Chapter 2 | Table of Contents | Chapter 4

A natural life, a bestial life, a diabolical life can subsist no longer than while they are immediately and continually under the working power of that root or source from which they sprang. So it is with the divine life in man. It can never be in him except as a growth of life in and from God. Resisting the Spirit, quenching the Spirit, and grieving the Spirit gives birth and growth to every evil that reigns in the world and leaves men and churches not only an easy, but a necessary prey to the devil, the world and the flesh. Nothing but obedience to the Spirit, trusting the Spirit, walking in the Spirit, and praying with and for its continual inspiration can possibly keep either men or churches from being sinners or idolaters in all that they do. Everything in the life or religion of man that has not the Spirit of God for its mover, director and end, be it what it will, is but earthly, sensual or devilish. The truth and perfection of the gospel state could not show itself until it became solely a ministration of the Spirit or a kingdom where the Holy Spirit does all the works.

The apostles, while Christ was with them in the flesh, were instructed in heavenly truths from His mouth and were enabled to work miracles in His Name. They were not qualified to know and teach the mysteries of His kingdom. After His resurrection he conversed with them forty days, speaking to them of things pertaining to the kingdom of God. Though he breathed on them and said, "Receive you the Holy Spirit," etc., they were still unable to preach or bear witness to the truth as it is in Jesus. There was still a higher dispensation to come that opened the divine life in their hearts in a way that could not be affected from an outward instruction of Christ Himself. Though He had sufficiently told His disciples the necessity of being born again of the Spirit, He left them unborn of it until He came again in the power of the Spirit. When He breathed on them and said, "Receive you the Holy Spirit," what was said and done was not the thing itself, but only a type or outward signification of what they should receive when He, being glorified, should come again in the fullness and power of the Spirit. It was then that He broke open the deadness and darkness of their hearts with light and life from heaven. That light alone could open and verify in their souls all that He had said and promised to them while He was with them in the flesh.

All this was expressly declared by Christ Himself saying unto them, "I tell you the truth, it is expedient for you that I go away." Therefore, Christ taught them to believe, to want, and to joyfully expect the coming of a higher and more blessed state than that of His bodily presence with them. He adds, "If I go not away the comforter will not come." Therefore, His followers could not have the comfort and blessing of Christ until something more was done to them and they were brought into a higher state than they could experience by His verbal instruction with them. He continued saying, "But if I go away, I will send Him unto you and when the comforter the Spirit of truth is come, He will guide you into all truth and He shall glorify me" (that is, He shall set up my kingdom in its glory in the power of the Spirit). "He shall receive of mine and shall show it unto you: I said of mine, because all things that the Father has are mine." (John 16)

Christ had told them of the necessity of an higher state than they were in and the necessity of such a comforting illuminating guide as they could not have until His outward teaching in human language was changed into the inspiration and operation of His Spirit in their souls. He commanded them not to begin to bear witness of Him to the world in a human way from knowing of Him, His birth, His life, His doctrines, His death, sufferings and even His resurrection. But He commanded them to tarry at Jerusalem until they were endued with power from on high, saying unto them, "You shall receive power after that the Holy Spirit is come upon you. And then shall you bear witness unto me both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and unto the utmost part of the earth."

Here are two most important and fundamental truths fully demonstrated. First, that the truth and perfection of the gospel state could not take place until Christ was glorified and His kingdom among men made wholly and solely a continual, immediate ministration of the Spirit. Everything before this was but subservient for a time and preparatory to this last dispensation, which could not have been the last if it did not carried man above the types, figures and shadows into the real possession and enjoyment of the spirit and truth of a divine life. For the end is not come until it has found the beginning. That is, the last dispensation of God to fallen man cannot come until the putting to an end of the "bondage of weak and beggarly elements" (Gal. 4:9), thus bringing man to that dwelling place in God and God in him which he had at the beginning.

Secondly, that as the apostles could not go forth without the Spirit, so no man from their time to the end of the world can have any true and real knowledge of the spiritual blessings of Christ's redemption without the Spirit. Nor can they have a divine call, capacity or fitness to preach and bear witness of them to the world, but solely by that same divine Spirit opening all the mysteries of a redeeming Christ in their inward parts, as it did in the apostles, evangelists and first ministers of the gospel.

Why could not the apostles, who had been witnesses to all the whole process of Christ, why could they not with their human apprehension declare and testify the truth of such things until they "were baptized with fire and born again of the Spirit"? It is because the truth of such things, the mysteries of Christ's process as knowable by man, are alone accomplished by this heavenly fire and Spirit of God in our souls. Therefore, to know the mysteries of Christ's redemption and to know the redeeming work of God in our own souls is the same thing; the one cannot be before or without the other. Every man, whoever he is and however able he is in all kinds of human literature, must be an entire stranger to all the mysteries of gospel redemption. He can only talk about them as of any other tale, until they are brought forth, verified, fulfilled and witnessed to by what is found, felt and enjoyed of the whole process of Christ in his soul. Since redemption is in its whole nature an inward spiritual work that works only in the altering, changing and regenerating the life of the soul, so it must be true that nothing but the inward state of the soul can bear true witness to the redeeming power of Christ. It wholly consists in altering what is the most radical in the soul, bringing forth a new spiritual death and a new spiritual life.

This being so, it must be true that no one can know or believe the mysteries of Christ's redeeming power by historically knowing or rationally consenting to what is said of Him in written or spoken words. The redeeming power and understanding of God's mysteries can come only by an inward, experimental finding and feeling that operates in that new death and new life, both of which must be effected in the soul of man. Without these, Christ is not and cannot be found and known by the soul as its salvation. It must also be equally true that the redeemed state of the soul is nothing but the resurrection of a divine and holy life within it. This action from first to last is the sole work of the breathing, creating Spirit of God as the first holy created state of the soul was before Adam fell. The mysteries of Christ's redeeming power that work and bring forth the renewed state of the soul are not creaturely, finite, outward things that may be found and enjoyed by verbal descriptions or formed ideas of them. Rather, they are a birth and life and spiritual operation which solely belong to God alone as His creating power. Nothing can redeem but that same thing and power that created the soul. Nothing can bring forth a good thought concerning eternal salvation, but what brought forth the power of thinking--Himself. Every tendency towards goodness, be it ever so small, is confirmed in the words of Paul, "... not I but Christ that lives in me."

This truth of truths, fully possessed and firmly adhered to, brings God and man together and puts an end to every "Lo here" and "Lo there" because it turns the whole faith of man to a Christ that can nowhere be a Savior to him, except as He is essentially born in the inmost spirit of his soul. It is not possible to be taken there by any other means except the immediate inspiration and working power of the Holy Spirit within him. To this man alone all scripture gives daily edification; the words of Christ and His apostles fall like a fire into his innermost being. And what is it that they kindle there? Not notions, not itching ears, nor rambling desires after new teachings and new expounders of them, but a holy flame of love to be always with and always attending to that Christ and His Holy Spirit within him. This alone can make him become and do all that the words of Christ and His apostles have taught. For there is no possibility of being like-minded with Christ in anything that he taught or having the truth of one Christian virtue, but by the nature and Spirit of Christ essentially living in us.

Read all of our Savior's divine sermon from the mount, consent to the goodness of every part of it, but the time of practicing it will never come until you have a new nature from Christ and are as vitally in Him and He in you as the vine is found in the branch and the branch in the vine. "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God," is a divine truth, but it will do us no divine good unless we receive it as saying, "Blessed are they that are born again of the Spirit for they alone can see God." No blessedness, either of truth or life, can be found in men or angels, but where the Spirit and life in God is essentially born within them.