To test the truth of this, let us take a hypothetical case. Mr. A is a very good speaker; he can talk fluently and most convincingly on any subject, but in practical things he is a very bad manager. Mr. B, on the other hand, is a poor speaker; he cannot express himself clearly, but wanders all around his subject, never coming to a point. Yet on the other hand, he is a splendid manager, most competent in all matters of business. Both these men get converted and become earnest Christians. Let us suppose now that I call on them both and ask them to speak at a convention, and that both accept.
Now what will happen? I have asked the selfsame thing of both men, but who do you think will pray the harder! Almost certainly Mr. B. Why? Because he is no speaker. In the matter of eloquence, he has no resources of his own to
depend upon. He will pray: “Lord, if you do not give me power for this, I cannot do it.” Of course Mr. A will pray too, but maybe not in the same way as Mr. B because he has something of natural aptitude upon which to rely.
Now let us suppose that, instead of asking them to speak, I ask them both to take charge of the practical side of affairs at the convention. What will happen? The position will be exactly reversed. Now it will be Mr. A’s turn to pray hard, for he knows full well that he has no organizing ability. Mr. B of course will pray too, but perhaps without quite the same urgency; for though he knows his need of the Lord, he is not nearly so conscious of his need in business matters as is Mr. A.
Do you see the difference between natural and spiritual gifts? Anything we can do without prayer and without an utter dependence upon God must come from the spring of natural life that is tainted with the flesh. We must see this clearly. Of course, it is not true that those only are suited for a particular work who lack the natural gift for it. The point is that, whether naturally gifted or not—and we should praise God for all His gifts—they must know the touch of the cross in death upon all that is of nature, and their complete dependence upon the God of resurrection. All too readily do we envy our neighbor who has some outstanding natural gift, and fail to realize that our own possession of it, apart from such a working of the cross, could prove a barrier to the very thing that God is seeking to manifest in us.
Shortly after my conversion, I went out preaching in the villages. I had had a good education and was well-versed in the Scriptures, so I considered myself thoroughly capable of instructing the village folk, among whom were quite a number
of illiterate women. But after several visits I discovered that, despite their illiteracy, those women had an intimate knowledge of the Lord. I knew the Book they haltingly read; they knew the One of whom the Book spoke. I had much in myself; they had much in the Spirit. How many Christian teachers today are teaching others as I was then, very largely in the strength of their carnal equipment!
Once I met a young brother—young, that is to say, in years, but who had learned a good deal of the Lord. God had brought him through much tribulation to gain that knowledge of himself. As I was talking with him, I said, “Brother, what has the Lord really been teaching you these days?”
He replied, “Only one thing: that I can do nothing apart from Him.”
“Do you really mean,” I asked, “that you can do nothing?”
“Well, no,” he said. “Of course, I can do many things! In fact, that has been just my trouble. Oh, you know, I have always been so confident in myself. I know I am well able to do lots of things.”
So I asked, “What then do you mean when you say you can do nothing apart from Him?”
He answered, “The Lord has shown me that I can do anything, but that He has said, ‘Apart from me ye can do nothing.’ So it comes to this, that everything I have done and can still do apart from Him is nothing!”
We have to come to that valuation. I do not mean to say we cannot do a lot of things, for we can. We can take meetings and build churches, we can go to the ends of the earth and found missions, and we can seem to bear fruit. But remember that the Lord’s word is “Every plant which my heavenly
Father planted not, shall be rooted up” (Matt. 15:13).
God is the only legitimate Originator in the universe (Gen. 1:1), and His Holy Spirit is the only legitimate Initiator in our hearts. Anything that you or I plan and set on foot without Him has the taint of the flesh upon it, and it will never reach the realm of the Spirit however earnestly we seek God’s blessing on it. It may last for years, and then we may think we will adjust here and improve there and maybe bring it on a better plane, but it cannot be done.
Origin determines destination, and what was “of the flesh” originally will never be made spiritual by any amount of “improvement.” That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and it will never be otherwise. So anything for which we are sufficient in ourselves is “nothing” in God’s estimate, and we have to accept His estimate and write it down as nothing. “The flesh profiteth nothing.” It is only what comes from above that will abide.
We cannot see this simply by being told it. God must teach us what is meant, by putting His finger on something which He sees and saying, “This is natural; this has its source in the old creation and did not originate with Me. This cannot abide.” Until He does so, we may agree in principle, but we can never really see it. We may assent to, and even enjoy, the teaching, but we shall never truly loathe ourselves.
But there will come a day when God opens our eyes. Facing a particular issue, we shall have to say, as by revelation, “It is unclean, it is impure; Lord, I see it!” The word “purity” is a blessed word. I always associate it with the Spirit. Purity means something altogether of the Spirit. Impurity means mixture. When God opens our eyes to see that the natural life is something that, in itself, He can never use in His
work, then we find we do not enjoy the doctrine any longer. Rather, we loathe ourselves for the impurity that is in us. But when that point is reached, God begins His work of deliverance. We are going on shortly to look at the provision He has made for that deliverance, but we must stay for a little longer with this matter of revelation.
Of course, if one does not set out to serve the Lord wholeheartedly, one does not feel the necessity for light. It is only when one has been apprehended by God, and seeks to go forward with Him, that one finds how necessary light is. There is a fundamental need of light in order for us to know the mind of God; to know what is of the spirit and what is of the soul; to know what is divine and what is merely of man; to discern what is truly heavenly and what is only earthly; to understand the difference between things which are spiritual and things which are carnal; to know whether God is really leading us or whether we are just being moved by our feelings, senses or imaginations. It is when we have reached a position where we would like to follow God fully that we find light to be the most necessary thing in the Christian life.
In my conversations with younger brothers and sisters, one question comes up again and again: How can I know that I am walking in the Spirit? How do I distinguish which prompting within me is from the Holy Spirit and which is from myself? It seems that all are alike in this; but some have gone further. They are trying to look within, to differentiate, to discriminate, to analyze, and in doing so are bringing themselves into deeper bondage. Now this is a situation which is really dangerous to Christian life, for inward
knowledge will never be reached along the barren path of self-analysis.
We are never told in the Word of God to examme our inward condition.
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That way leads only to uncertainty, vacillation and despair. Of course, we have to have self-knowledge. We have to know what is going on within. We do not want to live in a fool’s paradise—to have gone altogether wrong and yet not know we have gone wrong; to have a spartan will and yet think we are pursuing the will of God. But such self-knowledge does not come by our turning within, by our analyzing our feelings and motives and everything that is going on inside, and then trying to pronounce whether we are walking in the flesh or in the Spirit.
There are several passages in the Psalms which illumine this subject. The first is in Psalm 36:9: “In thy light shall we see light.” I think that is one of the best verses in the Old Testament. There are two lights there. There is “thy light,” and then, when we have come into that light, we shall “see light.”
Now those two lights are different. We might say that the first is objective and the second subjective. The first light is the light which belongs to God but is shed upon us; the second is the knowledge imparted by that light. “In thy light shall we see light”: We shall know something; we shall be clear about something; we shall see. No turning within, no introspective self-examination will ever bring us to that clear place. No, it is when there is light coming from God that we see.
I think it is so simple. If we want to satisfy ourselves that our face is clean, what do we do? Do we feel it carefully all over with our hands? No, of course not. We find a mirror
and we bring it to the light. In that light everything becomes clear. No sight ever came by feeling or analyzing. Sight only comes by the light of God coming in; and when once it has come, there is no longer need to ask if a thing is right or wrong. We know.
You remember again how in Psalm 139:23 the writer says, “Search me, O God, and know my heart.” You realize, do you not, what it means to say “Search me”? It certainly does not mean that I search myself. “Search me” means “You search me! “ That is the way of illumination. It is for God to come in and search; it is not for me to search. Of course, that will never mean that I may go blindly on, careless of my true condition. That is not the point. The point is that however much my self-examination may reveal in me that needs putting right, such searching never really gets below the surface. My true knowledge of self comes not from my searching myself, but from God searching me.
But, you ask, what does it mean in practice for us to come into the light? How does it work? How do we see light in His light? Here again the psalmist comes to our help. “The entrance of thy, words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple” (Ps. 119:130,
KJV
). In spiritual things we are all “simple.” We are dependent upon God to give us understanding, and especially is this so in the matter of our own true nature. And it is here that the Word of God operates. In the New Testament the passage which states this most clearly is in the epistle to the Hebrews:
The word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart. And there is
no creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do. (Heb. 4:12–13)
Yes, it is the Word of God, the penetrating Scripture of truth, that settles our questions. It is that which discerns our motives and defines for us their true source in soul or spirit.
With this I think we can pass on from the doctrinal to the practical side of things. Many of us, I am sure, are living quite honestly before God. We have been making progress, and we do not know of anything much wrong with us. Then one day, as we go on, we meet with a fulfillment of that word: “The entrance of thy words giveth light.” Some servant of God has been used by Him to confront us with His living Word, and that Word has made an entrance into us. Or perhaps we ourselves have been waiting before God and, whether from our memory of Scripture or from the page itself, His Word has come to us in power. Then it is we see something which we have never seen before. We are convicted. We know where we are wrong, and we look up and confess, “Lord, I see it. There is impurity there. There is mixture. How blind I was! Just fancy that for so many years I have been wrong there and have never known it!” Light comes in and we see light. The light of God brings us to see the light concerning ourselves, and it is an abiding principle that every knowledge of self comes to us in that way.
It may not always be the Scriptures. Some of us have known saints who really knew the Lord, and through praying with them or talking with them, in the light of God radiating from them, we have seen something which we never saw before. I have met one such, who is now with the
Lord, and I always think of her as a “lighted” Christian. If I did but walk into her room, I was brought immediately to a sense of God. In those days I was very young and had been converted about two years, and I had lots of plans, lots of beautiful thoughts, lots of schemes for the Lord to sanction, a hundred and one things which I thought would be marvelous if they were all brought to fruition. With all these things I came to her to try to persuade her, to tell her that this or that was the thing to do.
Before I could open my mouth, she would just say a few words in quite an ordinary way. Light dawned! It simply put me to shame. My “doing” and my scheming were all so natural, so full of man. Something happened. I was brought to a place where I could say, “Lord, my mind is set only on creaturely activities, but here is someone who is not out for them at all. Teach me to walk that way.” She had but one motive, one desire, and that was for God. Written in the front of her Bible were these words: “Lord, I want nothing for myself.” Yes, she lived for God alone, and where that is the case, you will find that such a one is bathed in light, and that light illuminates others. That is real witness.
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Light has one law: It shines wherever it is admitted. That is the only requirement. We may shut it out of ourselves; it fears nothing else. If we throw ourselves open to God, He will reveal. The trouble comes when we have closed areas, locked and barred places in our hearts, where we think, with pride, that we are right. Our defeat then lies less in our being wrong than in our not knowing that we are wrong. Wrong may be a question of natural strength; ignorance of it is a question of light. You can see the natural strength in some, but they cannot see it themselves.