates how sin may be forgiven while God’s governmental dealing remains. This prepares for the following message on the discipline of God.

Hebrews 12 supplies the principal framework for divine discipline. Nee presents God’s chastening as the Father’s training of His children, directed toward holiness, obedience, and the peaceable fruit of righteousness. The reader is encouraged to recognize God’s hand in difficult circumstances and to respond with submission rather than treating discipline as rejection. Together, governmental forgiveness and discipline show how grace and God’s government operate in the believer’s practical life.

“Resist the Devil” addresses satanic accusation, temptation, attack, and intimidation. Drawing especially on James and 1 Peter, Nee emphasizes submission to God and active resistance to the devil rather than fear or passivity. The lesson asks how a Christian should stand when attacked spiritually and how Christ’s accomplished work provides the ground for resisting the enemy.

The message on head covering develops 1 Corinthians 11 in relation to headship and divine order. Nee treats the outward practice as a testimony to a larger principle: God is the source of authority, Christ is Head, and Christian conduct should acknowledge God’s order. This concern with divine government and authority reappears later in the book’s treatment of Church authority.

The middle and later messages concentrate increasingly on the Church. “The Way of the Church” uses the churches in Revelation to consider the spiritual course and testimony of the Church and the problem of divisions and sectarian identities. The lesson on oneness then argues that Christian unity is not something believers manufacture; it is the oneness of the Body of Christ that must be recognized and maintained. Christian fellowship is therefore measured by the Body rather than by a narrower party, movement, or preference.

“Love the Brethren” develops 1 John 3:14 and related passages to present brotherly love as an expression of divine life. Love for other believers is not merely natural affection or an external rule; it flows from the shared life of those who have passed from death into life. The lesson connects love with receiving fellow believers and with a practical consciousness of belonging to one Body.

The teaching on priesthood presents believers as a priestly people with direct access to God and responsibility for spiritual service rather than dependence upon a separate spiritual class. The following chapter on the Body of Christ develops this corporate life through 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12, and Ephesians 4. Members have different gifts and functions, yet every member is needed and should serve for the building up of the Body. Nee also uses the biblical picture of Eve coming out of Adam to explain the Church as coming out of Christ, connecting Genesis with the nature of the Body.

The final message considers the authority of the Church under Christ. Authority, prayer, binding and loosing, discipline, and corporate action are treated as matters that depend upon spiritual reality and submission to God rather than autonomous institutional power.

Taken together, the book addresses readers asking how God disciplines His children, what governmental forgiveness means, how to resist the devil, what head covering signifies, what the Church is, how Christian oneness and fellowship should be maintained, why believers should love one another, what the priesthood of all believers means, how spiritual gifts and service function in the Body of Christ, and how the Church exercises spiritual authority.