THE WORKS OF THE DEVIL DESTROYED

THE WORKS OF THE DEVIL DESTROYED

To this end was the Son of God manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil. 1 John 3:8

The works of the devil, what are they - Death working within us, the spirit that is against truth and light, the darkness of ignorance. The spirit of hatred and malice, greed and jealousy and the whole unholy brood of things which are unlike God, lawlessness lying at the base of all, the refusal to submit, these are the works of the devil. Twenty centuries ago the Son of God was manifested, and during those centuries in the lives of hundreds, thousands, He has destroyed the works of the devil, mastered death by the gift of life, cast darkness out by the incoming of light, turned the selfishness of greed and jealousy into love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness. He has taken hold of lawless men and made them into the willing, glad bond-servants of God. So has He destroyed the works of the devil? All, so far, is but preliminary. It is twilight only. High noon has not yet arrived; but it is twilight, and noon must come. His first coming only brings to my heart the certainty of the ultimate victory. For He is coming again.

 The First Advent personally was the coming of the Stronger than the strong men armed. It was the coming of One to destroy the works of the devil in my own life and yours. Are they not destroyed? Are they not shaken to their foundations? Are they still established in the fiber of your being? Do you know as you sit in your home that the works of the devil, death, darkness, hatred and rebellion are the master forces of your being? The Good News tells you of One manifested to destroy all such works. I bear the testimony, the forces of this Christ have operated and are operating in my life, and the things that were formerly established are loosened and are falling to decay.

If in this article you are in the grip of forces of evil, if you realize that in your life his works are the things of strength, then I pray you turn with full purpose of heart to the One manifested long ago, Who is here now, Who, in all the power of His gracious victory, will destroy in you all the works of the devil and set you free taking you to the desire of His Father heart, perfection (Matt. 5:48; Jude 24).

THOUGHTS PROVOKE ACTION

THOUGHTS PROVOKE ACTION

“What think you of the Christ? Matt. 22:42

My business in this article is to ask you quietly in your individual and personal capacity, to answer this question. “What think you of the Christ? Matt. 22:42

Here, everything depends, as everywhere else, upon what a man thinks. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he," (Prov. 23:7) so said the Preacher of old. Your attitude toward Jesus Christ and your relationship to Him are alike based upon what you think of Him. Is He both Master and Lord? (John 13:13) Peter thought that to be true at that point but his actions didn’t confirm his thinking. He operated out of the flesh instead of the spirit which at that point needed to be quickened. You may turn that round if you will and state it thus, your attitude toward Christ results from what you think of Christ, and therefore reveals what you think of Christ. Consequently, the answer to this question is not an answer that can be made by the recitation of a creed. The answer to this question is not an answer that can be made by an affirmation or declaration of the lips. The answer to this question you are giving every day. Do you live a life by flesh or spirit leadership? There is a sense in which you can answer this question conclusively in this article, but you are answering it every day and every hour. If I in this message say to you what I think of Christ, I may do it with perfect sincerity, but I cannot convince you that what I say I think is the thing I think. How will you find out what I think of Christ? You can find out only if you know me in my everyday life, in my everyday activity, in what is my constant relation to Christ. A man's thought of Christ creates a man's attitude toward Christ, therefore I repeat, a man's attitude toward Christ reveals what the man's thought of Christ really is. Herein is the importance of this question. In the asking of it we pass beyond the externalities to the internal things of life. In asking this question we come into the very deepest of us. As I ask this question of my own heart, or let me put it in this way, as I let Christ Himself ask me, "What do you think of me?" it is not a mere question of speculation. It is in the last analysis a question that gets deeper down than the things which are upon the surface, to the very springs and fountains of my being. It does matter utmost for today and tomorrow, and the great forever of God, what I think of Him, because all my relation to Him depends upon that, and because what I am going to be in my own life depends entirely upon what I think of Christ. I stay here because if only I can fix your thought upon the importance of the question the battle is half won and the work is half done. All activity is the result of thought. A CONCEPTION ALWAYS UNDERLIES A DEED. Everything you do in any relationship of life is the direct outcome of some underlying thought, some conception. To put it in another way, AT THE BACK OF ALL ACTIVITY IS REASON, behind every choice that a man makes there is an impelling cause, and that impelling cause is a thought, a conception in the particular realm in which the activity is manifest. I watch what you do. I cannot watch what you think, but I can know what you think from what you do. We may be helped to an understanding of this question by a trivial illustration. It is this: I stand upon the highway and I watch the men and women passing up and down, and I see one man cross over from one side to the other. It is a manifest action, but before he crossed over he thought of crossing, and I know his prior thought by that simple action. It is a trivial illustration as I said, but lift it as high as you will, watch it in all the realms of human activity, from the lowest to the highest the same principle applies. WHAT YOU THINK IS MANIFEST IN WHAT YOU DO. We need to operate with the mind of Christ. (1 Cor. 2:16)

WHO RECEIVED WHO

WHO RECEIVED WHO

“Did you receive the Holy Ghost when you believed?”  Acts 19:2

Too many people are in the same boat as these that Paul questioned in this Acts passage. The one states a second blessing while the proper asks the nature of the first blessing. "Did you receive the Holy Ghost when you believed?" not, "Have you received the Holy Ghost since you believed?" There is no warrant for the introduction of that word "since" into the Authorized Version. The tense is the same in both the verbs. "The Holy Ghost Received You When You Believed?" The only difference is that the one is a question and the other an affirmation. Received you? You believed. This is a distinction rendered necessary by a difference. The introduction of the word "since" makes the Apostle's question mean, "Subsequently to believing, have you received the Holy Ghost?" The inquiry which he raised really was, "Coincidentally with believing, did you receive the Holy Ghost?" The Apostle's question was not whether these people had received a second blessing. It was rather an inquiry into the nature of the first blessing. An examination of the context will, I think, throw light upon the meaning of this question and enable us to make that personal and present application of it which is important to us. We see too many claiming salvation with no fruits from the activity of the Master and Lord in the life and the Holy Spirit Who produces that fruit.

DOUBLE LOVE

DOUBLE LOVE

“He that hath my commandments, and keeps them, he it is that loves me: and he that loves me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.” John 14:21

double love  Obedience to the Son and His commandments reveals love to the Right People and thereby produces both love from the Father as well as the Son. His love is able to flow on toward me unchecked in its manifestation and operation from a dual Source. This is an unbelievable outcome of obedience to the Son and His Law.

This is a statement that has at least a twofold meaning. First, that my love is proven by my obedience, and, secondly, that love to Christ produces obedience. That is but to state the one declaration in its twofold application.

I will manifest Myself unto him  Jesus, having expressed the truth concerning love in the terms of law, rose to another level: "He that loves Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest Myself unto him." If love is most perfectly manifested by obedience to definite and positive commandments it has as its answer visions, voices, revelations, unfolding's, and manifestations. Love's one utmost desire is to comprehend being loved. Thus love will obey the law, keep the commandments, and the loved One will answer the search by revealing Himself and thereby one becomes more like Him, walking towards perfection.

A TRUE SPIRITUAL MAN

A TRUE SPIRITUAL MAN

“The Spirit of life.” Rom. 8:2

Man is dust and Deity; of the dust, God in-breathed; linked to the material, offspring of the Spirit, of the earth, of the heavens. It is all poetry, but it is true poetry. Man becomes the conscious and capable ego, when by this mystery, baffling all explanation, the God of heaven by breath Divine makes man - Adam.

What is this man's consciousness? First, he is subject to the government of God. That is the first consciousness of personality, as Genesis reveals it. Secondly, he is conscious of the creation that he finds about him. He is able to name things, able to speak with clarity, able to understand things shared from God, able to till the soil, able to touch the resources of nature and make them blossom more perfectly. He is a being capable of co-operation with God, and all this in the power of the Spirit.

But I turn from the story. It is disappointing, it is heartbreaking. Just as the glory of it is growing upon the imagination, the vision is clouded and spoiled, and we leave it, and, passing through the centuries, come into the presence of the "last Adam." The story of the human life of Jesus from beginning to its unending condition—for there is no end to it—is the story of this truth, THAT THE SPIRIT OF GOD IS THE SPIRIT OF LIFE. All the human life of Jesus, naturally—not supernaturally—was life in the Spirit. His very existence was by the Spirit. He was a Man of the Spirit by processes different from those by which man at first was man of the Spirit.

In His ministry it becomes more obvious. He was anointed for ministry by the Spirit of God. He went down into the wilderness to temptation, driven by the Spirit of God. He came out of the wilderness and went back again to ministry in the power of the Spirit of God (Matt. 4:1; Luke 4:14), preaching and teaching in the power of the Spirit (Luke 4:18). He wrought miracles, as the record declares, by this selfsame power of the Spirit. He came to the sublime mystery of His death, and we hear the word again, "through the eternal Spirit He offered Himself without blemish unto God." (Heb. 9:14) He came to the morning of resurrection, and by the power of that Spirit He took life again, and came back into human consciousness and being. He tarried for forty days among His disciples, and, as Luke, the accurate Greek, the cultured scholar, tells us, He instructed His disciples by the Holy Ghost long before the Spirit was poured upon them (Acts 1:2-3). I open the Gospel of John, and read: "In Him was life"—essential life—"and the life was the light of men." (John 1:4) What is the life of Jesus? Spiritual life, not spiritual life as we too often use the phrase, as though it were something distinct from human life; but spiritual life in the simplest, and broadest, and profoundest sense of the truth that all life is life by the Spirit of God.

The life of Jesus is life in the Spirit from beginning to end, and when I read that "in Him was life, and the life was the light of men," (John 1:4) I understand the evangelist to mean that if I want to know what life really is, I must look at Him—physically, mentally, and spiritually—and see this truth, that all life is by the Spirit of God. Man's being, in all its complex wonders, is the creation of the Spirit of God, and the proper use of all the powers of the being is possible only in submission to the Spirit of life.

So that when we speak of regeneration, or of the filling of the Spirit, or of the anointing of the Spirit, or of spiritual life in the deepest and profoundest sense of the term, we are not asking men to enter a range or realm of life for which they were not made. We are calling them back to normality, to naturalness, to the fulfillment of the deepest and profoundest meaning of their own first creation. A man does not by his new birth become something other than himself. He becomes himself, as he never has been until by that new birth he finds himself. Not angels did Jesus Christ come to make; and if His terms are drastic and hard, if before He can baptize a man with the Spirit of life the man must consent to death, it is in order that he may find by the same new life, not some foreign life, but his own life. If you differ from the exposition, hear the actual words: "He that loses his life... shall find it," (Matt. 10:39) the very life he is willing to lose.

FLOWER GARDENS AND SKYSCRAPERS

FLOWER GARDENS AND SKYSCRAPERS

“Now the deeds of the flesh are evident…….But the fruit of the Spirit is love.” Gal 5:19, 22

Fruit suggests life. The Apostle writes, "the works of the flesh," but "the fruit of the Spirit." As a famous Englishman once forcefully put it, "The word works suggests the factory: the word fruit suggests the garden."

The finest works which man has ever wrought are all operations in the realm of death. If your quickly moving mind questions me about the flowers in the garden and tells me that they are man's work, I reply that it is where man's work ceases and God's begins that life proceeds. Man's work is always an operation in the realm of death. Take the amazing homes in which we live. It is useful, necessary, proper, but it could not be erected except as man handled dead materials. The tree in the forest with its rising sap and its budding life was no use to the builder. It must die before man could begin his work. The blocks and concrete begins to crumble and disintegrate the moment it is poured or laid. Man's works being operations in the realm of death, they contain within themselves the elements of break- up. While all these buildings were being erected, long before the builder put on the final stone with rejoicing, old Mother Nature with mossy fingers begins to pull it down, and, in spite of the fact that some might reconstruct and refurbish it, she is busy destroying it at this moment. As quickly as man works, his work crumbles and passes. That is the figure the Apostle used when he was speaking of the flesh. The works of the flesh are operations in the realm of death. The finest thing a man can do within his own self-centered life is a thing of decay and break-up, which perishes and passes and cannot abide.

Fruit is an operation in the realm of life, that mystic fact, which we all know by observation and none of us knows by final analysis and explanation. Life is of God as much in the flowering of a daisy as in the blossoming of stars. It owes its origin to God as surely in the sparrow as in the seraph. Fruit is God's work.

The word "fruit" presupposes life. There can be no fruit apart from life. The word "fruit" indicates cultivation. Fruit comes to perfection only in answer to the touch of cultivation. Fruit, finally, suggests sustenance. Fruit is a food. In these simplest thoughts concerning the word we have a revelation of the whole method of Christianity. Fruit suggests Christ active, feeding, nourishing, taking the one to the perfection of His Father (Matt. 5:48; Jude 24) which He was sent to bring about. Fruit reveals His faithfulness to the task He was sent to perform.

GOING TO THE FATHER

GOING TO THE FATHER

“A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father. Then said some of his disciples among themselves, What is this that he saith unto us, A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me: and, Because I go to the Father?” John 16:16-17

When Jesus said, "I go to the Father," so far as He personally is concerned He meant, "I came forth from the Father. I have walked the earth and the ways of men in the light of the Father. I am going back to the Father. There is nothing to keep me out. There is no barrier shutting me out of God's heaven. I go to the Father. I challenge heaven's light because of the purity of my life. I challenge the very holiness of God because I have never sinned. I am at home with the Father." That is Holiness challenging holiness and defying God's light to exclude Him. "I go to the Father, for I love the Father and my home is with the Father. The place of all my affinities is with the Father." Thus there emerges a new ideal of righteousness. We have said righteousness is for a man to pay his debts, and never to do his neighbor any harm, imagining that it consists in all that morality which is conditioned by the policeman. Jesus Christ says that righteousness consists in such relationships with heaven as make relationships with earth high and holy and noble. Righteousness consists not merely in the keeping of the laws written upon tables of stone, but in life which finds its center in the heart of God, and finds its home in the home of God. The Spirit reveals to us the true meaning of righteousness, and delivers us from false conceptions. The Spirit says to you righteousness is rightness, and rightness is right, and right is the proper relationship to the will of God, so that a man finds himself at home only when he finds himself with God.

Where I go flesh and blood cannot survive long enough. The flesh has desires it needs to be rid of, for they cause death and where I go is an eternal place. John 13:33 The Son revealed all these things.

Our origin was in His presence and our eternity returns us there and we shall have the credentials thanks to the Triune Godhead's work that qualifies us for that close communion (Matt. 5:48; Jude 24).