606 The Spiritual Man
It is not God’s purpose to annihilate our volition. If we say we
henceforth shall have no volition of our own but shall let His will be
manifested in our body we have not offered ourselves to God;
instead, we have covenanted with the evil spirit since God never
substitutes His will for ours. The right attitude is this: that I have my
own will, yet I will the will of God. We should put our volition on
His side—and even this is to be done not by our own strength but by
the life of God. The truth of the whole matter is that the life which
formerly energized our volition has now been committed to death so
that now we engage our volition in the energizing life of God. We do
not eliminate our will; it is still there; only the life has changed. What
has died is our own life; the function of the will continues although
renewed by God. Hereafter the volition is energized by the new life.
The Work of the Holy SpiritThose believers are numberless who have plunged into passivity
and enslavement because of not understanding the work of the Holy
Spirit. What follows are some of the most common
misunderstandings.
- Obey the Holy Spirit. Believers think Acts 5.32 suggests that
they must obey the Holy Spirit—“the Holy Spirit whom God has
given to those who obey him.” But they fail, according to the
command given in the Bible, to test all the spirits to see if they are of
truth or of error (1 John 4.1,6 ). They instead accept as being the
Holy Spirit every spirit which comes to them. They think this
obedience must be highly pleasing to God. What they do not know is
that the Scripture here does not teach us to obey the Holy Spirit but
to obey God the Father through the Spirit. In verse 29 of Acts 5 the
Apostles when under questioning by the council replied that they
“must obey God.” Should anyone make God the Spirit his object of
obedience and forget God the Father he tends to obey the spirit in
him or around him instead of obeying through the Holy Spirit the