The Biblical Secret To Fruitful Spiritual Life

I hope you understand what I’m saying. He never would open up to her. She began to really press the matter. She needed communication. She needed to forgive him for some things, and he needed to be forgiven, but she couldn’t. She needed to establish a relationship, and all this time, he had been the perfect spiritual Christian. If the spirit alone could transform a human being, he would have been transformed. I tell you, the man did everything by the book, but there was a great big, huge wall that said, You cannot tamper with my life. Don’t mess with my soul. And when push came to shove, when it finally came down to “have to,” it was more important to him to not be messed with in his soul than it was to have a marriage. And they are divorced. And he is not following the Lord. I wish I could tell you he didn’t have any brothers and sisters.

I want to tell you something, folks. I watch Christians kind of talk to one another. We can’t help but ask these questions. Who is going to make it? Will he make it? Is he going to follow the work? That brother is so committed to Jesus Christ. Oh, that sister is so committed. That brother’s weak. He’s not going to make it. That sister’s weak. She’s not going to make it. That brother, I’m not sure about him. Forget your conjectures. You don’t know. The most devout among us will commit the most hideous sins. The weakest among us will be there to the bloody end. The most neurotic among us will be there to the end. The most stable will go off somewhere else. And the most stable will make it, and the weak won’t make it. There is no prediction of this.

I have found two things that help me know. One of them is just a little bit, and the other one is a whole lot. One of them is…I know this is going to sound really strange…you’re expecting, how much of his time he spends with the Lord? How much did he witness? How much did he tithe? How obedient was it? No, how big was his library? When you walk into a home with this very devout brother, there are three books. No way. No way. Five books. No way. He’s just enjoying…he’s spooning the ice cream as he goes by. He’s forgetting the hyssop, the garlic; he’s just taking the goodies. He’ll step away when things get rough. He’ll come back when they get juiced up again. How big is his library? How much does he read? How much does he own his own to seek the Lord and the things of God. But the other one is really, really strange, but it’s true. How willing is he to seek out and receive professional help? I’m going to repeat that because I’m the guy who said it, and I know this is shocking. How willing is he to go to a professional counselor for help? Well, you say, “I just wouldn’t go to one of those people.” Not even a Christian? How about a really good Christian? Well, you might…if you’re in trouble spiritually.

What’s wrong with you, sir, is that you don’t want anybody to mess with your soul. You’re scared. And there are not very many men who have the courage to walk into a Christian counselor, wife in tow, and face what you are about to catch when you walk in that door, because we men manipulate our wives. And there aren’t many women who want to go with their husbands to a Christian counselor, either, because you manipulate your husbands. In fact, most of your marriage is about manipulating one another. The soul is damaged beyond all knowing, and we do not want it messed with. We want the spirit, but we do not wish for the soul. We want the cross. Well, we figure the cross can go out there and do its work, and the spirit can do its work, and we will be delivered from having our souls exposed.

Three things. The work of the spirit within, the work of the cross without, and some help. To those of you who are married, I just want to say to you, you cannot have the marriage you need without outside help. You need a referee. There are times when there are things you cannot work out. And to you single brothers out there and single sisters, you sometimes…a few of you…can get so self-righteous. It’s really interesting to watch your commitment to Jesus Christ. Greater than Francis of Assisi, much greater than Paul of Tarsus, greater than St. Simeon who climbed up there on that pole and lived there for 30 or 40 years, and then watch that commitment to Christ crumble and watch you turn into a logician with all sorts of intellectual excuses and reasons why you aren’t about to go to a Christian counselor. And I’m going to tell you something, brother: you’ve got problems in your soul, and you don’t want anyone to find them out, and that’s true of you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you and you. I skipped one.

You and I need help in our souls. We really need help. I would say to brothers and sisters who are considering coming here, and I would say to brothers and sisters who are considering going to experience the church. Forget it if you are not willing, if your dreams are only to know the deeper Christian life, and you think in terms of wonderful, glorious spiritual experiences. The reason is that your Lord will always take those experiences away from you, and you will be bitterly disappointed with him. The Lord will love you, and it’ll be like a warm puppy dog. It’ll just be glorious. The Lord Himself will test your commitment to Him. He will not establish a relationship with you on the basis of spiritual blessing, not a permanent one. He wants you to love Him, period, without motivation. And He will withdraw, and you have got to be prepared for that. In that moment, neither spiritual things nor positional truth, nor speaking in tongues, nor anything else will help you. At that moment, you simply have to trust, and you have to not get bitter at Him when He walks off from you and stays gone an interminably long time. In fact, maturity comes when you treat spiritual seasons of flood and torrents exactly the same way you treat the Sinai desert. You just take them both from the hand of God and say they are the Lord. So, if you’re looking for a warm puppy and you’re calling it the deeper Christian life, it’ll eventually turn on you and bite you. The deeper Christian life, even in the realm of the spirit, is not going to live up to what you’re looking for. Well, that’s one reason why you ought never to seek the Lord in the depths.

Now, if you come to the church, or that’s the way, you don’t have to come to the church. Also, remember there’s not only going to be this blessing and this dry spell, but remember there’ll be the cross, and that turns a lot of people off. The cross has turned people off. A little switch goes off. I can tell you without fear of contradiction that the masses of Christians who become interested in the deeper Christian life are not interested in the deeper Christian life. They’re interested in a warm feeling; a warm feeling. They think the deeper Christian life is always a warm feeling, and they will have it, and the Lord will always love them, and there will be this torrent of spiritual joy or something going on inside of them, and their mind is only, or their thoughts are only on the spirit. I’m telling you the spirit turns off. Now you must also remember that the spirit not only turns off, but the water also turns off, and the cross also comes. If you are foolish enough to not only want the deeper Christian life, but you want to experience it within the body, the context of the body of Christ, you are truly a foolish human being. For now, you have moved into even worse waters. Your soul is going to be exposed just by getting up and living with them. The cross will quadruple at least in your encounters. The dry spells will go longer because you’re not only having private dry spells. You’re having church dry spells.

Oh, the church is the most glorious place on the earth…one fourth of the time. Another fourth it’s getting into the most glorious place on the earth, and the another fourth it’s leaving the being the most glorious place on the earth and the other fourth it is absolutely the worst place on earth to be and there are literally Christians who will come and be there for the 1/4^th, who will walk away and wait until it becomes glorious again, and there are those who will get so bitter at man and God when the church with all of its glory goes into a dry spell and they feel it’s because of human sin or failure. It is not. It is God himself at work, testing, trying, developing, growing, and maturing you. Rudyard Kipling. He said, Success and failure, when you can treat those two impostors both the same, and when you can treat the dry spell and the wet spell both the same, then a little maturity is growing in you.

Alright, now we come a little further. We want the deeper Christian life. No, we want a warm live puppy. But if we’re foolish enough to want the deeper Christian life and the cross, and then we really are willing to take all that, and the exposure, even if we’re up on a mountain somewhere all alone, then we get foolish enough to want to come down out of the mountain and live with other Christians, then the cross magnifies. Then the riches magnify, and the dry spells magnify, but the cross just geometrically explodes in its greatness. There are still a lot of people here who are willing to come that far, but when you get down to the fact that you do not know yourself, that no man of himself knows his heart…up until this moment…you might be gutting it out just because you are possessed with an inner unknown desire to live and die and be remembered in church history as a Adoniram Judson for a Paul of Tarsus. You will accept all of this glory in order to achieve something. Who knows what it could be? 10,000 things. It is unlimited. What really might be motivating you may have nothing to do with Christ.

I’m going to ask you, and I’m going to ask all of you, to read a book by an atheist. I’m going to tell you ahead of time, I ask every Christian who comes to us to read this book. And I’ve watched Christians almost lose their faith. You ought to read it. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer. Here is an atheist who looks at both the political follower and the religious follower and simply dissects that person’s motive for getting into the religious world or into the political world. In the religious world, it is so obvious that most of us follow the Lord. Sure, we follow Him because we love Him. But there’s also a great big monstrous wolf behind us: another motive that has nothing whatsoever to do with Almighty God, nor the Lord Jesus Christ, nor His church, nor the scripture, nor anything else. Others may see it, but you do not because the heart does not know. Now I’m coming back to my point: we don’t want to know. Our manipulations of our husbands and our manipulations of our wives: we don’t want to know them. We do not wish to be found out. And for me, I would like to say to you, please don’t come around this place. For all of you, don’t get near me if you’re not willing for someone to tell you what that wolf is.

I will use another illustration, and these are just one of tens of thousands. A sister, devout in every way, holy, given to God, a young single sister, a servant, everybody loves her; this is the finest Christian there. You begin to watch her, and you begin to wonder, and you begin to realize something’s wrong. That girl is never down. She’s never hurt, or rarely, and she always, when she is, takes it so masterfully, and she’s never going to marry, and she’s going to serve the Lord forever, and she almost becomes an institution even before she’s 30. Here she is, so godly, so wonderful, and you know something’s going on inside there that hasn’t got anything to do with the Lord Jesus Christ. Something is compelling her that is inordinate, and it doesn’t show. It doesn’t leak, and you can’t find it, but give the body of Christ long enough, give corporate living long enough, and all things come to the surface. And one day, you discover that the woman is a man-hater. Or she is a man-fearer, and she is afraid of marriage, and she is afraid of men. Or possibly she wants to dominate men. Or possibly she is a latent lesbian, and she is being driven by something; maybe it’s guilt. Maybe it’s by the need to dominate. Maybe it is due to the fear of marriage. It doesn’t have anything to do with the Lord. You touch it, and you tamper with it, and boy, you have suddenly got a mad dog on your hands. That person will turn around and attack you from one end to the other, and a whole new human being emerges before your lives. That dear Christian, that godly saint, had a monster following her that she herself did not see. I hate to tell you this, but that monster is in all our lives. I include yours.

Well, brothers and sisters, these are the problems of the soul, and the church of Jesus Christ is not addressing them. The saints within the religious…the traditional church is not addressing these, and the Christians outside the religious system are not even looking at them. Won’t even admit they’re there, but these are the things that are tearing the fabric of the church of Jesus Christ apart. Your soul is going to need some outside help. It is very damaged.  Are you willing to be blessed and walk in heavenly places? Are you willing to see the door to heavenly places shut and not get in for days, weeks, months, and years? Are you willing for that door to never open again and still follow Him with total commitment? Are you willing to know the cross? Then, are you willing to know social rejection that goes with the cross? Are you willing to lose every friend you have because you’re pursuing Christ? And on that one, you’re mistaken; utterly mistaken, because we can be…without even realizing it…even though I’ve seen so many Christians being willing to do that, and it happens for one second, and they fold. Social rejection devastates almost all of us.