God is a living God, and just as people behave differently in different situations, His attitude toward these behaviors differs because He is neither a puppet nor is He a bunch of empty air. Getting to know God’s attitude is a worthy pursuit for humankind. People should learn how, by knowing God’s attitude, they can little by little attain knowledge of God’s disposition and come to understand His heart. When you gradually come to understand God’s heart, you will not feel that fearing Him and shunning evil is such a difficult thing to accomplish. Moreover, when you do understand God, you will not be as likely to draw conclusions about Him. Once you have stopped drawing conclusions about God, you will be less likely to offend Him, and without your realizing it, God will lead you to gain knowledge of Him; this will fill your heart with reverence for Him. You will then stop defining God by way of the doctrines, letters, and theories you have mastered. Instead, by constantly seeking out God’s intentions in all things, you will unconsciously become a person who is after God’s heart.
God’s work is unseen and untouchable by humans, but as far as He is concerned, the actions of each and every person—along with their attitude toward Him—are not merely perceptible by God, but visible to Him as well. This is something that everyone should recognize and be very clear about. You might always be asking yourself, “Does God know what I’m doing here? Does He know what I’m thinking about right now? Maybe He does, and maybe He doesn’t.” If you adopt this sort of viewpoint, following and believing in God yet doubting His work and His existence, then sooner or later there will come a day when you will arouse His anger, for you are already teetering on the edge of a dangerous precipice. I have seen people who have believed in God for many years, yet who still have not gained the reality of the truth, much less understood God’s will. These people make no progress in their lives and statures, adhering only to the shallowest of doctrines. This is because such people have never taken God’s word to be life itself, and they have never faced up to and accepted His existence. Do you think that upon seeing such people, God is filled with enjoyment? Do they comfort Him? Thus, it is how people believe in God that decides their fate. Concerning how people seek and how people approach God, people’s attitudes are of primary importance. Do not neglect God like He is just a bunch of empty air floating around in the back of your head; always think of the God you believe in as a living God, a real God. He is not sitting around up there in the third heaven with nothing to do. Rather, He is constantly looking into everyone’s heart, observing what you are up to, watching your every little word and every little deed, watching how you behave and seeing what your attitude toward Him is. Whether you are willing to give yourself to God or not, all of your behavior and your innermost thoughts and ideas are laid bare before Him and being looked upon by Him. Due to your behavior, due to your deeds, and due to your attitude toward Him, God’s opinion of you and His attitude toward you are constantly changing. I would like to offer some advice to some people: Do not place yourselves like infants in the hands of God, as if He should dote on you, as if He could never leave you, and as if His attitude toward you were fixed and could never change, and I advise you to quit dreaming! God is righteous in His treatment of each and every person, and He is earnest in His approach to the work of conquering and saving people. This is His management. He treats every single person seriously, and not like a pet to play with. God’s love for humans is not the pampering or spoiling kind, nor are His mercy and tolerance toward humankind indulgent or unmindful. On the contrary, God’s love for humans involves cherishing, pitying, and respecting life; His mercy and tolerance convey His expectations of them, and are what humanity needs to survive. God is alive, and God actually exists; His attitude toward humankind is principled, not at all a pack of dogmatic rules, and it can change. His intentions for humanity are gradually changing and transforming with time, depending on circumstances as they arise, and along with the attitude of each and every person. Therefore, you should know in your heart with absolute clarity that the essence of God is immutable, and that His disposition will issue forth at different times and in different contexts. You might not think that this is a serious matter, and you might use your own personal notions to imagine how God should do things. However, there are times when the polar opposite of your viewpoint is true, and by using your own personal notions to attempt to gauge God, you have already angered Him. This is because God does not operate the way you think He does, nor will He treat this matter like you say He will. Thus, I remind you to be careful and prudent in your approach to everything around you, and learn how to follow the principle of walking in God’s way in all things, which is to fear God and shun evil. You must develop a firm understanding with regard to the matters of God’s will and God’s attitude, you must find enlightened people to communicate these matters to you, and you must seek in earnest. Do not view the God of your belief as a puppet—judging Him at will, arriving at arbitrary conclusions about Him, and not treating Him with the respect He deserves. While God is bringing you salvation and determining your outcome, He may grant you mercy, or tolerance, or judgment and chastisement, but in any case, His attitude toward you is not fixed. It is dependent on your own attitude toward Him, as well as your understanding of Him. Do not allow one passing aspect of your knowledge or understanding of God to define Him in perpetuity. Do not believe in a dead God; believe in the living One. Remember this! Though I have discussed some truths here—truths you needed to hear—in light of your present state and present stature, I will not make any greater demands of you for now, so as not to sap your enthusiasm. Doing so could fill your hearts with too much bleakness and make you feel too much disappointment toward God. Instead, I hope you can use the love for God you have in your hearts and employ a respectful attitude toward God when walking the path that lies ahead. Do not muddle through this matter of how to believe in God; treat it as one of the biggest issues there is. Place it in your heart, put it into practice, and connect it with real life; do not just pay it lip service—for this is a matter of life and death, and one that will determine your destiny. Do not treat it like a joke or child’s play! After sharing these words with you today, I wonder how much understanding your minds have harvested. Are there any questions you wish to ask about what I have said here today?
Although these topics are a bit new, and a bit removed from your views, from your usual pursuits, and what you tend to pay attention to, I think that once they have been fellowshiped by you for a period of time, you will develop a common understanding of everything I have said here. These topics are all very new, and ones that you have never considered before, so I hope that they will not add to your burden in any way. I am not speaking these words today to frighten you, nor am I using them as a way to deal with you; rather, My aim is to help you to understand actual facts about the truth. Because a gulf exists between humankind and God, though people believe in God, they have never understood Him or known His attitude. Humans have also never been very enthusiastic in their concern for God’s attitude. Rather, they have believed and proceeded blindly, and been careless in their knowledge and understanding of God. I therefore feel compelled to clear these issues up for you, and help you to understand just what kind of God this God you believe in is, as well as what He is thinking, what His attitude is in His treatment of various sorts of people, how far you are from fulfilling His requirements, and how great the disparity is between your actions and the standard He demands. The goal in informing you of these things is to give you a yardstick by which to measure yourselves, and so that you will know what kind of harvest the road you are on has led to, what you have not obtained along this road, and in what areas you simply have not gotten involved. While communicating amongst yourselves, you usually speak on a few commonly-discussed topics that are very narrow in scope and shallow in content. There is a distance, a gap, between that which you discuss and God’s intentions, as well as between your discussions and the scope and standard of God’s demands. Proceeding like this over time will result in your deviating ever farther from God’s way. You are just taking God’s current utterances and turning them into objects of worship, and seeing them as rituals and regulations. That is all you are doing! In actual fact, God simply has no place in your hearts, and He has never really obtained your hearts. Some people think that to know God is very difficult, and this is the truth. It is difficult! If people are made to do their duties and get things done outwardly, and work hard, then they will think that believing in God is very easy, because all those things fall within the scope of human capability. However, the moment the topic shifts over to God’s intentions and His attitude toward humanity, then from everyone’s point of view, things really do get a bit more difficult. That is because this involves people’s understanding of the truth and their entry into reality, so of course there will be a degree of difficulty! Nevertheless, once you get through the first door and begin to attain entry, things gradually get easier.
—The Word, Vol. 2. On Knowing God. How to Know God’s Disposition and the Results His Work Shall Achieve