The Believer and Emotion 431
spirit or impart to man God’s untreated life or give him the Holy
Spirit to indwell his regenerated spirit proves thoroughly futile.
Neither our psychology nor that of the unbelievers can impart life to
them. Unless the Holy Spirit Himself performs the work, all is vain.
A Christian should understand that his emotion is wholly natural;
it is not the source of God’s life. If he in fact acknowledges that no
life of God resides in his emotion, he will never attempt to secure the
salvation of people by means of his power of emotion through tears,
mournful face, cries, or other emotional devices. No efforts of his
emotion can affect in the slightest the darkened human spirit. Except
the Holy Spirit gives life, man can have no life. If we do not rely on
the Spirit and use emotion instead, our work will yield no real fruit.
Those who labor for the Lord need to see distinctly that nothing in
man can generate God’s life. We may exhaust every psychological
method to excite man’s emotion, to arouse his interest in religion, to
make him feel sorry and shameful for his past history, to create in
him a fear of the coming penalty, to foster admiration of Christ, to
induce him to seek communication with Christians, or to be merciful
to the poor: we may even cause him to feel happy in doing these
things: but we cannot regenerate him. Since interest, sorrow, shame,
fear, admiration, aspiration, pity and joy are merely various impulses
of emotion, man can experience all these and his spirit still be dead
for he has not yet apprehended God intuitively. From the human
viewpoint, might not one be tempted to assert that if a man possesses
all these qualities must he not be a first-class Christian? Yet these are
but the manifestations of emotion; these do not prove regeneration.
The first and foremost sign of new birth in anyone is that he knows
God intuitively, for his spirit has been quickened. Let us not be
misled or be content in our work if people should change their
attitude towards us, become friendly with us, and manifest the above-
mentioned expressions. This is not regeneration!