Lesson 7
SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN OUR SPIRITS
We have come to know that spiritual things are as real as material things.
Love is as real as the building in which you live, and sometimes more real than material substance.
When we realize the reality of spiritual things, so that we will take account of them, plan on them as we do on material things, life will cease to be excursions in the dark.
Courage is a spiritual force. It is born of the spirit. It is not associated in any way with our reasoning faculties.
Reason cannot understand courage which can face defeat and still rise from the mat fighting.
You have heard of the fighting heart, that is a fighting spirit, a conquering spirit, a dominating spirit that cannot be whipped or defeated.
Reason says, "It is all over, you might just as well throw in the sponge." Sense knowledge has given up the fight altogether, but you are just beginning. Your spirit has taken the count again and again, but it keeps on fighting. It cannot be whipped.
I remember in the early days of my life when everything was going dead wrong. Death would have been a sweet escape, but I could not, and I could not be whipped.
At times I wanted to be whipped and would rather have been than not. If I could have been defeated and floated out with the wreckage that I saw on the stream of life, I would have been glad, but I could not give up.
Somehow or other, it seemed utterly impossible to conceive of being defeated. I must succeed.
My tired brain, my worn-out body cried for rest, but that something inside refused to give way to the desire of the Senses.
That is in every man if he will only cultivate it.
You see, courage is a spiritual reality that rises above circumstances, rises above Sense Knowledge facts, and dominates.
Faith is another great spiritual force. It is not born of Sense Knowledge. It is nursed in the bosom of the spirit.
It embraces failure and breathes victory into it. It uses the defeat of this morning, and the failures of yesterday, to build a foundation on which the super-structure of Success stands.
Faith is the creative force in the human spirit. Bolstered by wisdom, it cannot fail.
The will to win is a spiritual force. It is the dominating General in the council of your spirit nature.
It rallies the weak and tired body. It drives the exhausted senses in the council of your spirit nature.
It builds strength into the Senses. It stands invincible in the heart of man; the will to win, the will to conquer.
Joy is a spiritual thing. Joy is not happiness. Happiness belongs to the Senses. You are happy if things are beautiful and satisfactory to the mind and to the body; but joy flourishes, fills the soul with laughter and song when every beautiful thing is destroyed and every pleasing flower has lost its fragrance. Joy fills the whole being with heaven's own music.
Hope is of the spirit. Hope seems to spring out of the dead embers of a thousand failures, lifts its petals and its beautiful flower into the sunlight.
It is filled with fragrance and laughter.
Hope does not belong to the Senses. Sense Knowledge never produced a single member of the Hope family
Wisdom is not a product of knowledge, schools, teachers or libraries. Wisdom springs forth in all its beauty from the human spirit.
Wisdom is the cunning artificer, the creator of every beautiful tiring, the inventor of every labor-saving device. It has taken the commonplace and made it luxuriant with beauty.
Endurance is that quality that makes certain types of men outstanding in the world's history. They plod on month after month, year after year, with a sturdy self-reliance that thrills.
They bear the burdens of hundreds. Pain and disease may wrack their bodies, but they cannot be conquered.
This is one of God's richest endowments of the spirit.
Faithfulness stands out in the business markets of the world. We see it in the nurses in our hospitals. But in no other place does it grow so luxuriantly as in the home, in the heart of the wife and mother.
Through all the testings, the trials, the heartaches, the sufferings of life, it reigns a victor; faithfulness, a mighty force that makes the character strong.
Negative Forces
We have dealt with the positive forces or qualities of the spirit, but there are other forces detrimental to our spiritual development and growth.
I would not have believed at one time that hate, the hideous, monstrous thing, that deformed, unnatural thing, could be a child of the human spirit.
I have long associated the children of the spirit with love, joy, peace, and the many other beautiful flowers which have grown out of that soil. Then I was compelled to acknowledge that hate sprang from the same source.
Hatred, is devastating nations. It is dwarfing beautiful spirits. Men and women who never hated, now are filled with it.
It is poisoning the blood streams of their bodies. It is poisoning everything beautiful in their bodies.
Hate is a devilish thing inspired of hell. It will produce a plague like the flu that followed the first world war.
It should never be given place in anyone's spirit. I would never allow it to gain the ascendancy in my life. It is a poisonous, noxious weed.
Another bitter enemy to which the spirit gives birth is fear.
What a deadly enemy to success. It dwarfs our thinking. It devastates faith. It fills the whole life with a spiritual paralysis.
One can conquer it by knowing that he is tied up with God, and that the adversary has no power to rule his life.
Fear is a child of ignorance on the part of a son of God.
If you know what your abilities are, and you know that your enemy has been conquered, as you know that two and two make four, and that two quarters make a half, then you can face the thing that gave birth to fear and laugh in its face.
You are a conqueror, but as long as ignorance holds sway, that ignorance is darkness and you haven't any light in your life to dispel the darkness. Consequently, you are living in the darkness of ignorance and that darkness is a fearful thing.
When you know that the Son has made you free, and the things that you feared have stopped being a destructive force, then you arise and go down life's pathway singing your song of victory
They cannot fill you with doubt and fear, for you know Him whom you have believed, and you are resting in His grace.
Another hideous, monstrous thing is unbelief, doubt. It is a multi-headed enemy. It often comes in disguise, but the keen spirit-ruled one will recognize it.
Doubt and unbelief are born of the same parentage as fear. Unbelief is a product of ignorance of the Word.
The man who doubts that there is a God is living in the darkness of Sense Knowledge. He does not know the limitations of Sense Knowledge. Consequently, he accepts its verdict without a question, and the verdict is wrong. It is not based upon facts.
When you know the limitations of Sense Knowledge and how deceptive it is at times, it will put you on your guard.
Had Darwin known the limitations of Sense Knowledge, he would never have written the book that has destroyed faith in millions of lives.
Darwin had nothing but Sense evidence. He did not give place to the spirit in his reckoning. He was only half a man in his mental development. The most vital part of him, his spirit, was covered in absolute darkness.
The way to destroy unbelief is to become acquainted with the great Father-God and with Jesus, His Son.
Most often this comes to us first, through the Book called the Bible, which is a Revelation from the heart of God to the heart of man.
Another bitter enemy that is born, not of the reason, but of the spirit is despair.
It chokes hope, faith, and love out of the heart. It makes destruction seem a pleasure, and a thing to be desired.
It has driven every suicide victim to his fatal end. It hounds the foot-steps of the multitudes who are "hitch-hiking" through life. Despair has whipped them.
I wondered if anyone had the heroism to face despair and conquer it, then I found that one look into the face of Him who met despair and conquered it could conquer it for me.
The Spirit of Jesus
For a long time I could only see the physical aspects of the Substitutionary Sacrifice of Jesus.
As we see the disciples in the Four Gospels, we see that they only had Sense Knowledge. They saw the Man, they heard His voice, they felt His hands, they witnessed His miracles. Then they saw the arrest, the trial, and the crucifixion, Not one of them saw beyond the veil of the human body that shrouded the struggle of the spirit.
Eventually I saw that it was not His physical death that dealt with the sin problem, but it was His spiritual death.
His spirit became a partaker of the thing that separated man from God.
I saw that He died twice on the cross. The moment that He was made sin His spirit passed under the dominion of death. Hours later, He died physically.
"Him who knew no sin, God made to become sin; that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”
It was His spirit that was made sin. It is our spirits that are made Righteous. It is our spirits that are recreated. It was the spiritual suffering of Jesus that paid the awful price for our sin.
I did not want to accept these things I am telling you, and for a long time I rejected them. I refused to allow my mind to accept these facts, but now I have come to see them. They have become a part of my consciousness.
First, it was the spirit of Jesus that was made sin with our sin. He was stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted with our sin. It was not His body, but His spirit.
Then I saw that it was His spirit that experienced, or "tasted death for every man." It was not a physical thing. It was not a mental thing. It was a spiritual reality.
Then I went farther, and I saw that He suffered in His spirit. It was not the suffering of His mind, or the suffering of His body that paid the penalty of our transgressions; it was the suffering of His spirit. (Read my book, "The Father and His Family" to appreciate what Jesus did for you.)
His spirit, that had been made sin, was under judgment, suffering what humanity would suffer spiritually.
Then I saw that when He had paid the price, had satisfied the claims of Justice, He was justified in spirit, made alive in spirit, and was made righteous in spirit; that which He had lost on the cross was restored to Him.
He had lost His ability to stand in the Father's presence, and He cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
His spirit, which had been made sin, and had suffered the penalty that belonged to the human race, was Justified, made Righteous.
Next, He was made alive in spirit. They could no longer hold Him after He had satisfied the claims of Justice for the human race.
The spirit that had been made sin was recreated. He was made the head of a New Creation, "the first born out of death."
It was a spiritual death and a spiritual birth. It was not physical or mental. This is the reason that the senses (or Sense Knowledge) have declared that the Substitutionary Sacrifice is unreasonable to the senses, but it is the most logical and natural thing to the human spirit.
When He was made alive in spirit, the whole church (in the mind of Justice) was made alive.
When He was recreated, we were recreated in Christ. Philippians 2:10.
Then in that recreation, He meets our adversary, Satan, and conquers him, strips him of his authority, defeats him in open combat, and takes from him the armor of which he had robbed Adam in the Garden.
Then He was raised from the dead. That resurrection is more than physical, psychological, or metaphysical. It is an absolute reality; physically, mentally and spiritually.
He was resurrected, taken out of the realm of death into the realm of life.
It is no wonder that Paul, by the Spirit, tells us in Romans 5:17, "For if, by the trespass of the one, death seized the sovereignty through the one; much more shall they that receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign as kings in the realm of life through Jesus Christ, our Lord." (Weymouth)
That translation throws upon the screen of our spirits the reality of the substitutionary work of the Man of Galilee.
You see, by the same token Isaiah declares, Isaiah 53:4-5, "Surely He hath borne our sicknesses, and carried our diseases; yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we were healed."
It was all spiritual. Then healing of the physical body must manifest through the spirit.
Spiritually, God laid upon Him the diseases of the human race. Those diseases were not physical; they were spiritual. Just as sin is a spiritual thing, sickness is a spiritual thing manifested in the physical realm.
Those diseases were laid upon the spirit of the Son of God. He bore them away, and by His stripes we are healed. When He was made well in spirit, we were made well.
When He was made Righteous, we were made Righteous.
When He conquered the adversary, we conquered the adversary in Him. Herein lies the secret of absolute success.
Jesus conquered the adversary on our behalf. If He did, then we today are conquerors; because, by His victory over the adversary, we won our victory.
The Fruit of the Spirit
When Paul gives to us his introduction to the great spiritual realities as recorded in 1 Corinthians 1:30, he says, "But of him are you in Christ Jesus, who was made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption."
He puts wisdom first. The same thing holds true in speaking of the gifts of the spirit in 1 Corinthians 12:7-8.
"But to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit to profit withal. For to one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom; and to another the word of knowledge, according to the same spirit."
Wisdom is placed first here, showing that in the mind of the Father, wisdom holds the foremost place.
Now you can understand clearly the previous statement that it is not a problem of knowledge, but it is a problem of wisdom which knows how to use wisely the knowledge that has been gained.
In Galatians 5:22 we have this great passage, "But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control; against such there is no law."
This is not the fruit of the Holy Spirit, but the fruit of the recreated spirit.
See the 16th verse, "Walk by the spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh (or the desires of the senses)."
"For the senses are struggling against your spirit, and your spirit is struggling against your senses, for these are contrary the one to the other, that you may not do the things that you would. But if you are led by the spirit, (your own recreated spirit, not the Holy Spirit) you are not under law."
Then He shows the works of the Senses. It is a striking fact that we have always thought of these two passages as the work of the Holy Spirit, but they are not.
The first fruitage of this recreated spirit is love.
It goes on down through the list of nine marvelous fruits that the spirit bears in its daily contacts with mankind. Ahead of all these He has placed wisdom to use knowledge, to use love, and to make love a blessing to the world; wisdom to control joy, and wisdom to witness of the peace of God that passes all understanding.
It is of the first importance that we recognize that wisdom, and all these other fruits of the recreated life, are the products of our own human spirit.
As we keep in the closest fellowship with the Word, these great realities shine forth in our lives.
Questions
1. When will life cease to be excursions in the dark?
2. What is courage?
3. Name spiritual forces found in this lesson:
4. How does one conquer fear?
5. What produces unbelief?
6. What are the negative spiritual forces in this lesson?
7. It was the spiritual suffering of Jesus that paid the awful price for our sin. What 7 points does the author make about this point?
8. Jesus conquered the adversary on our behalf. If He did, then?
9. The fruit mentioned in Galatians5:22, are they of the Holy Spirit?
10. What should we recognize about wisdom and all the other fruits?
SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN OUR SPIRITS
We have come to know that spiritual things are as real as material things.
Love is as real as the building in which you live, and sometimes more real than material substance.
When we realize the reality of spiritual things, so that we will take account of them, plan on them as we do on material things, life will cease to be excursions in the dark.
Courage is a spiritual force. It is born of the spirit. It is not associated in any way with our reasoning faculties.
Reason cannot understand courage which can face defeat and still rise from the mat fighting.
You have heard of the fighting heart, that is a fighting spirit, a conquering spirit, a dominating spirit that cannot be whipped or defeated.
Reason says, "It is all over, you might just as well throw in the sponge." Sense knowledge has given up the fight altogether, but you are just beginning. Your spirit has taken the count again and again, but it keeps on fighting. It cannot be whipped.
I remember in the early days of my life when everything was going dead wrong. Death would have been a sweet escape, but I could not, and I could not be whipped.
At times I wanted to be whipped and would rather have been than not. If I could have been defeated and floated out with the wreckage that I saw on the stream of life, I would have been glad, but I could not give up.
Somehow or other, it seemed utterly impossible to conceive of being defeated. I must succeed.
My tired brain, my worn-out body cried for rest, but that something inside refused to give way to the desire of the Senses.
That is in every man if he will only cultivate it.
You see, courage is a spiritual reality that rises above circumstances, rises above Sense Knowledge facts, and dominates.
Faith is another great spiritual force. It is not born of Sense Knowledge. It is nursed in the bosom of the spirit.
It embraces failure and breathes victory into it. It uses the defeat of this morning, and the failures of yesterday, to build a foundation on which the super-structure of Success stands.
Faith is the creative force in the human spirit. Bolstered by wisdom, it cannot fail.
The will to win is a spiritual force. It is the dominating General in the council of your spirit nature.
It rallies the weak and tired body. It drives the exhausted senses in the council of your spirit nature.
It builds strength into the Senses. It stands invincible in the heart of man; the will to win, the will to conquer.
Joy is a spiritual thing. Joy is not happiness. Happiness belongs to the Senses. You are happy if things are beautiful and satisfactory to the mind and to the body; but joy flourishes, fills the soul with laughter and song when every beautiful thing is destroyed and every pleasing flower has lost its fragrance. Joy fills the whole being with heaven's own music.
Hope is of the spirit. Hope seems to spring out of the dead embers of a thousand failures, lifts its petals and its beautiful flower into the sunlight.
It is filled with fragrance and laughter.
Hope does not belong to the Senses. Sense Knowledge never produced a single member of the Hope family
Wisdom is not a product of knowledge, schools, teachers or libraries. Wisdom springs forth in all its beauty from the human spirit.
Wisdom is the cunning artificer, the creator of every beautiful tiring, the inventor of every labor-saving device. It has taken the commonplace and made it luxuriant with beauty.
Endurance is that quality that makes certain types of men outstanding in the world's history. They plod on month after month, year after year, with a sturdy self-reliance that thrills.
They bear the burdens of hundreds. Pain and disease may wrack their bodies, but they cannot be conquered.
This is one of God's richest endowments of the spirit.
Faithfulness stands out in the business markets of the world. We see it in the nurses in our hospitals. But in no other place does it grow so luxuriantly as in the home, in the heart of the wife and mother.
Through all the testings, the trials, the heartaches, the sufferings of life, it reigns a victor; faithfulness, a mighty force that makes the character strong.
Negative Forces
We have dealt with the positive forces or qualities of the spirit, but there are other forces detrimental to our spiritual development and growth.
I would not have believed at one time that hate, the hideous, monstrous thing, that deformed, unnatural thing, could be a child of the human spirit.
I have long associated the children of the spirit with love, joy, peace, and the many other beautiful flowers which have grown out of that soil. Then I was compelled to acknowledge that hate sprang from the same source.
Hatred, is devastating nations. It is dwarfing beautiful spirits. Men and women who never hated, now are filled with it.
It is poisoning the blood streams of their bodies. It is poisoning everything beautiful in their bodies.
Hate is a devilish thing inspired of hell. It will produce a plague like the flu that followed the first world war.
It should never be given place in anyone's spirit. I would never allow it to gain the ascendancy in my life. It is a poisonous, noxious weed.
Another bitter enemy to which the spirit gives birth is fear.
What a deadly enemy to success. It dwarfs our thinking. It devastates faith. It fills the whole life with a spiritual paralysis.
One can conquer it by knowing that he is tied up with God, and that the adversary has no power to rule his life.
Fear is a child of ignorance on the part of a son of God.
If you know what your abilities are, and you know that your enemy has been conquered, as you know that two and two make four, and that two quarters make a half, then you can face the thing that gave birth to fear and laugh in its face.
You are a conqueror, but as long as ignorance holds sway, that ignorance is darkness and you haven't any light in your life to dispel the darkness. Consequently, you are living in the darkness of ignorance and that darkness is a fearful thing.
When you know that the Son has made you free, and the things that you feared have stopped being a destructive force, then you arise and go down life's pathway singing your song of victory
They cannot fill you with doubt and fear, for you know Him whom you have believed, and you are resting in His grace.
Another hideous, monstrous thing is unbelief, doubt. It is a multi-headed enemy. It often comes in disguise, but the keen spirit-ruled one will recognize it.
Doubt and unbelief are born of the same parentage as fear. Unbelief is a product of ignorance of the Word.
The man who doubts that there is a God is living in the darkness of Sense Knowledge. He does not know the limitations of Sense Knowledge. Consequently, he accepts its verdict without a question, and the verdict is wrong. It is not based upon facts.
When you know the limitations of Sense Knowledge and how deceptive it is at times, it will put you on your guard.
Had Darwin known the limitations of Sense Knowledge, he would never have written the book that has destroyed faith in millions of lives.
Darwin had nothing but Sense evidence. He did not give place to the spirit in his reckoning. He was only half a man in his mental development. The most vital part of him, his spirit, was covered in absolute darkness.
The way to destroy unbelief is to become acquainted with the great Father-God and with Jesus, His Son.
Most often this comes to us first, through the Book called the Bible, which is a Revelation from the heart of God to the heart of man.
Another bitter enemy that is born, not of the reason, but of the spirit is despair.
It chokes hope, faith, and love out of the heart. It makes destruction seem a pleasure, and a thing to be desired.
It has driven every suicide victim to his fatal end. It hounds the foot-steps of the multitudes who are "hitch-hiking" through life. Despair has whipped them.
I wondered if anyone had the heroism to face despair and conquer it, then I found that one look into the face of Him who met despair and conquered it could conquer it for me.
The Spirit of Jesus
For a long time I could only see the physical aspects of the Substitutionary Sacrifice of Jesus.
As we see the disciples in the Four Gospels, we see that they only had Sense Knowledge. They saw the Man, they heard His voice, they felt His hands, they witnessed His miracles. Then they saw the arrest, the trial, and the crucifixion, Not one of them saw beyond the veil of the human body that shrouded the struggle of the spirit.
Eventually I saw that it was not His physical death that dealt with the sin problem, but it was His spiritual death.
His spirit became a partaker of the thing that separated man from God.
I saw that He died twice on the cross. The moment that He was made sin His spirit passed under the dominion of death. Hours later, He died physically.
"Him who knew no sin, God made to become sin; that we might become the righteousness of God in him.”
It was His spirit that was made sin. It is our spirits that are made Righteous. It is our spirits that are recreated. It was the spiritual suffering of Jesus that paid the awful price for our sin.
I did not want to accept these things I am telling you, and for a long time I rejected them. I refused to allow my mind to accept these facts, but now I have come to see them. They have become a part of my consciousness.
First, it was the spirit of Jesus that was made sin with our sin. He was stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted with our sin. It was not His body, but His spirit.
Then I saw that it was His spirit that experienced, or "tasted death for every man." It was not a physical thing. It was not a mental thing. It was a spiritual reality.
Then I went farther, and I saw that He suffered in His spirit. It was not the suffering of His mind, or the suffering of His body that paid the penalty of our transgressions; it was the suffering of His spirit. (Read my book, "The Father and His Family" to appreciate what Jesus did for you.)
His spirit, that had been made sin, was under judgment, suffering what humanity would suffer spiritually.
Then I saw that when He had paid the price, had satisfied the claims of Justice, He was justified in spirit, made alive in spirit, and was made righteous in spirit; that which He had lost on the cross was restored to Him.
He had lost His ability to stand in the Father's presence, and He cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
His spirit, which had been made sin, and had suffered the penalty that belonged to the human race, was Justified, made Righteous.
Next, He was made alive in spirit. They could no longer hold Him after He had satisfied the claims of Justice for the human race.
The spirit that had been made sin was recreated. He was made the head of a New Creation, "the first born out of death."
It was a spiritual death and a spiritual birth. It was not physical or mental. This is the reason that the senses (or Sense Knowledge) have declared that the Substitutionary Sacrifice is unreasonable to the senses, but it is the most logical and natural thing to the human spirit.
When He was made alive in spirit, the whole church (in the mind of Justice) was made alive.
When He was recreated, we were recreated in Christ. Philippians 2:10.
Then in that recreation, He meets our adversary, Satan, and conquers him, strips him of his authority, defeats him in open combat, and takes from him the armor of which he had robbed Adam in the Garden.
Then He was raised from the dead. That resurrection is more than physical, psychological, or metaphysical. It is an absolute reality; physically, mentally and spiritually.
He was resurrected, taken out of the realm of death into the realm of life.
It is no wonder that Paul, by the Spirit, tells us in Romans 5:17, "For if, by the trespass of the one, death seized the sovereignty through the one; much more shall they that receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign as kings in the realm of life through Jesus Christ, our Lord." (Weymouth)
That translation throws upon the screen of our spirits the reality of the substitutionary work of the Man of Galilee.
You see, by the same token Isaiah declares, Isaiah 53:4-5, "Surely He hath borne our sicknesses, and carried our diseases; yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we were healed."
It was all spiritual. Then healing of the physical body must manifest through the spirit.
Spiritually, God laid upon Him the diseases of the human race. Those diseases were not physical; they were spiritual. Just as sin is a spiritual thing, sickness is a spiritual thing manifested in the physical realm.
Those diseases were laid upon the spirit of the Son of God. He bore them away, and by His stripes we are healed. When He was made well in spirit, we were made well.
When He was made Righteous, we were made Righteous.
When He conquered the adversary, we conquered the adversary in Him. Herein lies the secret of absolute success.
Jesus conquered the adversary on our behalf. If He did, then we today are conquerors; because, by His victory over the adversary, we won our victory.
The Fruit of the Spirit
When Paul gives to us his introduction to the great spiritual realities as recorded in 1 Corinthians 1:30, he says, "But of him are you in Christ Jesus, who was made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption."
He puts wisdom first. The same thing holds true in speaking of the gifts of the spirit in 1 Corinthians 12:7-8.
"But to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit to profit withal. For to one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom; and to another the word of knowledge, according to the same spirit."
Wisdom is placed first here, showing that in the mind of the Father, wisdom holds the foremost place.
Now you can understand clearly the previous statement that it is not a problem of knowledge, but it is a problem of wisdom which knows how to use wisely the knowledge that has been gained.
In Galatians 5:22 we have this great passage, "But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control; against such there is no law."
This is not the fruit of the Holy Spirit, but the fruit of the recreated spirit.
See the 16th verse, "Walk by the spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh (or the desires of the senses)."
"For the senses are struggling against your spirit, and your spirit is struggling against your senses, for these are contrary the one to the other, that you may not do the things that you would. But if you are led by the spirit, (your own recreated spirit, not the Holy Spirit) you are not under law."
Then He shows the works of the Senses. It is a striking fact that we have always thought of these two passages as the work of the Holy Spirit, but they are not.
The first fruitage of this recreated spirit is love.
It goes on down through the list of nine marvelous fruits that the spirit bears in its daily contacts with mankind. Ahead of all these He has placed wisdom to use knowledge, to use love, and to make love a blessing to the world; wisdom to control joy, and wisdom to witness of the peace of God that passes all understanding.
It is of the first importance that we recognize that wisdom, and all these other fruits of the recreated life, are the products of our own human spirit.
As we keep in the closest fellowship with the Word, these great realities shine forth in our lives.
Questions
1. When will life cease to be excursions in the dark?
2. What is courage?
3. Name spiritual forces found in this lesson:
- F
- T
- J
- H
- W
- E
- F
4. How does one conquer fear?
5. What produces unbelief?
6. What are the negative spiritual forces in this lesson?
- H
- F
- U
- D
- D
7. It was the spiritual suffering of Jesus that paid the awful price for our sin. What 7 points does the author make about this point?
- .
- .
- .
- .
- .
- .
- .
8. Jesus conquered the adversary on our behalf. If He did, then?
9. The fruit mentioned in Galatians5:22, are they of the Holy Spirit?
10. What should we recognize about wisdom and all the other fruits?