Perhaps the greatest
failure to make the great discrimination with which we
are concerned is in relation to the difference between
mysticism and spirituality. It is here that not only the
world is mistaken but Christendom is deceived. Indeed, an
overwhelmingly large proportion of those who would regard
themselves as Christians are unable to distinguish
between mysticism (pertaining to the sense of the
beautiful) or asceticism (the practice of self-denial) on
the one hand and spirituality on the other. The fact is
that these belong to two entirely different realms, and
the Word of God cuts clean in between them, dividing them
asunder.
When we speak of Cain and "the way of Cain",
we are accustomed to recall immediately his act of
murder, born of jealousy and malice. We remember his
peevish, querulous, petulant, ill-tempered or even
insolent manner with God. But there is another side to
remember, and we must be fair to Cain, or we miss the
whole point. Cain did not exclude or ignore God. He was
not in the usual sense of the word a godless man. He
acknowledged God. Then he built an altar to God. Further,
he no doubt selected the best of the products of his hard
toil as worthy of God, and brought them. Here was
devoutness in religion. Cain worshipped with his whole
aesthetic sense, and Cain—murdered his brother! The
Jews did the same in Christ's day. Christendom is largely
constituted by this sense—its architecture, its
ritual, its music, its adornment, its lighting (or lack
of it), its tone, its atmosphere, its vestments and so
forth. All are of the soul. But Cain did not get through
to God! Neither did the Jews! Spiritual death marks that
realm, and while there may be intense emotions which make
for resolves, 'high' thoughts and desires, there is no
genuine change in the nature of those concerned, and
repeated doses of this must be taken to maintain any
measure of soul-self-satisfaction which makes them feel
good. All religions have this soulish feature in common,
more or less, and it is here that the fatal blunder has
been made by many religious people who contend
that other religions, which are undoubtedly devout and
sincere, should not be interfered with, but the good in
them should be recognized and accepted. It is the
confusing of religion with what the Bible means by being
spiritual. Religion can rise to high levels and sink to
terrible depths. It is the same thing which does
both. But that thing never rises above the human level;
it never really reaches God. Religion can be the greatest
enemy of God's true thought, because it is Satan's best
deception. Asceticism is no more truly spiritual than
aestheticism. There is no more a brief with God for
rigours, denials, fastings, puritanic iciness, etc., as
such, than for the opposite. Simplicity may give God a
chance, but it is not necessarily spiritual. It may be a
matter of taste. What sublime thoughts and ideas, in
poetry, music and art often can go hand in hand with
moral degeneracy and profligacy!
How near to the truth in perception and interpretation
can the mystical go! What wonderful things can the
imagination see, even in the Bible! What thrills of awe,
amazement, ecstasy, can be shot through an audience or
congregation by a master soul! But it may all be a false
world with no Divine and eternal issues. It may all go to
make up this life here, and relieve it of its drabness,
but it ends there. What an artificial world we live in!
When the music is progressing and the romantic elements
are in evidence—the dress and tinsel—and human
personalities are parading, see how pride and rivalry
assert themselves, and what a power of make believe
enters the atmosphere! Yes, an artificial world. We have
been in it and know the reactions afterward.
How hollow, how empty; Dead Sea fruit! The tragedy in
this melodrama is that it is 'real life' to so many. This
soul-world is the devil's imitation. It is all false,
wherever we may find it, whether associated with religion
or not.
Those of us who have tasted of this world's springs
have recognized the kinship between what is there and
what is in religion so far as that soul-nature is
concerned. It is only a matter of difference of realm,
not of nature. What the music and drama of the world
produce in one way—the soul-stirring, rousing,
craving: the pathos, tears, contempt, hatred, anger,
melancholy, pleasure, etc.—are all the same, only
under different auspices and in a different setting, and
the fact is, that it passes and we are really no further
on. A little better music, a change of preacher, a less
familiar place, a few more thrills, will perhaps
stimulate our souls, but where are we, after all? How
Satan must laugh behind his mask! Oh, for reality, the
reality of the eternal! Oh, that men might see that,
while a highly cultured soul with a keen sense of the
beautiful and sublime is immeasurably preferable to a
sordid one so far as this world is concerned, it
is not necessarily a criterion that such has a personal
living knowledge of God—of God as a Person—and
has really been born anew! Occultism—the power to
see deeper than the average, to sense what most do not
sense, to handle the abstruse, to touch unseen forces—is
not spirituality in the Divine sense. The soul realm is a
complex and dangerous one, and can take most people out
of their depths, but then land them into moral, mental
and physical ruin, with all hope gone.
When we pray for 'Revival' let us be careful as to
what we are after and as to what means we use to promote
it, or carry it on.
Having been more precise as to the functions of the
soul, we must go a little further at this point, as to
those of the spirit.
The Attributes of the Human
Spirit
As the soul is a trinity of reason, affection, and
volition, so is the spirit a trinity. Its attributes are
conscience, communion (worship) and intuition.
"The spirit of man is the lamp of the
Lord" (Prov 20:27).
"Gentiles that have not the law do by nature
the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the
law unto themselves; in that they shew the work of the
law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing
witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another
accusing or else excusing" (Rom 2:14-15).
When Adam sinned, he did so as the result of what
seemed to him a sound and right argument and reason, and
a judgment of what was good and desirable. But
immediately he had so acted he became aware of a faculty
within, which rose up and condemned his judgment, reason
and 'good (?) motive'. Henceforth he lived under a sense
of condemnation. The conscience which accused him and
caused him to excuse, could not restore him to God's
favour, but for ever kept God in his consciousness. Thus
it is that to live in and to be governed entirely by our
souls is not to have rest and real life. It is possible
to put our wills so strongly behind our reason and
thought and desire, or so to surrender our wills to our
emotions and affections, as to muffle the voice of
conscience so that we have little or no conflict within.
But should God come into "the garden in the cool of
the day", or, in other words, should we at any time
seek a living knowledge of God, we are in for a very bad
time with regard to this former mentality, these former
reasonings, and this former affectional life. But we are
not saying that the human conscience is infallible and
always right. Most certainly it is not. We can have a
sense of right and wrong which is altogether misinformed
and false, and Satan can play tricks with conscience. We
are only pointing out what conscience is as an attribute
of the spirit. For conscience to fulfil all of
its Divinely intended purpose in relation to God—not
merely to keep man aware of something beyond his own way—conscience
must (as with the whole spirit) be renewed in God and
united with the Holy Spirit. Christ is God's perfect
standard for conscience, and union with Christ is the
only ground of life in the spirit. "Christ... was
made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and
sanctification, and redemption" (1 Cor 1:30), and
when Christ is received by faith, so that our standing
before God rests upon what He is and not what we are,
then we "find rest unto our souls" in
this "yoke" (Matt 11:29), for we have our
"hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience" (Heb
10:22). With the whole human spirit, conscience must be
quickened from above, raised, enlightened, adjusted and
related.
Having already spoken of worship in spirit and in
truth, we can pass on to see the function of spirit by
intuition. Here the difference between soul and spirit is
very clear and definite. The spirit is the organ of
spiritual knowledge, and spiritual knowledge is very
different from natural or soul knowledge. How does God
know things, and by what means does God come to His
conclusions, decisions? On what basis of knowledge does
He run the universe? Is it by reasoning inductively,
deductively, philosophically, logically, comparatively?
Surely all this laboriousness of brain is unknown to God.
His knowledge and conclusions are intuitive. Intuition is
that faculty of spiritual intelligence by which all
spiritual beings work. Angels serve the will of God by
intuitive discernment of that will, not by argued and
reasoned conviction. The difference between these two is
witnessed to by the whole monument of spiritual
achievement. If human reason, the natural judgment and
'common sense' had been the ruling law, most, if not all,
of the giant pieces of work inspired by God would never
have been undertaken. Men who had a close walk with God
and a living spirit-fellowship with Him, received
intuitively a leading to such purposes, and their
vindication came, not by the approval of natural reason,
but usually with all such reason in opposition. 'Madness'
was usually the verdict of this world's 'wisdom'.
Whenever they, like Abraham, allowed the natural mind to
take precedence over the spiritual mind, they became
bewildered, paralysed, and looked round for some 'Egypt'
way of the senses, along which to go for help. In all
this we are "justified in the spirit", not in
the flesh. The spirit and the soul act independently, and
until the spiritual mind has established complete
ascendency over the natural mind, they are constantly in
conflict and contradiction. In all the things which are
out from God and therefore spiritual, "the mind of
the flesh is death; but the mind of the spirit is life
and peace" (Rom 8:6). This, then, is the nature of
spiritual knowledge.
The only knowledge of God which is of spiritual value
for ourselves, or for others by our ministry, is that
which we have by revelation of the Holy Spirit within our
own spirits. God never—in the first instance—explains
Himself to man's reason, and man can never know God—in
the first instance—by reason. Christianity is a
revelation or it is nothing, and it has to be that in the
case of every new child of God; otherwise faith will be
resting upon a foundation which will not stand in the day
of the ordeal.
'The Christian Faith' embraced as a religion, a
philosophy, or as a system of truth, a moral or ethical
doctrine, may carry the temporary stimulus of a great
ideal; but this will not result in the regeneration of
the life, or the new birth of the spirit. There are
multitudes of such 'Christians' in the world today, but
their spiritual effectiveness is nil.
The Apostle Paul makes it very clear that the secret
of everything in his life and service was the fact that
he received his gospel "by revelation". We may
even know the Bible most perfectly as a book, and yet be
spiritually dead and ineffective. When the Scriptures say
so much about the knowledge of God and of the truth as
the basis of eternal life, resulting in being set free,
doing exploits, etc., they also affirm that man cannot by
searching find out God, and they make it abundantly clear
that it is knowledge in the spirit, not in the natural
mind.
Thus, a rich knowledge of the Scriptures, an accurate
technical grasp of Christian doctrine, a doing of
Christian work by all the resources of men's natural
wisdom or ability, a clever manipulation and interesting
presentation of Bible content and themes, may get not one
whit beyond the natural life of men, and still remain
within the realm of spiritual death. Men cannot be
argued, reasoned, fascinated, interested, 'emotioned',
willed, enthused, impassioned, into the kingdom of the
heavens; they can only be born; and that is by spiritual
quickening. The new birth brings with it new capacities
of every kind; and amongst these, the most vital is a new
and different faculty of Divine knowledge, understanding
and apprehension. As we have said earlier, the human
brain is not ruled out, but is secondary, not primary.
The function of the human intellect is to give spiritual
things intelligent form for ourselves and for others.
Paul's intellectual power was not that which gave him
his knowledge of truth; but it was taken up by the spirit
for passing that truth on to others. He may have used his
intellect well, as he certainly did, to study and acquire
knowledge of the Scriptures; but his spiritual
understanding did not come that way. It was the extra
thing, apart from which even his Bible (Old Testament)
knowledge had not kept him from a most mistaken course.
The spirit of man is that by which he reaches out into
the eternal and unseen. Intuition, then, is the mental
organ of the spirit. It is in this sense—that is,
the deadness of the spirit in the matter of Divine union
and the going on with religion in its manifold forms of
expression merely from the natural mind—that God
says, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways" (Isa 55:8); and the
measure of the difference is as the height of the heavens
from the earth, of the heavenly from the earthly.
One of the chief lessons that we have to learn, and
which God takes pains to teach us, is that spiritual ends
demand spiritual means. The breaking down of the natural
life, its mind, its energies, so far as the things of
God are concerned, in the bitterness of
disappointment through futility, failure, ineffectiveness
and deadlock in real spiritual fruitfulness, is a life
work: but the truth mentioned above is the explanation
and key to the matter.
How important it is that every fresh undertaking in
work for God should come by revelation to those chosen
for it. Because God has so spoken and given revelation to
some chosen instrument and a truly spiritual work has
been done, others have taken it as a model and have
sought to imitate it in other places. The result has
been, and is, that they are called upon to take
responsibility for it—find the resources of workers,
funds and general support. This, in turn, issues in many
sad and pathetic, if not evil and worldly, methods and
means being employed, and those concerned find themselves
in a false position. Conception, not imitation, is the
Divine law of reproduction. Anointing, not human
selection, is the Divine law of succession. The fact is,
that the work of God has become a sphere for so many natural
elements to find expression and gratification. Man must
do something, see something, have something. Ambition,
acquisition, achievement, etc., have found their way over
to Christian enterprise, and so, very often (let us be
quite frank) things have become 'ours'—'our
work', 'our mission', 'our field', 'our
clientele'; and jealousies, rivalries, bitterness and
many other things of the flesh abound.
It is a very difficult thing, a crucifixion indeed,
for the natural man to do nothing and have nothing, and
especially to know nothing. But in the case of
His most greatly used instruments, God has made this a
very real part of their training and preparation. The
utter emptying of all self-resource is the only way to
have "all things of (out from) God" (2
Cor 5:18). On this basis, even Christ elected to live. We
need not remind you of Moses' "I am not
eloquent" (Exo 4:10), and Jeremiah's "I am a
child" (Jer 1:6), and Paul's "that we should
not trust in ourselves" (2 Cor 1:9). These were of a
school in which the great lesson of the difference
between natural and spiritual was taught experimentally.
God's Special Concern
This will help us to see that God's special concern is
with the spirit in the believer.
Firstly, we must realize that His quest is for sons of
His Spirit. The underlying and all-inclusive truth of
what has come to be called the parable of the Prodigal
Son is the transition from one kind of sonship, i.e. on
the ground of law, to another, i.e. on the ground of
grace; from the flesh to the spirit. There is a sonship
of God by creation on the basis of law. In this sense,
all men are the offspring of God, and Paul used this
phrase in quite a general way to the Athenians (Acts
17:28,29). But by the Fall—the "going
astray", or "deviating" (Gen 6:3)—all
the Divine purposes and possibilities of that
relationship have broken down, and that relationship is
no longer of value. "He is flesh", hence he is
separated from God—"alienated" (Eph 4:18),
in a "far country", "lost", and
"dead". Here grace enters and the Spirit
through grace. The Spirit begins operations in that realm
of death and distance, convicting of sin "against
heaven" (Luke 15:21) (the only adequate conviction),
compassing the end of the works of the flesh in despair
and destruction, constraining, assuring, producing
penitence and confession, and at length bringing to the
place of forgiveness and acceptance: from death unto
life, but not the same life as before. "That which
is born of the Spirit is spirit" (John
3:6). This man is the product of the travail and
energizing of the Spirit, and everything in the
relationship afterward is new; a "robe", the
robe of Divine righteousness; "shoes", a walk
and a way in the Spirit (Rom 8:2,4); "a ring",
the symbol of authority, the right or jurisdiction of a
son (John 1:12,13); "the fatted calf", food
such as was not his before, the best of the father's
house. Each of these points in the Scriptures has a whole
system of teaching.
The spirit of man, being the place of the new birth
and the seat of this only true sonship (Gal 4:5,6), is
also therefore "the new man", for it is
"in newness of the spirit" that we are to live
(Rom 7:6, etc.). Here it is that all the operations of
God in our education, fellowship and co-operation have
their base.
The 'prodigal's' knowledge of the father after his
'new birth' was such as he had never possessed before. He
really did not know his father until grace came in. His
spirit had been brought from death, darkness, distance,
desolation, chaos, and he then had not just an objective
knowledge of one whom he had termed 'father', but a
subjective and experimental understanding and
appreciation of him, because the spirit of sonship had
been born within him or given to him whereby he cried
"Abba, Father". There is no saving relationship
to, or knowledge of, God except through grace and by new
birth.
So, then, those who by being born anew have become
"little children" (Matt 18:3) or
"babes" in spiritual things (1 Cor 3:1)—not
wrong if we do not remain such—have to
learn every thing afresh, because "all things have
become new" (2 Cor 5:17,18). Such have to learn a
new kind of knowledge, to live by a new kind of life,
"newness of life" (Rom 6:4). Paul says that we
are to act as those who are "alive from the
dead" (Rom 6:13). We have to learn that our life,
our natural life, cannot do God's will, live as God
requires, or do God's work. Only by His risen life is
this possible. An element of offence in this truth is
that it demands a recognized and acknowledged weakness;
it requires that we have to confess that, in ourselves,
for all Divine purposes, we are powerless and worthless,
and that of ourselves we can do nothing. The
natural man's worship of strength, efficiency, fitness,
ability, meets with a terrible rebuff when it is
confronted with the declaration that the universal
triumph of Christ, over hierarchies more mighty than
those of flesh and blood, was because "he was
crucified through weakness" (2 Cor 13:4); God
reduced to a certain impotency! And "God chose the
weak things... to confound the things that are
mighty" (1 Cor 1:25-27). To glory in infirmity, that
Christ's power may rest upon him, is a far cry from the
original Saul of Tarsus; but what an extraordinary change
in mentality! God has, however, always drawn a very broad
line between natural "might" and
"power" on the one hand, and "My
Spirit" on the other (Zech 4:6), and for evermore
that distinction abides. This 'new-born babe' has to
learn a new walk, now in the Spirit as different from
nature. There may be many slips and perhaps tumbles, but
such are not altogether evil if they are marks of a
stepping out in faith rather than sitting still in
fleshly disobedience or fear. We have shown that the
nature of this walk is that reason, feeling, and natural
choice are no longer the directive laws or criteria of
the spiritual man. For such an one there are frequent
experiences of a collision and contradiction between soul
and spirit. The reason would dictate a certain course,
the affections would urge in a certain direction, the
will would seek to fulfil these judgments and desires;
but there is a catch somewhere within—a dull,
leaden, lifeless, numbed something at the centre of us
which upsets everything, contradicts us, and all the time
in effect says No! Or it may be the other way
round. An inward urge and constraint finds no
encouragement from our natural judgment or reason, and is
flatly contrary to our natural desires, inclinations,
preferences or affections: while in the same natural
realm we are not at all willing for such a course. In
this case it is not the judgment against the desire, as
is frequently the case in everybody's life, but judgment,
desire and will are all joined against intuition. Now is
the crisis! Now is to be seen who is to rule the life!
Now the "natural" man, or the outer man of
sense, and the "inner" man have to settle
affairs.
To learn to walk in the Spirit is a life-lesson of the
new man, and as he is vindicated—as he always will
be in the long run—he will come to take the
absolute ascendancy over the "natural" man and
his mind; and so by the energizing of the Holy Spirit in
the spirit of the new man, the Cross will be wrought out
to the nullifying of the mind of the flesh (which, in
spiritual things, always ends in death) and in the
enthronement of the spiritual mind which is "life
and peace" (Rom 8:6).
This, then, is the nature of the walk in the Spirit,
and its application is many-sided. But we must
remember the law of this walk, which is faith. We
walk in the Spirit but "we walk by
faith" (2 Cor 5:7).
To walk by faith there must, in the very nature of the
case, be a stripping off of all that the outer man of the
senses clings to, demands, craves as a security and an
assurance.
When the spiritual life of God's people is in the
ascendant, they are not overwhelmed by either the absence
of human resources on the one hand, or by the presence of
humanly overwhelming odds against them on the other hand.
This is patent in their history as recorded in the
Scriptures. But it is also true that when the
spiritual life is weak, undeveloped, or at an ebb, they
look round for some tangible, seen resource upon which to
fasten. Egypt is the alternative to God whenever
and wherever spiritual life is low. To believe in
and trust to the intuitive leadings of the Holy Spirit in
our spirit, even though all is so different from the ways
of men, and even though such brings us to a Canaan which
for the time being is full of idolatry and where a mighty
famine reigns: where all is so contrary to what our outer
man has decided must be in keeping with a leading and a
promise of God; to leave our old, sphere of life in the
"world", to break with our kindred, our
father's house, for this—this! and
then to have to wait through much continuous stripping
off of those means, and methods, and habits, and
judgments, which are the very constitution of the natural
man—this is the law of the spiritual walk, but this
is God's chosen and appointed way of the mightiest
vindication. Spiritual children and riches, and
fruitfulness, and service, permanence, and the friendship
of God, are for such Abrahams of faith or such children
of Abraham in the spirit. God has laid a faith-basis for
His superstructure of spiritual glory, and only that
which is built upon such a foundation can serve spiritual
ends. Let this be the test of our walk in all personal,
domestic, business and Church affairs. Here, again, we
have a principle which, if applied, would be
revolutionary, and would call for the abandonment of a
tremendous amount of carnal, natural, worldly stuff in
our resources and methods. "Faith apart from works
is dead" (James 2:26). True, but the works of faith—of
the spirit—are not those of the flesh; the two
realms are not comparable. The walk in the flesh is one
thing, but the walk in the Spirit is quite another. The
things of the Spirit are foolishness to the flesh. Men of
faith see what others do not, and act accordingly. This
also being true of men who have lost their reason, the
two are often confused, and the children of the flesh
think the children of the spirit mad or insane. They are
unable to discriminate between even the insanity of men
and "the foolishness of God", which is
"wiser than men" (1 Cor 1:25).
Abraham was fortified by his faith, but his walk by
faith was intensely practical, though so different from
the walk in the flesh. A writer has said that faith
brings us into difficulties which are unknown to men who
walk in the flesh, or who never go out in faith. But such
difficulties place us beyond the power of the flesh to
help, and make special Divine revelations necessary, and
God always takes advantage of such times to give such
needed education of the spirit. It is thus that the men
of the spirit are taught and come to know God as no
others know Him. Thus, faith is the law of the walk of
the new man—the inner man—which brings him by
successive stages into the very heart of God, Who crowns
this progress with the matchless designation, "my
friend"! (Isa 61:8).
One other thing in general has to be mentioned. The
new man of the spirit has to learn a new speech. There is
the language of the spirit, and he will have to realize
increasingly that speech with "enticing words of
man's wisdom", or what man calls "excellency of
speech" (1 Cor 2:1,4), will avail nothing in
spiritual service. If all the religious speech and
preaching and talking about the gospel which goes on in
one week were the utterance of the Holy Spirit, what a
tremendous impact of God upon the world would be
registered! But it is obviously not so and this impact is
not felt. It is impossible to speak in and by the Holy
Spirit without something happening which is related to
eternity. But this capacity belongs only to the
"born of the Spirit" ones, whose spirits have
been joined to the Lord, and even they have to learn how
to cease from their own words and speak as they are moved
by the Holy Spirit. It is a part of the education of the
inner man to have his outer man slain in the matter of
speech, and to be brought to the state to which Jeremiah
was brought—"I cannot speak; for I am a
child" (Jer 1:6). Not only as sinners have we to be
crucified with Christ, but as preachers, or speakers, or
talkers. The circumcision of Christ, which Paul says is
the cutting off of the whole body of the flesh, has to be
applied to our lips, and our spirit has to be so much in
dominion that, on all matters where God cannot be
glorified, we "cannot speak". A
natural facility of speech is no strength in itself to
spiritual ministry; it may be a positive menace. It is a
stage of real spiritual development when there is a
genuine fear of speaking, unless it is in words
"which the Holy Ghost teacheth" (1 Cor 2:13).
On the other hand a natural inability to speak need be no
handicap. To be present "in weakness, and in fear,
and in much trembling" (1 Cor 2:3), may be a state
which befits an apostolic, nay, rather, a Holy Spirit
ministry. The utterance of God is a very different thing
in every way from that of man. How much is said in the
Scriptures about "conversation", "the
tongue", "words" etc., and ever with the
emphasis that these are to be in charge of the spirit,
and not merely expressions of the soul in any of its
departments!
If it is true that only the quickened spirit can
receive Divine revelation, it is equally true that such
revelation requires a Divine gift of utterance in order
to realize its spiritual end. It is possible to
preach truth without the preacher having any spiritual
apprehension of it; that is, from a merely mental
apprehension. The preaching may be just natural
ability; but the grievous fact may be that neither the
one who preaches nor those to whom he preaches will be in
the good of the living and working values of the
truth. The spiritual results are hardly worth the
effort and expenditure. The virtue of speech
resulting in abiding fruit to the glory of God, whether
that speech be preaching, teaching, conversation, prayer,
is not in its lucidity, eloquence, subtlety, cleverness,
wit, thoughtfulness, passion, earnestness, forcefulness,
pathos, etc., but in that it is an utterance of the Holy
Ghost.
"Thy speech betrayeth thee" may be applied
in many ways, for whether we live in the flesh or in the
spirit, in the natural man or in the spiritual man, will
always be made manifest by how we speak and the spiritual
effect of the fruit of our lips.
Oh, for crucified lips amongst God's people, and oh,
for lips among God's prophets, touched with the
blood-soaked, fire-charged coal from that one great altar
of Calvary!