Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Spiritual Sight # 10

The Issue of Spiritual Sight (continued)

The Ministry of the Holy Spirit (continued)

"As from the Lord the Spirit." The Lord Jesus said, "When He is come ... He shall take of Mine, and show it unto you." "He shall not speak of Himself; but what things soever He shall hear, these shall He speak ... He shall take of Mine, and shall show it unto you" (John 16:13, 14). The Spirit, the faithful servant of the Father's house, has come right across the wilderness to find the bride for the Son, of His own kith and kin. Yes, there is room for wonder here. "Since the children are sharers in flesh and blood, He also Himself in like manner partook of the same" (Hebrews 2:14). "Both He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one" (Hebrews 2:11). The Spirit has come to secure that bride now, one with Him, His flesh and His bone. But the Spirit desires to be occupying us with the Lord Jesus at all time, showing us His things. To what effect? That we shall not feel that we are of one kind and He another, but that it may just be, 'This is the last step of many which have been leading to this, and every step has been making this oneness more perfect, this harmony more complete.' At the end, without any very great crisis, we just go in. We have been going in all the time, and this is the last step. That is conformity to His image, that is spiritual growth; getting to know the Lord, and to become like Him, getting to be perfectly at home with Him, so that there is no clash, no strangeness, no discord, no distance. Oneness with our Lord Jesus is spiritual growth. You see, it is something inward again, and it is but the development of that initiation, that beginning. We have seen and are seeing, and seeing and seeing, and as we see we are changed.

Is that true of everything you think you see? We have to test everything we think we see and know by its effect in our lives. You and I my have an enormous amount of what we think to be spiritual knowledge; we have all the doctrines, all the truths. We can box the compass of evangelical doctrine; and what is the effect? It is not seeing, beloved, in a true spiritual sense, if we are not changed. Yes, seeing is to be changed, and it is not seeing if it does not bring that about. It would be far better for us to be stripped of all that and to be brought right down to the point where we really do see just a little that makes a difference. We must be very honest with God about this. Oh, would we not sooner have just a very little indeed that was a hundred percent effective, than a whole mountain of knowledge, ninety percent of which counted for nothing? We must ask the Lord to save us from advancing beyond spiritual life, advancing, I mean, with knowledge, a kind of knowledge, presuming to know. You know what I mean. Real seeing, Paul says, is being changed, and being changed is a matter of seeing as by the Lord the Spirit. So we will pray to see.

Some of you know our Bible, knew our New Testament, knew Romans, knew Ephesians, thought we saw. We could even lecture on the Bible and these books, and on the truths of them, and did so for years. Then one day we saw; and people saw that we saw, and said, What has happened to the minister? He is not saying anything difference from what he has always said, but there is a difference; he has seen something! That is it!

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 11 - (Seeing Governs Ministry)

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