You must warn each other every day,
while it is still “today,” so that none of you will be deceived by sin and
hardened against God. Hebrews 3:13
We talk about our
motives, and we say, "Our motive was right!" We talk about our
conscientiousness, we talk about our intentions; but you and I do not know what
lies behind what we call our good motives. There is a deceitfulness about this
human heart that defies our greatest attempt at tracking it down, and we shall
never do it.... Here is where the church has become such a confused thing, and
such a tragedy; for the prevailing idea is that if you give yourself over to
God He will take you up and use you: "Bring over your humanity and
consecrate it to the Lord! Consecrate your old man to the Lord, and go out and
serve the Lord, with a consecrated old man!" it is utterly contrary to the
teaching of God’s Word. The result is that in the work of God all the world
over you have people serving the Lord in the energy of the flesh, in the
reasoning of the flesh, in the emotions of the flesh. Meet them, counter them,
frustrate them, and you meet something evil; you meet with a fight, a division,
a schism, a scattering, and wholesale resignations.
Do you see what a
havoc the enemy can make in that which is called the church, because people
with best intentions and purest motives have come to serve the Lord with all
their own intelligence, their own strength, and their own emotion? They have
not seen that God has closed the door to the old creation, and that God’s
attitude is this: "The only thing that can satisfy Me, that can serve Me
is My Son, and if you are going to come into My service, He has to be the energy
of everything, the Life of everything, the Wisdom of everything!" He has
to be the governing, ruling reality in everything. It is not to be a matter of
your impulses, but of His urgings and leadings by the Holy Spirit; not your
sitting down to reason out what it would be good to do for the Lord, what ought
to be done, what needs to be done, but what He shows you, nothing more.... You
and I must not bring over our old creation and give it to God, expecting God to
use it. God begins with birth. The church of the firstborn is something quite
new, and it comes out of a death. That death is the death of an old creation,
and the resurrection is of something that is not the resuscitation of an old
creation, but the resurrection of something wholly of God.
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