Monday, November 14, 2016

Fearing ourselves, our wisdom.

'Our Lengthy Discussion as to the difference between spirit and soul and their respective operations has been to lead us to this present point. For a believer who strives after God the element to be apprehensive about is the inordinate activity of the soul beyond the measure set by God.

The soul has been in ascendancy for such long duration that in the matter of consecration it even presumes to take upon itself the task of realizing that act to God’s satisfaction. Many Christians are unaware how drastically the cross must work so that ultimately their natural power for living may be denied.

They do not know the reality of the indwelling Holy Spirit nor that His authority must extend to gathering under His control the thoughts, desires and feelings of the entire being.

Without their having an inner appreciation of this, the Holy Spirit is unable to accomplish everything He wishes to do.

The greatest temptation for an earnest and zealous saint is to engage his own strength in God’s service rather than to wait humbly for the Holy Spirit to will and to perform.

The call of the cross of the Lord Jesus is to beckon us to hate our natural life, to seek opportunity to lose, not to keep, it.

Our Lord wants us to sacrifice self and be yielded wholly to the working of His Spirit.

If we are to experience afresh His true life in the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit, we must be willing to present to death every opinion, labor and thought of the soul life.

The Lord additionally touches upon the issue of our hating or loving our self life. The soul is invariably “self-loving.” Unless from the very depth of our heart we abhor our natural life, we shall not be able to walk genuinely by the Holy Spirit. Do we not realize that the basic condition for a spiritual walk is to fear our self and its wisdom and to rely absolutely upon the Spirit? '

The Spiritual Man -  Watchman Nee

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Tomorrow we will read and study this more in-depth. Please, read the above a few times, let it sink in. Then take your Bible and look up the following verses-

1Jn 2:15-17
Gal. 6:8
Gal. 5:16,17


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