610 The Spiritual Man
not exercise their wills to remember. And what is the outcome?—
“(a) the man himself does not use his memory; and (b) God does not
use it, because He will not do so apart from the believer’s co-action;
(c) evil spirits use it, and substitute their workings in the place of the
believer’s volitional use of his memory.” (Penn-Lewis, WOTS,121)
- Love. Text: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Rom. 5.5).
Believers misconstrue this to signify that they are not themselves to
love but to let the Holy Spirit dispense God’s love to them. They
petition God to love through them that His love may be supplied
abundantly so as to fill them with divine love. They no longer will
love for hereafter it is God Who must make them love. They cease to
exercise their faculty of affection, permitting its function to sink into
total paralysis. With the result that (a) the believer himself does not
love; (b) God will not bestow supernatural love upon him in
disregard of the man or the operation of his natural affection; and so
(c) evil spirits substitute themselves for the man and express their
love or hate through him. And once he has abandoned the use of his
will to control his affection the evil spirits put their counterfeit love
in him. Thereafter he behaves like wood and stone, cold and dead to
all affections. This explains why many saints, though holy, are
scarcely approachable.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with
all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength,”
says the Lord Jesus (Mark 12.30). Now whose love is this? Exactly
whose heart, soul, mind and strength is brought into view here? It is
of course ours. Our natural life needs to die, but these natural
endowments and their functions remain.
- Humility. Text: “Not that we venture to class or compare
ourselves with some of those who commend themselves” (2 Cor.
10.12 ff.). Believers misjudge this long passage from verse 12 to 18
as signifying a call to hide themselves to the extent that they are left