Excerpt -
(The Spiritual Man
by Watchman Nee)
3. Memory. Text:
“But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he
will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said
to you” (John 14.26).
Christians do not
grasp that this verse means the Counselor will enlighten their mind so that
they may remember what the Lord has spoken. They instead think it instructs
them not to engage their memory because God shall bring all things to their
minds. They accordingly allow their memory to degenerate into passivity; they
do not exercise their wills to remember. And what is the outcome?—
“(a) the man himself
does not use his memory; and (b) God does not use it, because He will not do so
apart from the believer’s co-action; (c) evil spirits use it, and substitute
their workings in the place of the believer’s volitional use of his memory.”
(Penn-Lewis, WOTS,121)
4. Love. Text:
“God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has
been given to us” (Rom. 5.5).
Believers
misconstrue this to signify that they are not themselves to love but to let the
Holy Spirit dispense God’s love to them. They petition God to love through them
that His love may be supplied
abundantly so as to
fill them with divine love. They no longer will love for hereafter it is God
Who must make them love. They cease to exercise their faculty of affection,
permitting its function to sink into
total paralysis.
With the result that (a) the believer himself does not love; (b) God will not
bestow supernatural love upon him in disregard of the man or the operation of
his natural affection; and so
(c) evil spirits
substitute themselves for the man and express their love or hate through him.
And once he has abandoned the use of his will to control his affection the evil
spirits put their counterfeit love
in him. Thereafter
he behaves like wood and stone, cold and dead to all affections. This explains
why many saints, though holy, are scarcely approachable.
“You shall love the
Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your
mind, and with all your strength,” says the Lord Jesus (Mark 12.30). Now whose
love is this? Exactly whose heart, soul, mind and strength is brought into view
here? It is of course ours. Our natural life needs to die, but these natural
endowments and their functions remain.'
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