The Biblical Secret To Fruitful Spiritual Life

…and he is in fact a new biological entity. I’d like to describe that with an illustration. If we were to go into the ocean floor and find an eel, and then we would also find an electric eel, they would look the same in every way. Even if you cut them open, you probably could not see any difference unless you were very, very wise in your scientific experience. But there is a difference. One has an organ that the other one does not have. One can emit electricity. They are, though they are both eels, they are two different species of eels, and we are a different species than lost men because we have a functioning organ within us that they do not have, and that organ came from a different universe. It came as an invasion. It came from outer space. It came through a door into our being. It comes from and belongs to a different dimension with different attributes than anything that is known in this universe.

We are biologically, from the viewpoint of the spiritual, construed differently than an unregenerated, unsaved man or woman, and we function differently. Now, perhaps the greatest single problem we have in this area is that no one ever tells us this, and we do not develop this other realm organ within us, the spirit, and we are actually spoken to by ministers, sometimes I want to say we’re spoken to, as though we were the lost men who didn’t have the organ. But in a way, we’re almost addressed as though we were God, because the demands being placed on us are ones only God Himself can meet. But the real problem is that we have a message addressed to our humanity, and we are expected to fulfill these demands with our humanity. We are supposed to hear something: this is what Jesus is like; this is what a Christian is supposed to do; we are told to do something about it, and, in our humanity, we seek to respond.

I go back to the illustration of the pig. You might as well ask a pig to sit down and handle an eight-course dinner with a napkin around its neck and do it all just right. The demands put upon us by the Christian message are addressed to the wrong organ. In fact, they’re addressed to the wrong species. And we, in turn, attempt to fulfill what we conceive as our obligations with the wrong life form. The more I think about those angels sitting down on that assembly line making transistor radios, the more I believe that as we lay hold of that other and higher form of life in us, we will come to feel that perhaps all this obligation we thought we were supposed to fulfill isn’t really hitting the mark. I have found that men and women who get to know the Lord more and more intimately feel less and less obligated to all the things constantly demanded of us as Christians. It is the very objective and non-experiential Christian who has not much backlog of spiritual encounter who goes around feeling he has to read 10 pages out of his Bible every day because Dwight L. Moody did, and he must speak to someone who’s lost every day because Dwight L. Moody did, and he must memorize many verses of scripture because R. A Torrey and somebody else did, and he read somewhere that “Praying Hyde”, or somebody else and somebody else prayed 10 hours a day.

Let me tell you, there’s John Wesley’s mother. She had 19 kids, and she spent an hour with each one of them, or 30 minutes, every day. Man, I want you to know those stories can really put you under the pile, folks. Folks, don’t listen to those stories. You can’t do it. That pig came closer to eating that meal at the president’s palace than you can to living up to that. What a great liberation when you realize you cannot do that. The greatest moment of my life came in Tyler, Texas. The greatest revelation of the Christian life I ever had was the day when I discovered I could not live the Christian life. Woo! That was glorious. Why didn’t somebody tell me that the day I got saved? All this stuff I’ve been putting on myself and others, and I cannot do it.

Now then, we get this story: Oh, let the Lord do it in us. That doesn’t work either. The relationship has to begin somewhere else because, immediately, you’re back into obligation. I’m not going to let God do this. If you establish a relationship with the Lord that is fulfilling and overflowing, I have to go and say, and also, what shall I say, a relationship that the boat can’t rock, a relationship that is consistent. So, I’m trying to say that not only is it fulfilling, but it also does not change when it is not fulfilling when the Lord gives you, from His hand, the dry spells. There will ultimately and eventually come an outworking of the Lord’s life in you that is no burden and no seeking, and it will just fit you really well, and you will be at peace with it, and you will not be driving mad, and then you will see diversity in the body of Christ. You will see a brother who really lives by the Lord’s Life who really enjoys witnessing, and he does not put somebody else under the pile to witness, and someone else who is just benevolent and who is taking care of the families and hospitality, and he’s living the Lord’s Life out of Him without strain. It’s what the old mystics called…it’s almost a retiring…at least deep inside; there’s no anxiety.

Audience: They have a preacher in the area, and he has already visited one of the houses and heard about the changes we’ve gone through. He asked us to share some of the literature we’ve been reading with him. He said, “Oh, I used to read all that.” And he said, “I got so inward that I didn’t do anything outward anymore. I didn’t witness or anything like that,” and it kind of knocked that believer for a loop, you know.

Well, I think he was right. I think that what happened was that he was not in the body of Christ. Now, if you get a group of people together who all want to retire and look at the end of their nose or, as the Hindus, contemplate their navel or something like that, then that’s a different matter. But if you’re evangelical Christians, and you’re living in the real world, and you haven’t moved out on a farm 50 miles away because the world’s getting so sinful, and you’re all eating vegetables and wearing beards and long dresses, if you’re actually right there in the middle of the fray, that kind of thing will almost invariably balance itself. Almost always. But that’s true, anything you can go overboard on. Oh, that brother came in and said he got too inward.

Well, alright, why didn’t anybody ever remind us about all the evangelicals who get too outward? What about the guy who comes by and lays soul-winning on all of us? Listen, I want to be aggressive here. I’m not going to be defensive. Sure, we see people falling over the horse this way and that way, though. Why is it that…it was Tozer who said, “It seems that anytime anything oddball happens in evangelical circles, they blame it on the deeper Christian life.” When the evangelicals, because they don’t know much about it, are not looking at themselves and seeing all the mess and problems that they have. I’ll turn my guns on those people given half a chance. What about all the religious organizations that have thousands and tens of thousands of young people every year come to their movements, and they preach to them that the heart of God is the evangelization of the world? And those young people believe it, and in their youthful enthusiasm, they go out, and they spend one, two, three, four, five, six years preaching the gospel, witnessing. In the seventh year, you can’t find them on this planet. And there are 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, or 30,000 Christian young people under 30, and there are a handful over 30, and this goes on for decades and decades and decades. They never ask what happened to all those tens of thousands of young people when they hit 30. They never ask.

I say to you, dear friends, that our problems are minimal compared to those of any other segment of the Christian faith when viewed from that perspective. Yeah, that’s true. There are people who get over a little bit, and they ought to get into the body of Christ, and these problems probably would not take place. Yes.

Audience: I just agree with you that so much of it is just grist for the mill, to keep it going. Without new life, without these new 20-year-old kids coming in, that thing dies. And after seven years, they’re burned out.

Absolutely. They don’t have anything else to give them. That’s right, and that youthful enthusiasm is read as something of the spirit. And I would like to say to the young man that I’m looking at right now, the very young man that I’m looking at right now, that your 20s are to get to know the Lord. They’re not to go out and burn your life out witnessing. I would use an illustration that the Lord used, and it’s the illustration of fruit. Again, I would like to put this within the context of the body of Christ. Everything I’m speaking of should take place in church life.