468 The Spiritual Man
the working of the Spirit causes spiritual men to advance. The
progress of the former is false; only what is attained in the power of
the Holy Spirit is true.
The Aims of GodWhy then does God impart and later withdraw these feelings?
Because He has a number of aims He wishes to fulfill.
First. God grants joy to believers to draw them closer to Him. He
uses His gifts to attract men to Himself. He expects His children to
believe in His love in every circumstance after He has once shown
how gracious and loving He is towards them. Unfortunately
Christians love God only when they sense His love and forget Him
the moment they do not.
Second. God deals with our lives in this fashion in order to help us
understand ourselves. We realize the hardest lesson to learn is that of
knowing oneself—to appreciate how corrupt, empty, sinful, and void
of good one is. This lesson has to be absorbed throughout life. The
deeper one learns it the more one perceives the depth of uncleanness
of his life and nature in the eyes of the Lord. Yet this is instruction
which we do not relish learning nor is our natural life able to learn it.
Hence the Lord employs many ways to teach and to lead us into this
knowledge of self. Among His numerous ways the most important is
this giving of joyous feeling and later taking it away. Through such
treatment one begins to comprehend his corruptness. In the state of
aridity he may come to see how in the former days of joy he misused
God’s gift in uplifting himself and despising others, and how he
many times acted through the ferment of emotion rather than with the
spirit. Such realization evokes humility. Had he understood that this
experience is arranged by God to assist him to know himself, he
would not have sought blissful sensation so intently as though it were
the summit. God desires us to recognize that we may act just as often
in dishonoring God’s name when in ecstasy as when in anguish. We