The Absolute DANGER Of Being Alone

Well, I was saying the Lord’s relationship to His Father on earth was that of having a living spirit and the Father dwelling within Him, and there was communion that grew up between them, and the Lord turned within His human life, in submission to His divine life, and He literally only spoke…He was so committed to His Father’s life that He only spoke what He heard His Father say. He only did what His Father told Him to do. Now, that is an enormous study and submission, and it is His goal for His children, only, of course, there has to be, not a sense of something outward, but one day our wills shall also be in that much in concert with the Lord. It’s very dangerous to suggest that this would be the Christian’s walk. I said a minute ago that we need the tempering of the church and the corporate body, and I really hope for a day when young men and young women will grow up in the church and later become workers who will be able to handle these things. I feel that young men and young women really need to grow up in the church if they intend to be workers because there is a tendency in our day for men and women to get very, very exposed to powerful truths when they’re in their 30s or 40s and they have not been in an experience of the life of the body of Christ and they become leaders, often repeating exactly what they used to be, only with a maybe a new message and nothing more; an unbroken nature, and the house of God suffers from it greatly. Hundreds of people are damaged. I would hate to see anyone preach this relationship of Jesus Christ to a group of people who had not seen something in his own life, both broken and exposed, within the church of Christ. The life lived out by the Lord, or anything remotely similar to it, has always, from the viewpoint of God, been His will that it be within the church. I am not speaking of reporting into on Sunday morning at 11:00 a.m. and walking out at noon. I don’t consider that church life. That’s a very…well, it’s about the same thing as going to a motion picture. You go in on Saturday night at 7, you come out at 9:00. How many people have you gotten to know? What relationship is there? There is no community of Christian believers. Checking in at 11:00 a.m. and checking out at 12. And I’m speaking of body life, church life.

Anyway, this is the life the Lord lived in front of His disciples. He has the divine Spirit within His Spirit. The divine Life of God within Him. His soul is in submission to that Life and His body. Of course, all we know is it was in the form of human flesh, but there was no sin. At least the glory ended with a skin. It could not be seen. He looked very ordinary at the time of His sojourning on the earth, but I would say he could be illustrated by those little circles of gold in the spirit, gold in the soul, and gold within the body.

Now, what do you and I have as his brothers, the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ? Not quite the same, I assure you. So let us look carefully at what we are as believers. Essentially, I wonder if this is theologically correct. Essentially, our spirit is in the same situation as our Lord’s. He had the Father indwelling His Spirit. We have the Trinity. We have the Son. We have the Godhead. We have the Lord. We have divine Life indwelling our spirit, which has been made alive again because He has quickened it. He is one who gives life. So, we have an area in us that’s really in pretty good shape. It is possible that there is a part of you that has never sinned. Again, I’m not sure, but it is possible that your spirit never sinned since it’s been raised from the dead. That there’s an area of you in pretty good shape. In fact, there’s a possibility that there’s one portion of you that’s perfectly normal, and within that portion of you, there is a form of Life.

Now, I would like to really hear, because you can’t do this so much with the Lord’s life, but I would like to contrast in me the difference in my soul and my spirit, and in you the difference in your soul and your spirit. I find this fascinating. Have you ever watched a science fiction, or read a science fiction story, and you get this story of a higher form of life that has landed on the earth from some other planet, and it’s a higher form of life than our own, and invariably, that higher form of life is illustrated by technological superiority and by the ability to think better than we think.  Now that is real evidence of what we view to be an increase or a higher form of life, and how mistaken it is. A higher form of life has entered this realm and come to this planet, and was not known for its technological superiority, nor its ability to think better than we think. In fact, that higher form of life thought more simply than we think and was not the least bit interested in technology or philosophy or superior thinking.

I’m going to make a point. You have not increased your spiritual life because you have increased your knowledge of the Bible. You have not increased your spiritual life just because you have a higher IQ than someone else, and you can think in theological terms more clearly or accurately than someone else. You have not increased your spiritual life when you have memorized verses. You have not increased your spiritual life by increasing your capacity to think or follow logic or to present that logic, even if it has to do with the things of the Lord Jesus Christ. Thinking is not superior spirituality. This is a soul function. It is not a spirit function.

I would now go back to the Lord Jesus Christ, and I would have you go through the gospels and watch the higher life form. You will be impressed that He doesn’t do a lot of thinking. He does not use a great deal of logic. In fact, He put the logicians down with parables. But I think one of the most interesting experiences of the Lord is to give us an insight into what it’s like by a man who’s living by the highest form of Life and a man who’s living by fallen human life.

I’m sure you remember the story of the tearing open of the roof and letting the lame man down. Well, it says very clearly that the Pharisees reasoned together… fallen human life. And it says, “The Lord perceived. They reasoned. He perceived.” Now, I’m not going into the enormous amount of verses you will find in the Gospels that indicate the Lord Jesus Christ operated His ability to apprehend on levels that had very little to do with Western thinking within the soul, but it becomes quite obvious that the higher form of Life within us is really not a Life built on a great deal of thinking ability. He perceived, He sensed. He saw; He had a knowing. The Lord had an intuition. He was intuitive. He had an insight that leaped the soul’s power to reason logically. These things were in Him, but they were in submission to a higher form of life.

Now, I want to press this a little further. If angels were to come to earth, and take on, or allow us to see, their bodily forms, and they lived among us, do you think they would begin producing superior radios and television sets? They are a higher form of life. Perhaps they would build a spaceship for us. No, because they are very much like their Lord in their conceptual and in their apprehensions. These are hard things for us to grasp, but we need to understand this. We really need to get clear on this because theology and the whole Christian faith is fouled up over this thing of superior intellect. Unwittingly fouled up. He lived by a life that saw the unseen, that perceived, that sensed, that had a knowing. This is not logic. This is not thinking. This is not the “sound mind” principle. A Christian really needs to lay hold of this…and I just walked out on thin ice…and it’s going to get thinner and thinner, but I’m going to put a little coal to it and make it thick.

Ah, if a theologian is listening to me speak right now, he is probably having apoplexy. So, would you excuse me just a minute while I talk to him? I find you to be a very interesting person. First of all, I bet you are Germanic. I bet you’re not Italian. I’m sure you’re not French. You’re probably Germanic. You’re probably an Englishman, a Scandinavian, or a German, but at least that’s where we got this stuff from. The high rational view. I find it quite interesting. Many studies tell us there are basically three kinds of people. We’re talking about the soul now. The thinker, the feeler, and the doer. I want you to know we’re going to come back to this and talk about it, but the thinker always considers himself superior to the feeler. Always. You know, the sisters…what a beautiful sunset. Sister, control your emotions. “The Lord was so glorious.” Sister… “Well, I just felt like the Lord said to me…” You can’t feel like…don’t trust your feelings.

Now, listen. When the soul fell, it didn’t fall in two of three places. It did not fall in its feelings and in its power to do, but not in its power to think. And the thinker, first of all, has always been fascinated with the Bible, and if he had never gotten saved, he’d have been fascinated with technology. He just thinks that way. That’s the way he works. And so, the Christian faith is something that he likes to study. Then, of course, he’s going to tell us to study the Bible. Men can become so enamored with theology and the study of the scripture, and can concentrate on it so much that their capacity to think is often misunderstood as inspiration by themselves. I know that, because in the seminary, when we begin to really get down deep into religious philosophy and stuff, sometimes your mind would get so concentrated that you think for all the world you just saw revelation. It is nothing in the world but the powers of the mind to concentrate.

Now I’m going to ask you a question, sir. You who look down on the feelers and tell us every time you get up to speak, “Don’t trust your feelings.” How come we ought to trust our thinking if not our feelings? Is your thinking less fallen than your feeling? I don’t know who invented fact, faith, feeling: the choo choo train, and then the cargo and the caboose. Have you seen that illustration all your life? Fact, faith, feeling. That’s based on the assumption that I’ve got enough sense to know what the fact is. The feeling can get right up there in front of that train and be just as accurate as the fact. The fact…is assuming that I agree with you theologically. Fact: Jesus Christ has saved me, and I’m saved for all eternity. Fact: Put your faith in that, brother, and trust with all assurance, and then maybe you’ll feel saved. Try to tell that to a Methodist. A Methodist doesn’t happen to believe that once saved, always saved. Therefore, his fact and your fact don’t agree. Now, you may think that’s not a very big deal. Baptists, Methodists, the Arminians, and the Calvinists have been fighting over this for 300 years. Oh, wait a minute. There have been religious wars fought over that illustration right there, and hundreds of thousands of men and women have been slaughtered. And I ask you, were they slaughtered by those who were led by their feelings or those who ran by their thinking? You can’t find feelers starting wars, but boy, you can find the thinkers willing to slaughter millions. There have been, on the face of the continent of Europe, tens of millions of people who’ve died in religious wars over the theological convictions of the thinkers. You tell us it’s dangerous to trust our feelings. I have a better way. Don’t trust your feelings, and don’t trust your doings, and don’t trust your thinking most of all.

And by the way, behind all of this was a point. The point is that our soul is not like the Lord’s soul. It is quite damaged. Now, there are many things about the human soul, and I’ve just pointed out one of them, that we basically fall into three categories. The feelers, the thinkers, and the doers, and the feelers are always being put down. Well, I tell you, I happen to be a feeler, a well-trained theological feeler, and I enjoy putting down thinkers. I’ve been a doer. I started out as an evangelist. You can build a case that there are only three denominations in the world. The feelers, the thinkers, and the doers. The thinkers would be your Presbyterians and your Plymouth Brethren. And of course, a lot of feelers join them, but they’re constantly, oh, you know, going to the seminary. No, they don’t get leadership. They sure never get leadership. They don’t get in control of anything.