The Biblical Secret To Fruitful Spiritual Life

Do you want the church? Are you willing to accept the dry spells as well as the wet spells? You’re raising your hand, but you don’t mean it. We let a wet spell turn into three or four years, and the church goes through two or three real big, beautiful splits. Are you willing for somebody to sit down and tamper with the hidden motives of your heart? The answer to that is almost universally no. Regardless of whether we raise our hand or not, we are not willing to be helped in our souls.

Well, all church life that I will know from this day forward will have brothers and sisters there to help you find out what you don’t want to know. Everything you didn’t know about your soul that you didn’t want anyone to ask about will have brothers and sisters there, ready to help you anyway. I’ve just about reached the point that…well, I do, I ask everyone this…are you willing? If you’re not willing, just don’t come. Well, of course, everybody says yes, and I’m going to tell you again, almost everybody gets completely healed after one session of counseling: two at the absolute most. It’s amazing how fast we get healed.

Well, brothers and sisters, if you think this one has been tough, wait till you hear the next one. We have been talking today about the fact that we are biologically different from the lost man, that we have spirits, but our souls are still damaged. We have not yet touched the body, the physical body. We have not talked about it, and I have stopped to talk a little about the inordinate damage that the soul of every man and every woman undergoes.

In our next talk, by the mercies of God, I’m going to ask a simple question, rhetorically. So, you want the deeper Christian life, and we’re going to look further at just how damaged the human soul is. I said to you informally yesterday that every Christian writer of the faith in the past, who has ever touched on the deeper things of Christ, all of them speak on this subject. And they all speak, almost with awe, about how damaged the soul is and how they never cease to be amazed at how deep the damage goes. And I can say that no matter how much I have spoken on this and warned brothers and sisters, everyone gets shocked at how deeply damaged they themselves are. I have seen so many brothers and sisters find out what they’re really like, and they are so devastated by the knowledge of it, they leave the Lord. They cannot handle the knowledge of the discovery of what they are really, truly like, and I have to say this, in order to balance this, because there is always the masochistic person out there who really wants to know how bad off he is, who really has a low self-image and this is only reassuring him that his low self-image was absolutely correct. He is a dog. He is really a messed-up soul. That, when we turn around and speak of our position in Christ, that person never hears.

Then, there’s another guy sitting over here. He’s some Eskimo from some place you never heard of. No matter how many times you tell him how bad off the soul is and how damaged we are, and what we are really like, he never hears that, but he really gets “the place we are in Christ,” and we eventually arrive at the point where we don’t even want to speak anymore, because there’s so many different kind of people out there, which once more proves how damaged we are.

I am not here to put you under the pile, but I am trying to say to you dear saint, that there are motives going on you inside you, you don’t know that the discovery of what you are capable of doing is a shocking experience, and it must come to all of us, or we will not grow in Christ, and our willingness or our unwillingness to be discovered is a great barometer of just how real our commitment to Christ is. Not how willing you are at 20 or 25, but how willing are you at 35, 40, 45, and 50? And not how willing you are to go through a dry spell in the house of God for the kingdom of God at 25 and 28, but how willing are you to go through a dry spell at 35 and 40 and 45 and 50. These are the things that really help us find out whether we are interested in the deeper Christian life.