396 The Spiritual Man
RaptureThis law of the mind’s assistance can be applied as well to the
matter of faith concerning “the rapture.” At the beginning you enjoy
the “spirit of rapture,” but later on you feel as though it is drained of
its awareness of the nearness of the Lord’s return and the reality of
your rapture. In that hour you should recall the law of the mind
coming to the aid of the spirit. You ought to pray with the mind even
while your spiritual sense is empty. If you merely wait to have your
spirit refilled with the sense of rapture, you will never possess it
again; but by exercising your mind to think and to pray, you shall
shortly be filled with the spiritual awareness you once had.
PreachingFor the preaching of the truth this principle is vital. Those truths
learned in the past are now stored in our brain. Communicating to
others what is in our mind simply by our mind can produce no
spiritual results whatever. No doubt at first we knew those truths in
our spirit, but currently the spirit seems to have receded and all
which is left are memories. How, then, can our spirit be replenished
with these truths so that we may communicate them by the spirit to
others? By exercising our mind. We should re-meditate on those
truths before God and pray over them once again; that is, we should
take those truths as centers and pray around them. Shortly thereafter
we shall discover our spirit being permeated once more with those
truths which had been there before. These initially are possessed in
the spirit, later are stored in the believer’s mind, and now re-enter his
spirit by praying with the mind. Thus are we qualified to preach the
truths we once before had known in our spirit.