Please read the
following excerpt from the book we are studying, constantly using the Word of
God for the guide to ALL truth.
Tomorrow by the will
and grace of God we will study this more thoroughly searching for only truth as
found in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!
Excerpt from - The
Spiritual Man by Watchman Nee
'The Proper Use of
Emotion
If God’s children permit the cross to operate
deeply upon their emotion they shall find afterwards that it no longer
obstructs, but rather cooperates with, their spirit.
The cross has dealt
with the natural life in the emotion, has renewed it, and has made it a channel
for the spirit. A spiritual man we have said before is not a spirit, but
neither is he a person devoid of emotion; on the contrary, the spiritual man
will use his feeling to express the divine life in him.
Before it is touched
by God emotion follows its own whim. And hence it habitually fails to be an
instrument of the spirit. But once it is purified it can serve as the means of
the spirit’s expression.
The inner man needs emotion to express its
life: it needs emotion to declare its love and its sympathy towards man’s
suffering: and it also needs emotion to make man sense the movement of its
intuition.
Spiritual sensing is
usually made known through the feeling of a quiet and pliable emotion. If
emotion is pliably subject to the spirit the latter, through the emotion, will
love or hate exactly as God wishes.
Some Christians, upon discerning the truth of
not living by feeling, mistake spiritual life as one without it. They
accordingly try to destroy it and to render themselves as insensate as wood and
stone. Because of their ignorance of the meaning of the death of the cross,
they do not understand what is meant by handing over one’s emotion to death and
living by the spirit. We do not say that, in order to be spiritual, a Christian
must become exceedingly hard and void of affection like inanimate objects—as
though the term spiritual man means for him to be emptied of feeling. Quite the
contrary. The most tender, merciful, loving, and sympathetic of persons is a
spiritual man.
To be entirely
spiritual by delivering his emotion to the cross does not denote that
henceforth he is stripped of his feeling. We have observed numerous spiritual
saints and have noticed that their love is greater than that of others, which
demonstrates that a spiritual man is not without emotion and additionally that
it differs from that of the ordinary man.
In committing our
soul to the cross we must remember that what is lost is the soul life, not its
function.
Were its function
nailed to the cross we then could no longer think, choose, or feel. We must
therefore remember this basic fact: to lose soul life means to doggedly,
resolutely, and continuously deny the natural power and to walk exclusively by
the power of God; it means to live no longer after self and its desires but to
submit unexceptionally to the will of God.
Moreover, the cross
and resurrection are two inseparable facts: “for if we have become united with
him in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his
resurrection” (Rom. 6.5 ASV).
The death of the
cross does not connote annihilation; hence the emotion, mind and will of the
soul are not extinguished upon passing through the cross. They only relinquish
their natural life in the death of the Lord and are raised again in His
resurrection life. Such death and resurrection cause the various operating
organs of the soul to lose their life, to be renewed, and to be used by the
Lord.
Consequently a
spiritual man is not emotionally deprived; rather, his emotion is the most
perfect and the most noble, as though newly created out of God’s hand. In
short, if anyone has trouble here, the trouble lies with his theory and not
with his experience, for the latter will bear out the truth. Emotion must go
through the cross (Matt. 10.38-39) in order to destroy its fiery nature, with
its confusion, and to subject it totally to the spirit. The cross aims to
accord the spirit authority to rule over every activity of emotion.
Mat 10:38 And
he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of
me.
Mat 10:39 He
that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake
shall find it. '
No comments:
Post a Comment