Chapter 4 | Table of Contents | Chapter 6

True spiritual teaching must feel and find everything that the scriptures speak of pertaining to God, of man, of life and death, of good and evil, and of heaven and hell as essentially verified in our own souls. For everything is found within man that can be either good or evil. God abiding in him is His divine life, His divine light and His divine love on the one hand; Satan within him animates his life of self, earthly wisdom, diabolical falseness, wrath, pride and vanity of every kind. There is no middle way between these two. He that is not under the power of the one is under the power of the other. Man was created in and under the power of the divine life; as far as he loses or turns from this life of God is as far as he falls under the power of self, Satan and worldly wisdom.

When St. Peter, full of a humanly good love towards Christ, advised Him to avoid His sufferings, Christ rejected him saying, "Get you behind me Satan," giving this reason for it, "for you desire not the things that be of God but the things that be of men." This is plain proof that whatever is not of and from the Holy Spirit of God in us, however plausible it may outwardly seem to men to their wisdom and human goodness, is in itself nothing else but the power of Satan within us. And as St. Paul said truly of himself, "By the grace of God I am what I am." So every wise man, every scribe, every disputer of this world, everyone who trusts in the strength of his own rational learning, everyone that is under the power of his own fallen nature is never free from desires of honors and preferments of men, but is ever thirsting to be rewarded for his theological abilities. He is ever afraid of being abased and despised or always thankful to those who flatter him for his distinguished merit. Nothing else hinders any professor of Christ from being able truly to say with St. Paul "God forbid that I should glory in anything but the cross of Christ by which I am crucified to the world and the world to me." Nothing makes him incapable of finding what St. Paul found when he said, "I can do all things through Christ that strengthens me." Nothing hinders all this, but a man's disregard of Christ within him, by choosing to have a religion of self, of laborious learning and worldly greatness, rather than being such a gospel fool for Christ as to renounce everything He renounced, and to seek no more earthly honor and praise than He did, and to will nothing, know nothing, and seek nothing, but what the Spirit of God and Christ knows, wills and seeks in him.

Here and here alone lies the Christian's full and certain power of overcoming self, the devil and the world. But Christians seeking and turning to anything else, except to be led and inspired by the one Spirit of God and Christ, will bring forth a Christendom, that in the sight of God, will have no other name than a spiritual Babylon, a spiritual Egypt and Sodom, a scarlet whore, a devouring beast and red dragon. For all these names belong to all men, however learned, and to all churches, whether greater or less, in which the spirit of this world has any share of power. This was the fall of the whole church soon after the apostolic age. It also brought the demise of all human reformations begun by ecclesiastical learning and supported by civil power and will. These signify little or nothing, but often made things worse until all these churches, dying to all they own, seek for no reforming power but from that Spirit of God. The same power which in the beginning converted sinners, publicans, harlots, Jews and heathens into a holy apostolic church, that knew they were of God, that they belonged to God by the one Spirit that he had given them and that worked in them.

"You are not in the flesh," said the apostle, "but in the Spirit." Then he adds as the only ground of this, "if so be that the Spirit of God dwells in you." Surely he means if you are moved, guided and governed by what the Spirit wills, works and inspires within you. And then to show the absolute necessity of this life of God in the soul he adds, "If any man has not the Spirit of Christ he is none of His." That this is the state to which God has appointed and called all Christians he thus declares, "God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts crying, Abba Father" (Gal. 4:6). In this he was most surely saying that nothing in you can cry or pray to God as its Father, but the Spirit of His Son Christ that has come to life within you. This is also as true of every tendency in the soul towards God for goodness, as there is of the seed of the woman striving to bring forth a full birth of Christ in the soul [See Revelation 12:4-5].

"Lo I am always with you," says the holy Jesus, "even to the end of the world." How is he with us? Not outwardly, every illiterate man knows, and not inwardly says many a learned doctor, because a Christ within us to them is a gross fanaticism or Quakerism. How then shall the faith of the common Christian find any comfort in these words of Christ's promise unless the Spirit brings him into a remembrance and belief that Christ is in him and with him as the vine is with and in the Branch. Christ says, "Without me you can do nothing." He also said, "If any man loves me, my Father will love him and we will come unto him and make our abode with him." Now if without Him we can do nothing, then all the love that a man can possibly have for Christ must be from the power and life of Christ in him. It is from such a love that a man is born of the Father and the Son dwelling and making their abode in him. What higher proof or fuller certainty can there be that the whole work of redemption in the soul of man is and can be nothing else but the inward, continual, immediate operation of Father, Son and Holy Spirit raising up again their own first life in the soul to which our first father [Adam] died?

After His glorification in heaven Christ says, "Behold I Stand at the door and knock." He does not say, "Behold you have Me in the scriptures." Now what is that door at which Christ at the right-hand of God in heaven knocks? Surely it is the heart to which Christ is always present. He goes on, "If any man hears my voice..." How does he hear but by the spiritual hearing of the heart and what voice but that which is the speaking and sounding forth from Christ within him? He then adds, "...and opens the door," that is, will become a living holy nature by the Spirit born within him, "...and I will sup with him and he with Me." Behold, the last finishing work of a redeeming Jesus enters into the heart that opens to Him, bringing forth the joy, the blessing and perfection of that first life of God that Adam lost in the soul that was lost by the fall. It is here that Father sets forth a supper or feast of the heavenly Jesus with the soul and the soul with Him.

Can anyone justly call it "fanaticism" to say that this supping of the soul with this glorified Christ within it, must mean something more heavenly transacted in the soul than that last supper that he celebrated with His disciples while he was with them in flesh? That supper of bread and wine was such as a Judas could partake of and could only be an outward type or sign of what was to come; an inward and blessed nourishment with which the believing soul should be feasting when the glorified Son of God should, as a creating Spirit, enter into us, quickening and raising up His own heavenly nature and life within us.

Now this continual knocking of Christ at the door of the heart sets forth the case or nature of a continual, immediate and divine inspiration within us. It is always with us, but there must be an opening of the heart to it. Though it is always there, it is only felt and found by those who are attentive to it, depend upon and humbly wait for it. Now let anyone tell me how he can believe anything of this voice of Christ, how he can listen to it, hear or obey it, but by such a faith as keeps him habitually turned to an immediate, constant, inspiration of the Spirit of Christ within him? Or how any heathenish profane person can do more, despite to this presence and power of Christ in his own soul, than that ecclesiastic who mocks the light of Christ within and openly blasphemes that faith and hope and trust that solely relies upon being moved by the Spirit as its only power for doing what is right, good and pious, either towards God or man. Let every man whom this concerns lay it to heart.

Time and the things of time will soon have an end. He that trusts to anything but the Spirit and power of God working in his heart will be ill fitted to enter into eternity. God must be all in all in the here and now or we cannot be His hereafter. Time works only for eternity and poverty eternal must as certainly follow him who dies fully stuffed only with human learning, just as he who dies only full of worldly riches. The folly of thinking to have any divine learning, but what the Holy Spirit teaches, or to make ourselves rich in knowledge towards God by heaps of common place learning crowded into our minds, will leave us as dreadfully cheated as that rich builder of barns in the gospel to whom it was said, "Thou fool this night shall your soul be required of you. And then whose shall all these things be?" (Luke Ch. 12). So it is with every man that treasures up a religious learning that comes not wholly from the Spirit of God.

To this inward continual attention to the continual working of the Holy Spirit within us the apostle calls us in these words, "See that you refuse not Him that speaks; for if they escaped not who refused Him that spoke on earth much more shall not we escape if we turn from Him that speaks from heaven" (Heb. 12:25). Now what is this speaking from heaven which it is so dangerous to refuse or resist? Surely they are not outward voices from heaven. Or what could the apostle's advice signify to us, unless it is such a speaking from heaven as we may and must be always either obeying or refusing? St. James says, "Resist the devil and he will flee from you." What devil? Surely he is not an outward creature or spirit that tempts us by an outward power. What resistance can we make to the devil but that of inwardly falling away or turning from the workings of his evil nature and spirit within us?

They therefore who call us from waiting for, depending upon and attending to the continual, secret inspirations and breathings of the Holy Spirit within us, call us to resist God in the same manner as the apostle exhorts us to resist the devil! For since God means only our spiritual good and the devil our spiritual evil, neither the one nor the other can be resisted or not resisted by us, but so far as their spiritual operations within us are either turned from or obeyed. St. James has shown us that resisting the devil is the only way to make him flee from us, that is to lose his power in us. He immediately adds how we are to behave towards God that he may not flee from us or His holy work be stopped in us. "Draw near," says he, "to God and God will draw near to you." What is this drawing near? Surely it is not by any local motion either in God or us. But the same is meant as if he had said resist not God, that is, let His Holy Spirit will within you have its full work. Keep wholly, obediently attentive to what He is and has and does within you and then God will draw near to you. He will more and more manifest the power of His holy presence in you and make you more and more partakers of the divine nature.

Further, what a blindness is it in the before mentioned writers to charge private persons with the fanaticism of holding the necessity and certainty of continual immediate inspiration and to attack them as enemies to the established church, when everybody's eyes see that the established liturgy, teaches and requires them to believe and pray for the continual inspiration of the Spirit as that alone by which they can have the least good thought or desire? Thus, "O God, forasmuch as without you we are not able to please you. Mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts." Is it possible for words more strongly to express the necessity of a continual divine inspiration? Or can inspiration be higher or more immediate in prophets and apostles than what directs what rules our hearts, not now and then, but in all things? Or can the absolute necessity of this be more fully declared than by saying that if it is not in this degree, both of height and continuance in and over our hearts, nothing that is done by us can be pleasing to God, that is, can have any union with Him?

Now the matter is not at all about the different effects or works proceeding from inspiration as whether by it a man is made a saint in himself or sent by God with a prophetic message to others. This affects not the nature and necessity of inspiration, which is just as great and just as necessary in itself to all true goodness as to all true prophecy. All scripture is of divine inspiration. But how can this be? "Because holy men of old spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit." Christ and His apostles oblige us in like manner to hold that all holiness is by divine inspiration and that therefore there could have been no holy men of old or in any latter times, but solely for this reason because "They lived as they were moved by the Holy Spirit." Again the liturgy prays thus "O God from whom all good things do come, grant that by your holy inspiration we may think those things that be good and by your merciful guiding may perform the same." [Peter asserts, "If any man speaks, let him speak as the oracles of God; if any man ministers, let him do it as of the ability which God gives: that God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and dominion forever and ever. Amen."(1 Peter 4:11 KJ2000)]