Bro. Mark Spinks Reply

September 5, 2022

Dear Arlan,

My burden in writing a letter to you along with the article in response to your article on your website, “Proclaiming the Return to the Bible on Medical Aid,” is to focus on what it means to trust God according to the scripture:

“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.  In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.  Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil.  It shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones.”  Proverbs 3:5-8

This is not just a matter of making up our mind that we will not lean unto our own understanding, for no one can trust God as they should without His help.  It is certainly within our reach to try to rely on God with less than complete, exclusive trust, just as it is possible to live a good, moral life without possessing a regenerated heart.  But if we are to walk with God, rather than wanting Him to walk with us, it takes a whole lot of grace and guidance from above.  This is because of the disparity between us and out Creator.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”  Isaiah 55:8-9

We were not created with the capacity to trust God without leaning to our own understanding, without His help.

Now God is the Almighty, and He does things that are inexplicable to us.  He makes turns wherein we find ourselves pressed out of strength and above measure.  We can’t keep up on our own and must have help from Him to stay with Him.

A sister minister was laboring with an older sister on what proved to be her death bed, and the older sister was undergoing such suffering that it caused the sister minister to question what God was and how He was going about this particular trial.    She thought, “Is God sadistic or a God of masochism?  Does He just delight in seeing how much we can bear?”  She did not like to think like that, but the battle was so severe that it aroused these thoughts in her mind.

The Bible answers this question in Lamentations 3:33-36, “For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.  To crush under his feet all the prisoners of the earth, to turn aside the right of a man before the face of the most High, to subvert a man in his cause, the Lord approveth not.”

I have found that it is difficult to understand the limits of free will agency and the suffering of many innocents that comes from it.  “O Lord, how long?”  Psalms 6:3    God just seems to let things that are monstrous and things that are hard to bear go on and on and on.  As the wise man said (by inspiration), “Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil.”  Ecclesiastes 8:11    But God has helped me to realize that the parameters of what He allows are carefully engineered and monitored.  (He sits by the refining furnace – Malachi 3:2-3    He is a God at hand, and not a God afar off – Jeremiah 23:23)  We will all see on the final day of judgment a complete expose of the manifold wisdom and attentiveness of God.  But now, “Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried; but the wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand.”  Daniel 12:10    It is our privilege to understand enough to hold still and wait on God.

God appoints suffering for mankind, including His children, and He determines just how far it should go to accomplish what He knows should be done.  God knows that the gain is worth the pain.  He watches carefully and knows the capacity of what can be borne with His help.  He knows what He is after.  “He worketh all things after the counsel of His own will.”  Ephesians 1:11    He helps us to pray according to His will with the result of which Brother John speaks: “And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us:  And if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.”  1 John 5:14-15    When we lean to our own understanding in this arena of trust, we don’t get it right, ask amiss, and do not get the petitions that we desired of Him, and then we suffer attendant spiritual damage.  He suffers as He sees us suffer, but He knows what is necessary even though we don’t.  He loves us too much to give us a trial too much and to give us too small an amount of trials.

The following poem has been a real insight to me, and I have quoted it in different trials which were my appointments.

“‘But Thou art making me, I thank Thee, Sire.

   What Thou hast done and doest, Thou knowest well,

 And I will help Thee:  gently in Thy fire

   I will lie burning; on Thy potter’s wheel

   I will whirl patient, though my brain should reel;

   Thy grace shall be enough to quell,

 And growing strength perfect, through weakness dire.

“‘I have not knowledge, wisdom, insight, thought,

   Nor understanding, fit to justify

 Thee in Thy work, O Perfect!  Thou hast brought

 Me up to this; and lo!  what Thou hast wrought,

   I cannot comprehend.  But I can cry,

 ‘O enemy, the Maker hath not done;

 One day thou shalt behold, and from the sight shalt run!’

“‘Thou workest perfectly.  And if it seem

   Some things are not so well, ’tis but because

     They are too loving deep, too lofty wise,

   For me, poor child, to understand their laws.

 My highest wisdom, half is but a dream;

 My love runs helpless like a falling stream;

   Thy good embraces ill, and lo!  its illness dies.”

                                                                                    – George MacDonald

God took David from following the sheep, from the victories over the lion and the bear, and He plunged this young man into trials of such depth, horror, and peril that they are scarcely comprehended until we experience the weight of such things.  And in these awful tests, all so necessary and vital, David made mistakes and blunders and was kept from making some missteps just barely, by a hairsbreadth, as it were.  Consider the situation, detailed in the scriptures, of Abigail’s appeal to this man in the twenty-fifth chapter of 1 Samuel, verses thirty through thirty-three.  In Psalms 34, he writes of how God helped him when he leaned to his own understanding, saying, “David said in his heart, I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul: there is nothing better for me than that I should speedily escape into the land of the Philistines; and Saul shall despair of me, to seek me any more in any coast of Israel: so shall I escape out of his hand.”  1 Samuel 27:1    This was not God’s way of escape for David.  After he had done what he had done in leaning to his own understanding, and after he had experienced the aftermath of his inevitable letdown, humbled himself, and dropped his own way of dealing with his situation, he wrote:

“A Psalm of David, when he changed his behaviour before Abimelech; who drove him away, and he departed. I will bless the LORD at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth.  My soul shall make her boast in the LORD: the humble shall hear thereof, and be glad.  O magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together.  I sought the LORD, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears. [God’s way of escape from all his fears!]  They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed.  This poor man cried, and the LORD heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.  The angel of the LORD encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them.  O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.  O fear the LORD, ye his saints: for there is no want to them that fear him. The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger: but they that seek the LORD shall not want any good thing.”  Psalms 34:1-10

David made it back to the path of complete and exclusive trust in God.  He abandoned the idea of working out a way to escape Saul; he left the matter in God’s hand completely.

Now, Arlan, I do not know you.  I do not even remember ever talking with you, but it is plain that you are looking at this subject with your eyes too much upon men.  You cannot properly interpret men’s attempts to live right, except the Lord teach you how to understand their efforts.  Brother Warner had his weaknesses, just as each of us have our’s, and he was inclined to give more room for coming clear of adulterous marriages than is sound.  Brother Byrum was most likely looking on the coming letdown and compromise among the adherents of the holiness reformation of 1880.  He was zealous for the truth, knew what it meant to trust God completely and exclusively (he had the gift of healing), although he took steps later, not ordered of the Lord, that effectively destroyed what he had once had.

A brother, reading and studying about these things, was brought face to face with an awful conclusion.  He said to the Lord, “If these men, with their blessing and power with God, could lose it, what chance is there for me?”  And he said that the Lord spoke to him in his heart, saying, “I dealt with every one of them.”

The answer, then, is not to analyze what others have done, with the idea of coming up with another way.  That is simply continuing to lean to our understanding, to trust and rely upon something other than wholly trusting Jesus.  Entirely trusting Jesus is to humble down and receive direction and grace from above.  “For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world, and more abundantly to you-ward.”  2 Corinthians 1:12    Yea, be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the Lord, and depart from evil.

In the congregation at twenty-third street in Oklahoma City, there was an older sister who suffered a great deal.  She was faithful to attend services and had a good testimony.  Her voice shook when she testified or had a conversation with you to the extent that it was hard to follow what she was saying.  The pastor told me what had happened to her.  She came down some years before (seems like at least ten years) with an affliction that looked as if it was her final affliction.  She trusted God exclusively and was ready to go.  Her children, however, were not living for God, and they were not ready to let their mother die, so over her protests they submitted her to the medical profession.  After what they did was over, she was alive but in continual suffering.  And God let this be, and let this demonstration of terrible wretchedness be before her children who had done this thing and before anyone who had eyes to see and ears to hear.  “It is better to let the Lord have His way,” my pastor said.

The Bible backs this.  We have a record of the affliction of Hezekiah given to us in 2 Kings, the twentieth chapter and Isaiah, the thirty-eighth verse.  God sent Isaiah to the king, saying, “Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live.”  Hezekiah had no successor; the kingdom had been miraculously spared being conquered by Sennacherib, king of the Assyrians.  To human thinking, it did not seem a good time to leave the situation at all.  And so Hezekiah prayed to be allowed to continue down here for a time, and God allowed it, adding fifteen years to Hezekiah’s life.  Three years into that time, Manasseh was born.  When Hezekiah died, this boy was twelve years old, and “he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, after the abominations of the heathen.”  2 Kings 21:2   It was this Manasseh who slew Isaiah and Eliakim.  (According to history, Isaiah was sawn in two by a wooden saw.)  And Hezekiah’s heart was lifted up, and he showed all the treasures of the kingdom to representatives of the king of Babylon.  Those fifteen years were full of blunders and mistakes that God would have spared the man.  The account is included in the Bible to drive home the point that God knows best and we do not.

“Had I the choosing of my pathway,

     In blindness I should go astray,

 And wander far away in darkness,

     Nor reach that land of endless day.”

The Lord has put a deep burden upon me, Arlan.  As I said before, I do not know you.  I don’t even remember ever having a conversation with you.  That doesn’t matter.  As a brother said, “I am acquainted with God, who is acquainted with you, so in a round about way, I have an acquaintance with you.”  I am relying on that; I am relying on God.  And I feel a great need to stress and expound on what it means not to lean to our own understanding.

My parents were raised in the Nazarene Church.  They dated around when they came to mature years.  My mother, in particular, was quite popular, as well as socially adept.  My father was socially adept, too.  They just thought that was a normal part of life.  They had a high regard for marriage, very high ideals, and they took the responsibility of choosing a companion for life very seriously.  They believed in highly developed character and ideals, and, most important of all, they had a heritage of holiness, which although sectarian, held before them the solemn necessity of living a sinless life.  They believed in salvation and had some light on the things which accompany salvation, and they lived to that light.  They rejoiced when I got saved, and they had confidence in my life.

When God began to deal with me to go deeper, for Jesus came that we might not only have spiritual life, but that we should have it more abundantly, my folks rejoiced in that, too.  They knew of entire sanctification; my dad definitely did not have it (he never got a hold of the rest in God that is the privilege of a Christian.  See Hebrews 4:9-10).  My mother professed it, but I am not sure that she really had the experience at the time I came to my later teens.  The Lord began to deal with my heart about not dating.  There was dating going on all around me in high school, and as I came to maturity, there were girls that I liked and esteemed (mainly because of character).  I had already understood that saved people should only consider other saved people, and I prayed for different ones to whom I was attracted.  When I began to meet other young people at camp meetings who were saved, I esteemed those who were more spiritually-minded, dressed modestly, and seemed to have a genuine experience of salvation.  They loved God and wanted to please Him, and that was so refreshing to me.  It was at that time that God began to deal with me about how inadequate I was to make the choice of a woman to marry.

I was saved and entirely sanctified.  I had died to self and utterly surrendered to God and was a living sacrifice to God every day.  I had given my life to my Lord completely and unreservedly.  I wanted His will to be fulfilled in my life.  This place was not reached without a struggle, but at that point, the struggle was over.  To know the will of God was to do it.  How thankful I am that I can truthfully report to you, Arlan, that I am still on the altar; I am still all the Lord’s.  From the heart, I could then and can now sing:

“I am crucified with Jesus,

     And He lives and dwells in me.

  I have ceased from all my struggling,

     ‘Tis no longer I, but He.

  All my will is yielded to Him,

     And His spirit reigns within,

 And His precious blood each moment

     Keeps me cleansed and free from sin.

“All my cares I cast upon Him,

     And He bears them all away.

  All my fears and griefs I tell Him,

     All my needs from day to day.

  All my strength I draw from Jesus,

     By His breath I live and move.

  E’en His very mind He gives me,

     And His faith and life and love.

“For my words I take His wisdom,

     For my works His Spirit’s power.

  For my ways His gracious presence

     Guards and guides me every hour.

  Of my heart He is the portion,

     Of my joy the ceaseless spring,

 Savior, Sanctifier, Keeper,

     Glorious Lord and loving King.”

At that time, as I have said, the Lord dealt with me about foregoing my right to choose a companion.  Voluntarily laying down that right.  Giving it to Him instead of exercising my understanding, the very best of my understanding.  For “verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.”  Psalms 39:5    O, glory!  How sweet it is to sink down into God, to receive and embrace His perspective, which is always right and just as it should be!  O, how good is the Lord to invite us to walk with Him, to set before us the choice to let Him have His way!  To regard our life as not our own.  “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.  I do not frustrate the grace of God.”  Galatians 2:20-21    In this, Christ is our example, “And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”  Philippians 2:8    As the poet said:

“Forever I choose the good will of my God;

     Its holy, deep riches to love and to know,

 The serfdom of love to so sweeten the rod

     That its touch maketh rivers of honey to flow.”

God is so respectful of our right to choose at each step that He gives us opportunity over and over to lean to our own understanding and rejoices when we do not take it, choosing to trust Him instead.  And so I gave up my right to choose my companion, giving it to Him whether I would ever get married at all (though the natural clamored so loudly for what it wanted and needed), or just who the woman would be to whom I would consecrate.  And my companion was doing the same, all unknown to me, but known to God.  There was nothing between us at that time except the normal esteem of two spiritual members of God’s family for each other; I had not the faintest hint that this sister in the Lord would be my companion for life.  Each of our hearts was submitted to God; we had each decided to let Him do the choosing.

My Mother and I talked freely, heart to heart, and I told her of how I would wait on God, not dating, not exercising my right to choose, but surrendering continually to God.  She did not tell me then, but later she told me her reaction.  She said, “I thought you were losing your mind over religion.”  Mother was a very sensible and thoughtful adult, and this was an extremely radical conclusion for her to reach.  I am sure that in her lifetime up to that point, she had seen some examples of extreme zeal that led to sad cases of very sincere people becoming unhinged and demented and making terrible mistakes.  She was afraid for me.

When she saw how matters worked out and how God blessed, what He did with the living sacrifice I had become, she changed her mind and was provoked to love and good works.  She deepened down in God, herself.  “The blessing of the LORD, it maketh rich, and he addeth no sorrow with it.”  Proverbs 20:22    As my companion and I approach our forty-third anniversary, both of us can say and do say, “We have been so blessed.”  The half has never yet been told.  We are rich (spiritually) beyond the imagining.  And it is true; there is no sorrow in the blessing.  It has no downside.  I would to God that all men everywhere walked with God and yielded their will to Him.  It was meant to be that way.  It is available to all who will.

All around us are people who (1) do not yield at all to God, or, (2) yield only reluctantly and less-than-wholeheartedly in some ways, or, (3) a very few who are all the Lord’s.  As one brother told a sister, “Don’t be stingy with the Lord.”  She was very offended, although he was entirely correct in his assessment of where things stood.  It was too strong a meat for her to bear, although it was true.  I would to God that all would be generous and holding back nothing in loving and trusting God!  He has given His all for us; He has done all that there is to do to restore us to the sweet and perfect trust and love that Adam and Eve had before the fall.  That door, the door of salvation and living a wholly trusting life, is before all.  God has made it possible to live as Adam and Eve had it before they fell.

When the will is determined to lean to its understanding, to see and know and understand before consenting, terrible, detrimental things result.  If we could see what it cost to not totally trust God, what it means to lean to our own understanding, we would quickly abandon our ways and cling to God’s will; we would know that He knows best.  But, alas, this is hidden from those that are not all on the altar.  People decry the sacrifices, the high cost of an education, and if their minds get fixed enough on this aspect, then they lose sight of the cost of being ignorant.  We live in a world that is largely ignorant of God, what He does and can do, and this ignorance extends to professing Christians, who limit the Holy One of Israel in their minds and hearts.  They do not understand Him; they have not grace to appreciate the merit – the necessity – of what He does, of the matchless love and mercy, the infinite wisdom, that lies behind the Lord’s doings.  O, what a price men pay to not walk with God!  They want Him to walk with them.  They want Him to be there; to be a sort of vending machine in which they put in the requirements and get the results.  But He does all things after the counsel of His will, and His ways are best.

Sister Hannah Smith relates the following:

“‘A Christian who was in a great deal of trouble was recounting to another Christian the various efforts he had made to find deliverance, and concluded by saying, ‘But it has all been in vain, and there is literally nothing left for me to do now but to trust the Lord.’

‘Alas!’ exclaimed his friend in a tone of the deepest commiseration, as though no greater risk were possible – ‘Alas! has it come to that?’”

“Blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.”  Matthew 11:6

Job was not offended by God allowing his children to all die, all his wealth to be stripped away, then his health collapsed.  His wife was offended.  She said, “Dost thou still retain thine integrity?  Curse God, and die.”  But he said unto her, “Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh.  What?  Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?”  Job 2:9-10    This same man said in the depths of his fiery trial, “But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.  My foot hath held his steps, his way have I kept, and not declined.”  Job 23:10-11

If the brother who trusted in God and relied upon Him while “his face looked like it had been blasted clean with a 12-gauge shotgun” were to come back from the realm of glory right now and speak of the trial he endured, would he say, “I made a mistake; I should have thought that God was as reasonable as many men deem themselves to be”?  Or would he say, “O, that was but a light affliction that worked for me a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.  God helped me, step by step, to look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.  Praise His name!”  (2 Corinthians 4:17-18)

Our will and understanding has the monstrous and heinous capacity to rise above our Creator, not only claiming the right to rubberstamp Him and to secondguess Him, but actually daring to argue with God and flat out contradict Him. We, in the carnality of the unregenerated heart, would actually bend the purpose of our existence, redefine the framework and boundaries which define our bodily existence, and make God our servant.  We would actually redefine “reasonable service” to a definition that is more acceptable to our flesh.  And we would contend that if God appoints such fiery trials for us as we read about in the Bible, we have a right to walk away and say, “This is an hard saying; who can hear it?”  John 6:60    A man or woman under the influence of such leaning to one’s own understanding might even compare such fiery trials to the murders and atrocities of pagan idol worship.  But the Bible tells us, “Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: but rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.  If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you: on their part he is evil spoken of, but on your part he is glorified.”  1 Peter 4:12-14

I listened to an Anderson minister say that he gave God one half-hour to heal him in an affliction.  If God didn’t cooperate with his time-table, then he felt he had liberty to do as seemed best to him.  That was his standard of living, but it is not a Bible standard.  This was where leaning to his understanding had brought him.

A young sister had a disagreeable night outside her home (they were not able to reside in their house that night because of some problem) in a tent with her children sick and vomiting.  “Life shouldn’t be so hard,” she complained.  This is where leaning to our understanding, instead of wholly trusting God, will take us.  To self-pity.  Why me?  But God has something much better for us if we will die to self, lay all on the altar, and just voluntarily surrender ourselves as vessels to God for Him to “make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you that which is wellpleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ.”  Hebrews 13:21    “For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure.”  Philippians 2:13

In Salvation, Present, Perfect, Now or Never, Brother Warner answers a letter by one Stixtus, who objects to the Bible standard of a sinless life:

“Says he [Stixtus], ‘The real question is simply this: Are true believers all they ought to be? Are they as holy, as perfect, as sinless as they ought to be, as God requires them to be?’ That is always the way with hirelings. ‘The real question’ with them is not what God requires, and what men ‘ought to be’; but what they are, and what will please them? He would have us drop the standard of the divine requirement, because the masses of sectism are far below it. How forcibly the words of the apostle apply here. ‘For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.’ Gal. 1:10.”

It can be seen at a glance that the same wresting of the scriptures that this Stixtus presented is exactly the same as attempting to modify or evade the Bible requirements to exclusively trust God with our life and for all things.  The same trust is necessary; the same help from God that can keep us with a conscience void of offense toward God or man can keep this fleshly body, even during the dissolving of that man in old age.  And we see that Stixtus, leaning to his understanding instead of trusting God to help him live to the Bible standard, had his eyes on what men are and what will please them, rather than on God and what He requires and has made a way for all to experience.

God has so fixed things that when we attempt to live up to the Bible standard without a huge infusion of grace and guidance from above, we fail in our tests.  This is one of the ways that He tries our hearts.  If, instead of humbling down and confessing our failure and searching for why it didn’t work for us, we contend that the standard is too high and too hard, we come to the place where the temptation to modify God’s Word and to change our vision of the character of God is overwhelmingly compelling.  God sees to it that we come to that place.  It is one of the judgments that come on people that eat their own bread and wear their own apparel, yet wish to be called by God’s name to take away their reproach.  (Isaiah 4:1)  It is dangerous to add to or take from God’s words.  It leads to the creation of an idol – another Jesus, another gospel, another spirit.

This is what happened to the Gospel Trumpet movement, now identified as the Anderson Church of God.  They attempted to hold what the spiritual had possessed, by human effort, and God left them more and more to their own devices.  Eventually the form of godliness became untenable to them.  Hardly anyone was living it.  Hardly anyone got healed.  Hardly anyone got really saved and lived triumphant, saintly lives, either.  So the standard of preaching was lowered to accommodate the majority of the people, but actually it was lowered when the first steps were taken to receive people who had failed as though they had not.  But as people failed, the cost of soberly recognizing why they failed and telling good supporters, loyal church members that “Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God,” (Acts 8:21), was more and more costly.  It would tear the group apart.  Staying together, in the pride and hubris of how they were puffed up and believed themselves to be IT deceived them.  I have heard those say that avoided this puffing up: “If we won’t serve God, He’ll raise up a people who will.”  But by then, the Anderson people were building with wood, hay, and stubble, and the fires that God sent in faithfulness were consuming what they had built.  God’s word to them was “I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve that thou mayest see.  As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.”  Revelations 3:18

“A name to live while dead

     Will only God betray,

 Then come as He hath said,

     ‘The Bible way.’”

The process of losing the true gospel has been repeated over and over, in heart after heart, in group after group.  God allows this to go on.  It demonstrates the difference between those who hold the truth in unrighteousness and those who worship in Spirit and in Truth.  It separates between the precious and the vile, those who serve the Lord and those who serve Him not.  These people, who once taught that the saved should separate from the works of men became a sect themselves.  “For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error.”  2 Peter 2:18    These leaders built an idol, a church of God idol, and it became a place for the spiritual to flee from and escape, to come out of and to be separate.

If people do not repent of their lack of faith, their lack of consecration, and they stay together, then a congregation, then a group of congregations, a church of the works of men evolves.  All of the efforts of the leaders to keep the form of this thing according to the form of the one and only church that Jesus built are futile in the end, and it ends up as a church that men built, an idol, the work of men’s hands.  If the preachers attempt to keep preaching the true standard, but the people don’t live it, then where people actually are becomes the defacto standard of the group.  For it is not the saying of the standard, but the living of the standard that matters.

In a certain group, not Anderson and not what we knew as the Faith & Victory people, the daughter of a minister loved to dance, and she wanted the ministers among them to allow that.  Her father said, “Just wait a while.  The opposition to dancing will gradually wear away.  Just wait.”  This is what a people who are not led by the Lord, not holding the truth by the help that God gives, can come to and usually do.  Now dancing is still wrong between unmarried people and between married people who are not dancing with their companions.  It still has the influence that is wrong, leads to wrong things, and is no part of holy living.  That truth is settled in heaven.  But these people did not have help from heaven to hold God’s standard.  They were on their own, and it gradually got away from them, more and more.

“At this point, I think of Bro. George Winn of Guthrie, Oklahoma, whom some of you may still remember. He said at one time that if God would hand him the Bible and say, ‘Here, George, just take this book and fix it to fit you,’ he would just hand the Bible back to God and say, ‘God, the book is all right just like it is. Just fix George to fit the book.’ Brethren, that, is the attitude we all need  and must have. Let us not be trying to change any part of God’s Word to suit our way of life at any point, but let us earnestly be seeking God to change our lives in any way they need changing to conform to the truths of God’s Word.” – Remove Not the Ancient Landmarks

When Brother Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, he said, “I will come to you shortly, if the Lord will, and will know, not the speech of them which are puffed up, but the power.  For the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power.”  1 Corinthians 4:19-20

God has put a love for you and yours in our heart, and that is why we have written to you at such length.  We know that what we have written is true.  We are living to that truth.  As Brother Paul said to the Galatians, “But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man.”  Galatians 1:11    That word certify is very meaningful.  It means to authenticate, to prove, to substantiate.  And just what is proven or certified?  The gospel is not after man.

At one point in my life, I backslid.  I gave up through discouragement, even though I remember thinking to myself, “This is the stupidest thing you have ever done.”  I remember the deadly awareness of vulnerability that I felt when I was away from God.  It was an awful time, the darkest time of my entire life, and it lasted about a month.  During that time, God had great mercy on me.  I was in the kingdom of satan, and he did his level best to handicap and damage me insomuch that if I ever did find deliverance from him, then I would never be the same.  When I humbled down before God and found His pardon and deliverance, I found myself with many battles I had not had before.  The struggle was hard, and I was often tempted strongly to give up.  But God gave me an insight from a scripture in Jude, the fourteenth and fifteenth verses.

“And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”  Jude 1:14-15

The question arose in my mind: why did the Lord come back with ten thousands of His saints?  And as I wondered at that, the answer stood out as though written in letters of fire: to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.  In that great multitude of saints coming back with Jesus will be people just like me, people that had the same hindrances with which I was struggling, people that were SHOUTING THE VICTORY AND PRAISING GOD FOR HELPING THEM TO OVERCOME where I was failing and struggling.  And then I would be convinced, I would be convicted that I could have done better, that I could have trusted more effectively, I could have gone deeper in what God had for me.  This became a powerful stimulus to me; it provoked me to love and good works; it caused the excuses and reasoning that assailed me to be seen in their true light.

Now the Bible tells us in unmistakable terms: “WITHOUT FAITH IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO PLEASE HIM.”  Hebrews 11:6    No faith, no pleasing.  Little faith, little pleasing.  Erratic faith, erratic pleasing.  Much faith, much pleasing.  Perfect faith, perfect pleasing.  “That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness.”  Colossians 1:10-11

But there is worse than just missed blessings and falling short.  God, knowing the capability of the human heart to exalt itself (Genesis 3:22), has put a curse on non-exclusive trust.  “Thus saith the Lord; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord.”  Jeremiah 17:5    The earth is full of this curse, from no trusting to partial trusting.  The inevitable result of not trusting completely is a decline, a retrogression from God, an inferior independence.  The heart departing from the Lord is the inevitable consequence.  Here is the curse defined in the Bible again: “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.  So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”  Revelations 3:15-16

And so I would urge you, Arlan, as the Bible does: “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.”  Ephesians 4:1

Anything less than complete faith in God is a denial of Him.

This letter and the accompanying article are for you to publish or not as you see fit.

As the three Hebrew children said to king Nebuchanezzar in their hour of trial, “We are not careful to answer thee in this matter.” Daniel 3:16    That is, they were not politically calculating, not answering according to fleshly wisdom.  “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.”  1 Peter 3:15    Now I have not shunned to declare unto you the whole counsel of God, and your blood is not on my hands in His sight.  We have said what we have said in love and faithfulness for your soul, and thus it will be revealed at the final judgment.

Love and prayers,

Mark Spinks

The following article was received from Bro. Mark Spinks, along with the personal reply to me presented above.
I don’t think this article was created for me, but was included along with the letter to me because it addresses the same topic of trust in God.

Complete and Exclusive Trust

Complete and Exclusive Trust

 

“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.  In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.  Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil.  It shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones” Proverbs 3:5-8

This is the Bible definition of exclusive trust in God.  If we can determine what it means to lean not unto our own understanding, then we can begin to understand what it means to live a life of wholly leaning on God.  It is a life of acknowledging Him in all our ways.  It is a directed life – directed of God.  “The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he delighteth in his way.” Psalms 37:23    And we are cautioned: Be not wise in thine own eyes.  As the Bible admonishes us in Romans 12:16, “Be not wise in your own conceits [your own estimation].”  It takes an extraordinary amount of humility to trust God exclusively, that is, completely.  It takes a remarkable measure of the fear of the Lord.  And it takes a clean and sinless life to be able to trust as we should.  This life is obtained by complete trust and is sustained from above by constant, complete trust.

It is beyond human capacity to trust God in this way without His help.  He knows that.  We need to know that, too.  It is not just a matter of making up our mind to trust God.  That is necessary, but no one can trust God completely and entirely without continual help from Him.

“It is of the LORD’S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.  They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.  The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him.  The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him.  It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD.”  Lamentations 3:22-26

A Normal, Reasonable Christian Life Seems Excessive and Unreasonable to the Flesh

It is human nature to avoid afflictions and trials as much as possible, but we read in the Bible where Paul wrote to the Thessalonians that we are appointed thereunto these things.  And not only that, but God so dealt with the same brother in his afflictions that he said, “Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.  Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.”  2 Corinthians 12:9-10    The poet speaks of this rejoicing, saying:

Welcome the storms, my hope is abounding.

     Let the waves come, my anchor is sure.

Fixed in the Rock on which I am standing,

     How can I fall when all is secure?

This is ordinary, normal Christian life for those whose hearts are taught of God how to trust.  It seems extraordinary to wannabe aspirants.  They tend to regard those who trusted God in this all encompassing way as super-hero Christians, far ahead of the rest of us.  The ways of divine trust are very mysterious to them – they do not understand them; it seems unreasonable and fanatical.  Why would king David get in trouble with God for counting his soldiers?  They do not appreciate the leaning to his understanding that brought God’s displeasure and judgment down on the kingdom.  They do not comprehend the diminishing of his faith that went with the counting.  (Even Joab, in his spiritual condition, could see it was not the thing to do.)

Many of these less-than-complete, would-be Christians do not have the victory and blessing in their lives that Jesus died for them to possess.  They seek out other guidance than from above.  They attempt to guide themselves and doctor themselves, seeking out Dr. Google for answers and remedies.  (See 2 Corinthians 1:12)  The things that the Bible holds before us as a standard seem strange and out-of-reach, idealistic and impractical.  They pass over such scriptures as, “But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.”  Hebrews 11:6    Or they comfort themselves with a static, stagnant belief in God, saying, “Well, of course I believe in God.  I believe in His Word.  I believe He can do anything.”  But this faith is largely powerless in the face of their difficulties and afflictions.

To those who have not received the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16), just about every aspect of real spiritual living seems fantastic, radical, and just plain extremist.  Are Christians crazy?  Have they lost their minds?  In the sense that they have received the mind of Christ, yes.  People, good Jewish people, thought that about Jesus.  Listen to the words of Isaiah about how the honorable, upright Jewish worshipers viewed our Lord:

“Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.”  Isaiah 53:4    Our Lord lived a life in the body as an example of how all of us should live, but that life didn’t fit with fleshly wisdom at all.  Except for a few, who humbled themselves and fought their way to find what Jesus had (Matthew 11:12), most just thought there was something wrong with Him.  The first part of Isaiah’s prophecy reads, “Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?”  They didn’t size up the life lived before them as a pattern of how they all should be.  Unless that was revealed to one of them (after the humbling and repentance, the sober counting of the cost), they just concluded it wasn’t for them, was impractical, and just plain strange, even weird and bizarre.

It is a fact: ANYTHING LESS THAN COMPLETE FAITH IN GOD IS A DENIAL OF HIM.  That denial may only be a small percentage, but it is a denial, all the same.

“He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again.”  2 Corinthians 5:15

“For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.”  1 Corinthians 6:20    Note the completeness of what is given to God in a real Bible Christian’s life.  Body and spirit.  Everything.  All the heart.  All the body, too.

This can be readily seen as a true standard if we consider what it means to put the guidance of our soul into the hands of a psychiatrist or a psychoanalyst.  “Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.”  Psalms 1:1. That would be really leaning to our own understanding and the understanding of other human beings.  The Bible tells us, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:  That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.”  2 Timothy 3:16-17    And again, we read, “According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue:  Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.”  2 Peter 1:3    All we need, all that is safe to accept and follow, is the Word when expounded to each soul by the Spirit of God.  Yea, all things that pertain unto life and godliness.  And notice the consequences that follow in those who totally surrender to God and lean on Him: by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature.  This is wonderful, but there is more: having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.  The world desires wisdom for self-interest, and that desire is strong and motivates them to search and look.  Their motive is flawed – it is for self, not for love of God.  But their looking is in the wrong place and doesn’t really meet all the needs of a human being.  This is true of the soul, and it is true of the body, also.

The world would not tolerate a doctor who attempted to treat the soul and body together.  “You have this affliction because you are not as careful and honest as you should be in your business or toward your family.  You can get a little relief in the affliction by taking this drug, but God is afflicting you to get your attention and encourage you to mend your ways and change.”  People would not stand for it, nor would they pay for it.  We recognize that the entire medical profession, including decent and honorable people, is not built on faith in God, not taught of God.  It is an entirely different work, a work of men, and it is narrowly focused on the body, not the soul.  Unbelievers can get really comfortable in this atmosphere of scientific investigation and thought; it was built by unbelievers for unbelievers, for the love of money as well as helping others, and it has been allowed to delve into many things that are not seen.  But this exploration of all this simply has a bad effect.

“Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind.”  Colossians 2:18    God knew that the motive of the heart would distort men’s interpretation of the wonderful works of creation, and it would misinterpret and misapply many things in the ways He had not intended.  Now this scripture takes in far more than the investigations and conclusions of the medical profession.  It deals with movement idolatry and the deceptiveness of false religion among other things, but it also sheds light on the spiritual condition that motivates this activity of intruding in things which he hath not seen.  Vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind.  That puffed up, fleshly mind makes all kinds of assumptions about why we are here, how we are to deal with the challenges of physical existence, including afflictions and aging, etc.  It twists the statements of the Bible to support erroneous ideas, if it takes the Bible into account at all, wrongly dividing the Word of Truth.  It would pursue living forever if it could; it would abolish all sickness and disease.

“We’ll introduce poison to the body to kill the cancer, etc.  This is a tradeoff, but it is necessary to have a chance to still live.”  What if it is time to leave this world?  Does God confine Himself to working through poison or other natural means?  Is He not the Great Physician?  Did He not create the world and hang it on nothing?  Did He not heal the leprosy of Naaman, making his flesh appear as the skin of an infant?  “God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;  Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things” Acts 17:24-25    “Blessed is that man that maketh the LORD his trust, and respecteth not the proud, nor such as turn aside to lies.”  Psalms 40:4

“Ye are not your own”

The concept of complete trust, exclusive trust, involves abandonment to God.  And it is a surrender, a relinquishing of one’s self to God because we love Him.  This is “faith which worketh by love.”  Galatians 5:6    When our love is made perfect (1 John 4:17-18, 1 John 2:5), it automatically generates perfect confidence and trust, that is, a complete capitulation to what He wants and what He does with us.  Then, with Job, we can say from the heart: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in him.”  Job 13:15    And, as our Example said, “Not my will, but thine, be done.”  Luke 22:42

“And now I have flung myself recklessly out

    Like a chip on the stream of the infinite will.

I pass the rough rocks with a smile and a shout,

    And I just let my God His dear purpose fulfill.”

The objective in trusting God completely and exclusively is not necessarily to obtain what He has to give, such as healing, but a trust that is absolute, without doubt, that He knows best and is doing the right thing and going about it the right way, whether I am able to comprehend His actions or lack of actions.  This is so well illustrated from an anecdote quoted by Brother C E. Orr of Sister Hannah’s writings that I will take the space to quote it here:

“Mrs. Hannah Whitehall Smith tells a story that well illustrates the responsibility of ownership.  She says that while traveling in the south, she met a lady who told her that she had occasion one time to give her slave a piece of work to do which required him to stand outside the window on a plank, that was held steadily by some one sitting on the end on the inside.  The man was a little afraid, but said, ‘Missus, if you will set on the end of the plank yourself, then I’ll do the work.’  I replied, ‘Won’t it do if your wife will sit on the plank?  Mandy will not let it fall.’  ‘No, Missus,’ he answered, ‘I won’t trust Mandy.  She is only my wife, and she may forget and get up, but you are my Missus, and I belong to you, and of course, you will keep me safe.’”

Now this reality of ownership is viewed as hopelessly extreme by those who have no trust in God.  It appears dangerous and questionable by those who have not perfect love for God and the perfect faith in Him that is brought about by this love.  How could it be otherwise?  They do not trust Him.  But it is normal Christian living for the wholly sanctified in Christ Jesus.  They have ceased from their own works to do the work of God (Hebrews 4:10), and they just want the Lover of their soul to will and to do of His good pleasure in their lives in any way that He sees fit to do.  Sister Katherine Helm puts it, as quoted below in The Lure of Divine Love:

“It is to get acquainted with Him; it is to be wedded to Him! It is to give yourself up to Him and have Him reveal Himself to you, and then give Himself to you. There are conditions. You must be in touch; you have got to drop a lot of other things before you can be in touch with Him. You have got to let go of this foolish world. Let Him have you, your body, your life, and then He will delight to come to you. It will be no strain; it will be simple trust. Then you will have a jealous feeling that you will not want anybody else to handle your body but the Lord.”

“But Thou art making me, I thank Thee, Sire.

    What Thou hast done and doest, Thou knowest well,

 And I will help Thee:  gently in Thy fire

    I will lie burning; on Thy potter’s wheel

    I will whirl patient, though my brain should reel;

    Thy grace shall be enough to quell,

 And growing strength perfect, through weakness dire.

“I have not knowledge, wisdom, insight, thought,

    Nor understanding, fit to justify

 Thee in Thy work, O Perfect!  Thou hast brought

 Me up to this; and lo!  what Thou hast wrought,

    I cannot comprehend.  But I can cry,

 ‘O enemy, the Maker hath not done;

 One day thou shalt behold, and from the sight shalt run!’

“Thou workest perfectly.  And if it seem

    Some things are not so well, ’tis but because

    They are too loving deep, too lofty wise,

    For me, poor child, to understand their laws.

 My highest wisdom, half is but a dream;

 My love runs helpless like a falling stream;

    Thy good embraces ill, and lo!  its illness dies.”

                                                                                    – George MacDonald

The God-given Liberty to Walk in the Light

We have here depicted the motivation of the wholly trusting soul – the exclusively trusting soul.  And now we desire, by the help of God, to examine the borderline of that trust, especially the liberty of God’s trusting children to walk in the light from above as it shines on their pathway.  This liberty involves far more than just the aspect of trusting, of complete faith in God.  The subject is profound; this liberty is involved in the astounding diversity of how God has made mankind, with our free will.  It is astonishing and awesome how carefully God deals with us in our differences in understanding and temperament.  The Bible tells us that “He hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence.” (Ephesians 1:8)    We catch a glimpse of this abounding in the account of John concerning Philip and Nathanael, as related in John 1:44-51.  It is obvious that what it took to convince Philip was not what it took to persuade Nathanael.  But both were satisfied.  God is able to meet the inward need of those who cannot read, who cannot articulate, who are autistic, who are retarded.  All human beings are created of God (and all return to God and give account, Ecclesiastes 12:7; Romans 14:12).  The range of diversity is so complex, so involved, that it is impossible for human beings to take the place of the Creator to all.  We simply do not have the capacity to abound toward all in all wisdom and prudence.  God has reserved that for Himself, and He has made man with a diversity that flouts the desire to dominate.  God respects and observes that diversity, too.  He deals with the Philips and the Nathanaels in accord with their varied needs, and all the rest of us, as well.  God expects more from some, less from others, but all are confronted with the requirement to live holy lives and to love the Lord with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength.  God chooses the emphasis, the focus, the guidance in each follower’s life.  He holds before some requirements that others are not given grace to meet and are not required to meet.  See Matthew 19:11-12; Acts 9:16.  There is a range of growth that God justly expects of every one who receives eternal life.  Yet some bring forth of fruit a hundredfold, a sixtyfold, a thirtyfold.  The Lord knows our capability.

No child of God can live faithless, nor can anyone become a child of God without faith in God.  The scope of saving faith stretches up to the gift of faith, that knows no limit save God’s unbounded Word.  But all who love Him acceptably are stirred to increase in faith and love Him more and more.

This all applies to the individual understanding of God required of each of us at any given point to trust Him.  You will not be able to trust Him as you should unless He helps you and inspires you.  “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.”  Romans 8:26    Take note of that phrase: we know not what we should pray for as we ought.  You will get it wrong if you lean to your own understanding, if you take things into your own hands, if you just do as seems best to you.  As the poet put it:

“Had I the choosing of my pathway,

    In blindness I should go astray,

 And wander far away in darkness,

    Nor reach that land of endless day.”

Some might say, “Well, don’t I have a choice?”  Yes, you can choose to exercise your right to choice by choosing to relinquish your right to choose your own way.  You can acknowledge that what seems best to you may not be best in the eyes of Him whom you trust, and that you want Him to have His way.

If you take things into your own hands, you will not have inspired faith, you will not have the help of the Spirit of God, and you will not be able to pray the prayer of faith.  The prayer of faith is a dictated prayer – for we know not how to pray as we ought.  This is what happens to people who are not taught of God how to trust Him.  They assume; they suppose; they reason, generalize and conclude; they LEAN TO THEIR UNDERSTANDING, and it does not work out as they thought.  The confidence that we read about in 1 John 5:14-15 is not there, for it does not arise from human understanding.  Trust with all the heart is not there, either, but it takes insight from God to see what must be done to wholly trust.  As the brethren have said, We must pray until we pray, i.e., God helps us to pray.

God, in His infinite wisdom, has made a way that only works as it should when He is wholly loved by His follower.  And this principle, this motivated completely by love and keeping ourselves in the love of God is the only valid, acceptable to God way to be and to live.  As Sister Lottie Jarvis states in the tract, God or a System, Which?, “Personal love for God is the only safeguard for the soul against idolatry and error.”  Personal love for God is the only safeguard against leaning to our own understanding, as well.

In her book, Life’s Story and Healings, Sister Nellie Poulos writes:

“I saw the lives of many companions ruined by marrying one who  promised to love them and they were left alone, deserted and  brokenhearted, and I became afraid to think about getting married  lest I, too, be left alone and deserted. It seemed one did not know whom to trust, and I feared many or maybe most of the men had  become unsafe to trust. In this state of mind and feeling so sorry for some of my friends, I decided I would remain single and be happy with and help care for my parents and live for God. But I was forgetting to let God lead in all things and was setting up my own plans. Through a fear of the disappointment of the future I had my mind fixed. But our dear Lord is faithful to His children and will help us if we let Him.”

This sister re-consecrated her life to God when she realized that she was taking her life into her own hands through leaning to her own understanding, and God gave her a saved, precious companion in due time.  She was walking in the light as it shone upon her pathway, and the fruit that came from her walk was from the root of loving God above herself and of being led of Him.

In her book, I Want You to Go to Mexico, Sister Opal Kelly relates an experience in trusting God for her body:

“One time when I was deathly sick with the flu, I disobeyed the Lord in calling the States for help in prayer after God showed me He wanted to heal me in answer to my own prayer. I surely suffered the consequences.”

Here are examples of leaning to one’s own understanding.  And it is enlightening.  When God allows affliction or trial in our lives, He is after certain adjustments in us.  God is relentless in pursuing these changes because He knows the value of them and just how much we need them.  He loves us too much to leave us to ourselves.  He knows that the gain is worth the pain that it costs.  This is why He appoints trials and afflictions, persecutions and reproaches, too.  It is possible for us to thwart what God is after by not walking in the light that we have.

If the lesson of the trial or affliction is not gained, it is necessary for the lesson to be repeated until we get the lesson (such is its importance).  You do not have to get the lesson; you can quit on God with all attendant consequences.  God carefully weighs out each trial that He allows to His children, and He monitors our progress or lack thereof.

Had David not gone through the trials that God appointed for him in the court of king Saul, he would have not been able to stand in the treacherous, slippery position of being the king of Israel.  He needed every ounce of God’s preparation in him to do the task that God set before him.  As it was, he barely made it through and had some disastrous failures in his life.

“He is like a refiner’s fire, and like fullers’ soap:  And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the LORD an offering in righteousness.  Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant unto the LORD, as in the days of old, and as in former years.”  Malachi 3:2-4

“My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him:  For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.  If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?  But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.”  Hebrews 12:5-8

“But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.”  1 John 1:7

This light from above may be light on trusting God – detailed instructions tailored to the particular need of the sufferer or of others – or it may be understanding on other aspects of Christian living:  from details of dress in modesty and plainness for the individual, to where one should attend Christian services, to how one should earn their living or where they should reside.  Walking in the light from above keeps us in fellowship with God and all others who are in fellowship with God.  It keeps the pipeline open to receive the abundance of grace from above to follow the path that the hand of our God does trace.  And it also separates us from those who have substituted leaning to their own understanding instead of being led of the Lord.  Just how deep and wide this degree of this separation is depends on how much one walks in the light from above or how little.  How weighty are the words of the apostle here: “And what communion hath light with darkness?”  2 Corinthians 6:14

The Borders of Christian Liberty

Others may, you cannot.  God allows and disallows as He sees fit with every one of His children.  God allows.  If God allows it, then the child of God will continue to be blessed as long as they walk in the light.  And there will be an openness, a receptiveness to further light.  There will be growth toward the standard of holiness that God has established.

Those who have understanding from above on any line must be faithful to that light.  They must deal faithfully.  They must recognize when anyone is living to less than the light that they themselves possess – the reality of where the other person is at.  They must continually hold the true standard before others, both by word and by example.  They must meekly hold the true position, standing firm.  They cannot justify the below-standard person in their condition and keep in the light themselves.  This sober evaluation of where the other brother or sister is, is not an acceptance of the sub-standard living of the brother or sister in such a condition.  It is an acceptance of the reality of where they are, with a clear vision of where God will eventually bring them if they continue to walk in the light given to them.

An illustration from the writing of S. O. Susag will illustrate the point:

“One old mother in Israel, when she heard of the books being burned, said, ‘I’ve got only one book and it’s a good one.’ She brought it to me and said, ‘If you say this is not good, my salvation goes too.’ I asked her if I might mark with a pencil in her book and she said I could. After reading it awhile I laid it aside, having marked it here and there. She asked me what I thought of her book. Not to discourage her, I said, ‘There are some good things in that book.’ She took it and began to find the places which I had marked, finally closed the book and said, ‘This book is no good; the Bible says thus and so and the book speaks to the contrary.’ Then she said, ‘Why have I been blessed many times when reading this book?’ I answered, ‘Because you were honest and did not know any better.’” – Personal Experiences of S. O. Susag

 

“For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.”  Galatians 5:13    This letter to the Galatians was a letter of reproof and warning.  It dealt directly with the borderline between liberty to be Jewish and to be un-Jewish, as it were, by receiving the gospel of trusting completely in Christ for salvation and not leaning on the works of the Old Testament.

In Acts 21:17-26, we find the account of Brother Paul observing the customs of the Mosaic Law by going with four Jewish men who were under a vow into the temple.  He was requested to do this by Brother James and others in Jerusalem.  They said, “Purify thyself with them, and be at charges with them, that they may shave their heads: and all may know that those things, whereof they [thousands of Jews which believe and are zealous of the law] were informed concerning thee, are nothing; but that thou thyself also walkest orderly, and keepest the law.”  (verse 24)   And Brother Paul did this.  He had liberty to be Jewish as well as Christian.  He did not feel that going through this ritual would contradict light that he had.  He did not trust in this, for his trust in God for salvation had been removed from the works of the law and placed exclusively and completely in Christ.  He was walking in the light that he had, and James and others were walking in the light that God had revealed thus far, at that moment in time, to the body of believers.  They were still grappling with what God required of gentile believers.  They wondered just how Jewish a gentile needed to be.  I do not know if Paul would have done this ritual later on, or if the brethren with James would have asked him to do such a thing later.  It took time for the eternal truth behind what was the issue at hand to be realized.  It was a process of walking in the light.

In the scripture quoted above in Galatians, we read of how Paul regarded this in speaking to folks who were being persuaded to turn back to the law.  The same situation recorded in Acts is recorded in Galatians (Galatians 2:1-10), and from the vantage point of our time, it is easy to see the weight of how the writer of Hebrews described the Mosaic Law: “In that He saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old.  Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.”  Hebrews 8:13    What an abundance of walking in the light of God was necessary to bring the Jewish brethren to this conclusion!

Now to be drawn back, to be seduced to put one’s trust in the works of the law, was to go back from light from above.  Brother Paul was laboring with a burden to reveal this to the Galatian brethren.  “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.  Behold, I Paul say unto you, that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing.  For I testify again to every man that is circumcised, that he is a debtor to do the whole law.  Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace.”  Galatians 5:1-4,6

And in the sixth verse, he adds: “For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love.”

Now this is faith for the salvation of the soul, the most serious aspect of Christian living that can be addressed, but the same liberty and borderline of liberty exists in faith for the care and health of the physical body.  The standard is complete and exclusive reliance on God, i.e., not leaning (not trusting) to our own understanding, both our understanding personally and that of mankind in general, including the medical profession.  And each child of God must walk in the light from heaven.  Each child of God must learn how to trust, step by step, each step being ordered of the Lord.  If you make mistakes in this, leaning to your understanding, not acknowledging Him in all your ways, your faith in God will diminish, whether you discern it or not, and your life will not harmonize with those who are walking in all the light of God on this subject.  It will not end with the diminishing of your faith; it will go further until your faith in God is utterly powerless and ineffective.  You have been and are being robbed and spoiled.  You will eventually fail the Lord, crossing the line into something you know is wrong, and end up being dead in your sins.  This is just as our adversary, the devil, would have it, and it is what he labors endlessly to accomplish.

O, how weighty is this text!  “For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.”  Galatians 5:13

Sober Thinking

“For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.”  Romans 12:3

To think soberly is to think realistically, not as we would like for things to be, but humbly facing and acknowledging the truth.  The two disciples on the road to Emmaus were thinking, but it was not sober thinking.  It was based on looking on the outward appearance of the situation.  Jesus did not say, “Now here is where you made your mistake.”  What did He say?  “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.”  Their lack of sober thinking was caused by slowness of heart; the deficiency was at the heart level, not the mind.  The cure for their fault was in the reality of the prophecies and the necessity of what God was doing.  And Jesus expounded upon these indisputable realities until their hearts burned within them.  And then it was unfolded to them at the supper table that Jesus Himself was before them.  Sober thinking, then inspired faith, then “this day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.”  (Luke 4:21)   Sober thinking, Bible thinking, causes us to recognize that God deals at different levels with His children, yet His dealings all harmonize and produce a holy life.  Each pilgrim has his own trials, his own weaknesses, his own needs, his own comprehension of God and His ways, yet the Spirit of God leads continually to the perfect light, shining more and more unto the perfect day when we shall see without the veil.

The Word of God asks us: “Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.”  Psalms 19:12    Please notice that the one who wrote these words from inspiration included the prayer: cleanse Thou me from secret faults.  In all this bearing and forbearing one another in love, in the meekness that comes from considering ourselves lest we also be tempted, sober thinking is absolutely crucial.  I must face my mistakes for what they are.  I must discover my secret faults, perhaps my shocking secret faults (which I did not know I had) and let God have His way in correcting them.  “For the commandment is a lamp, and the law is light; and reproofs of instruction are the way of life.”  Proverbs 6:23    I continually have to be corrected, first to get on the right path, and then to stay on the right path.

What, then, is the purpose of my intellect, my reasoning powers?  What is their place?  When should they be employed?  What does it mean to be led of the Lord?  Should I pray about when I should eat a meal?  The exact time?  Two o’clock or 2:01?  Should I pray about just when I should go to the mailbox?  No, there is a sphere for human logic and rationale.  What, then, does it mean to be led of the Lord in all things?

We do not have to speculate; the answer to all this is in the Bible.  In Acts 16:6-7, we read, “Now when they had gone throughout Phrygia and the region of Galatia, and were forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia,  After they were come to Mysia, they assayed to go into Bithynia: but the Spirit suffered them not.”    The Spirit of God intervened, contradicting what they thought was best.  It was not wrong to think, but their thinking, their very lives, were on an altar before God.  At that time, going to certain places was out-of-the-question; God had spoken and overridden.

It is important to note that they did not just go ahead, find the Bithynia was not spiritually profitable, etc.  They were led; they were guided; they were corrected; the Spirit suffered them not.  Sometimes the Spirit works like this, and other times He allows us to get into trouble before we are corrected.  But the crucial thing is that we are under the control of the Holy Ghost.  “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.”  Romans 8:14   The Spirit of God will lead us into sober thinking.

Now this furnishes a Bible answer to a question that troubles many honest souls.  When is food medicine?  When does changing my diet involve my becoming my own doctor?  Where are the lines between trusting God completely and depending on myself?  And should I eat only foods that seem to offer some advantage, such as organically-grown, etc.?  What do such scriptures as, “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on,” (Matthew 6:25) really mean?  How can I even prepare a meal if I take no thought?  And so on.

We can easily see that at one extreme, one could hardly live, but must needs go out of this world.  And at the other extreme, one could become obsessed with eating, drinking, apparel, and other matters of natural life.  Should one own a home?  Should one have a savings account?  And a general answer does not help much.  Did Jesus have a home?  No. Did He have a savings account?  No.  All He had in the way of apparel, it seems, was a robe, someone says.  What did He do when it needed to be laundered?  I do not know anything in the Bible about that.

But we can easily see that our Lord lived a life of minimal involvement with the natural requirements of life.  He did not marry; He did not raise a natural family.  The Spirit of God did not lead Him to do so.  The Spirit of God taught Him (in the days of His flesh) how to go about natural life just as He should that He might live as He should, and that is the answer to the questions posed above.  Take note of the weight of this scripture: “Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God,” Hebrews 9:14    Jesus did it right through the eternal Spirit.  Whenever there is a question, there is direction from above for us, and God can interfere and meddle with our thinking as He sees best, and that is completely acceptable to us who love Him with all the heart, the soul, the mind, and the strength.

It is rather like a child.  The child thinks like a child, and most of the time that is just as it should be.  The overall frame of the child’s life is controlled by the parents, and they can interfere as seems best to them.  The child is to accept their direction and their contradiction (if this occurs).  He is under their oversight.  The reality is that the child is not an adult and accepts adult direction and intervention.  The reality is that the child makes mistakes and must be chastised and corrected.  “But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.”  Hebrews 12:8

Did the directing of our Lord’s life in the flesh comes easily and automatically to Him?  Let the Bible answer: “Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared;  Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered.”  Hebrews 5:7-8    If it took prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears for Jesus to live it, shall we get by with less?  It takes this kind of listening, this kind of obedience, this kind of press, this kind of drive, to walk in the light of heaven while we are in the body.  We must know; we must get it right.  The guidance and assistance is outside of ourselves; it is from above.

God’s way is to first regenerate the soul, implanting a fervent love for Him and a burning desire to live right.  Then, if we follow on to know the Lord, the way will be revealed to us, step by step.  And this unfolding will be in complete accordance with our peculiar needs.  It will take into account our conditioning, our background; yea, “He will guide you into all truth.”  (John 16:13)

We learn to trust God by Him teaching us, little by little.  It is line upon line, precept upon precept, experience upon experience.  When this is working as it should, the soul is quiet and leaning upon God instead of leaning upon the understanding of our own thinking.  We wait upon the Lord; we are often somewhat perplexed as to what is happening and how it will turn out, except that we know that if we trust God with all our heart, it will come out right because He will make it come out right.  “But He knoweth the way that I take: when He hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”  Job 23:10    Praise His name!  “For Thou, O God, hast proved us: Thou hast tried us, as silver is tried.  Thou broughtest us into the net; Thou laidst afflictions upon our loins.  Thou hast caused men to ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water: but Thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place.”  Psalms 66:10-12

It is sober thinking, tempered by the Holy Ghost, that shows us the depths of meaning in the inspired observation of David, that man of God, when he wrote: “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly.”  Psalms 1:1    It is not just a good idea to stay away from the advice and counsel of those whom the Holy Ghost has not taught, it is BLESSED to not walk in that counsel.  I have greatly benefitted in my afflictions from NOT resorting to the doctor.  The benefit was always there for the soul, and frequently to the body, as well.  And we can appreciate the warning of the Bible on this line: “Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD.”  Jeremiah 17:5

Now I have heard different ones dispute this.  They did not think soberly and attempted to trust God and trust other things, especially themselves (non-exclusive trust), and they would say, “My heart has not departed from God.  I still trust Him.”  They do not realize the corrosive effect of what they are doing.  There is a curse, put by God, on divided trust.  The part that is not fixed on God undermines and diminishes faith in Him.  What Jeremiah was describing was an ongoing consequence of trusting in man: whose heart departs from the Lord.  It just happens; it is the inevitable, inescapable effect.  Maybe just a little, especially at first, as the erring soul dips cautiously into the counsel of the ungodly.  But it doesn’t stop there.  “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”  1 Peter 5:8    Peter was also inspired to speak of how to deal with this: “Whom resist stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world.”  (verse 9)

The Faith

It has been said that if one attempts to defend holiness by stepping outside of holiness, then it has already been lost.  And if one attempts to follow the ways of faith in God that works by love for God without really loving God and without having one’s steps ordered by the Lord, then this will result in a formula, a code, a creed of human interpretation of the promises of the Bible.  God will not consistently defend it or honor it, for it is of man’s devising, and it will result in one being left to one’s own devices.

     What do I mean by consistently?  At times, people who are not taught of God how to trust Him will happen to align themselves with the purposes and directions of the Almighty, and He will see fit to answer prayer.  Sometimes God doesn’t even wait to be asked.  This happened with king Ahaz as related in the seventh chapter of Isaiah.  Ahaz was in serious trouble; both Syria and Israel had made a league against Judea, and this ungodly king did not know what to do.  And God sent the prophet Isaiah to the idolatrous king to offer help, for the destruction of Judea was not according to His plan.  But there was no interest on the part of the king in God.  “But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt [try] the Lord.”  (Isaiah 7:12)   In spite of this man’s lack of interest in God and His plan, Judea was miraculously preserved, but Ahaz got no spiritual good out of God’s mercy at all.  The same kind of thing goes on around us all the time, for this world receives more mercy and longsuffering from God than they imagine.  But a lot of them get no more out of it than did king Ahaz.

But when men set up a creed, they set up an idol.  This is how men arrive at a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.  (2 Timothy 3:5)  Only God can keep us from the things in each of us individually that deny the power of God working as He wants to work.  The doctrine becomes merely a way of life, a philosophy, simply a shell of what it can be in the hands of the Holy Ghost.  Men attempt to hold it – desperately attempt to hold it, go to great lengths to hold it, quoting such scriptures as our Lord’s question: “When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” to justify even extreme measures.  Luke 18:8    “There will be a letdown here only over my dead body!”, so to speak.

But men cannot hold the truth by their own efforts.  “Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”  Psalms 123:1.  Men shun people who question these formulas, these creeds.  They do this to “hold” the truth – only the truth in its fulness is not held, only the form.  I am sorry to say that this is largely the case with the Amish and Mennonite creeds, for instance.

People do all in their power to enforce adherence to an outward observance of the things that accompany salvation, but unless these things are done because people are really regenerated, wholly sanctified, and head over heels in love with God, the truth is already lost, the fruit non-existent or greatly diminished.  “These things saith he that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars; I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.”  Revelations 3:1    The form of godliness can be lost, as well as the root of the matter, but if the root is dried up, the outer form is of little value, being only a husk of real, genuine Bible life from above.  This form will grow more rigid as time passes, just as the stem and branches dry up, but retain their outer shape.  Eventually even this dried up husk is lost, and rot and mold are the destiny of what was once alive, flourishing, and bringing forth fruit.

“A name to live while dead

    Will only God betray.

 Then come as He hath said,

    The Bible way.

“No human creed or church

    Will answer in that day,

 When God each heart will search;

    Then choose His way.”

To try to live as did genuine saints without having the same love and love-generated faith in God as they possessed will produce this inadequate, unacceptable-to-God substitute.  To love a creed of our own interpretation of the Bible, to pretend that doing so is loving God, is to love an idol – an idol of our own fashioning, our own making.  God has made this truth so it cannot be passed in its fulness and completeness from human to human.  It must be gotten from the Source of All Good Things for oneself.  But a creed of human understanding, a catechism, is not the work of God, but something else.

I was talking to a minister who had attended a ministers’ meeting wherein they were disciplining one of their own, and I asked him, Well, what do you think God thinks about the matter?”  To my horror, he appeared surprised that I had even brought up what God thought about it.  The entire proceeding was going on without wondering what God thought about it?  What God thought about it was irrelevant to them.  They assumed that their conclusions together were what mattered.

A way of life evolves out of men’s efforts to condense, to express, what they believe and stand for.  It becomes a philosophy, a school of thought, a dogma – an object of affection and loyalty that is confused with loving God.  And, as people sacrifice and suffer to sustain their creed, it is exalted more and more in their hearts, and becomes sacred to them.  It becomes another gospel, and it receives the regard and esteem that the one, true, everlasting gospel alone should have.  People’s conception of God Himself becomes different from what the Bible presents to us.  Instead of true worshipers worshiping God in Spirit and in Truth, we perceive that there is a vast multitude of Christian professors, worshiping in vain in many different spirits and in many different “truths”.  “This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.  But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.”  Matthew 15:8-9    This is what happens when we lean to our understanding, when we take things into our own hands.  This is where those paths lead.

With many people who “trust the Lord for healing”(?), they have nothing more than a creed of not going to the medical profession.  In many cases, they are afraid of the people in the medical profession; they are prejudiced against them.  Their faith(?) is motivated by the spirit of fear.  How could it be otherwise?  It is not faith that works by the love of God.

As they get less from God, they have only their own resources to rely on, and the search for remedies and the wisest way to go about natural life becomes more and more preeminent in their thinking.  This is leaning to ones own understanding indeed, and it is capable of being leaned to more and more.  It comes at the cost of not leaning on God.  It is actually quite destructive to inspired faith in God, and it has consequences far beyond the afflictions of the body.  It is really nothing more or less than taking things into our own hands.

As the testimonies of God’s healing power become more rare, unbelief rises stronger and stronger, and there is a real fear that “the truth” is being lost, and that it must be preserved.  That is, the creed is in danger of being abandoned, and must either be supported by strenuous human effort or revised to accommodate the new reality.  Human ingenuity is taxed to the uttermost to deal with the situation.  Every effort is made to “preserve” faith in the creed.

The Shepherds of the Form of Godliness

Now I am aware of such scriptures as, “And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.”  2 Timothy 2:2    And, “Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.”  Jude 1:3    And I have encountered the mentality that emphasizes this communication between human to human.  But men that have been taught of God know there is no substitute for being taught of God, and you will hear them say from time to time, “You need to pray about this and get your understanding and leading from God.”  They say this because they know that heart-instruction, not particularly head-instruction is needed.  Second-hand religion is not acceptable to God.

Men and women of God recognize the experience of being taught of God in others, and they recognize the unity and oneness of what comes from the same precious Source.  The unity of God’s people is not through a consensus among themselves between themselves, but each is in unity with God.  This brings about a consensus, but it is not person to person, it is each person to God, and then finding themselves speaking the same thing with the same judgment.  It is described in the Bible, “Ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”  Galatians 3:28    And this oneness is the one and only oneness that comes from each being taught of God.  (See John 6:45; 1 Thessalonians 4:9; Hebrews 8:10-11.)  They can point to that fundamental experience and do so readily.  As one said, “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ.”  1 Corinthians 11:1    This does not refer to Paul’s disciples as contrasted with another brother’s.  He was simply saying, “I followed God and this is what He taught me.  My example is valid and worthy of imitation; it is a true pattern.  Now you get from God for yourself what I got and follow the same teaching from God.”  Jesus said, “If any man will do His will, he shall know the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.”  John 7:17    God’s religion is not a religion of just following one another, but of following God as He is revealed to the trusting heart.  It is safe to follow what is of God in another because that part is of God.  That is, God in another is God, and I am following Him.

“Those who will take advantage of what man says to serve the flesh are far from being saints.  They are not living unto God.  They are not serving God from heart choice.  Now listen; if you are doing right things because some man teaches these right things, you will likely do  wrong things if this same teacher teaches wrong things.  You are not to do right things because man teaches these things, but because God has written these right things in your heart.  If you are not doing them from a righteous principle in your heart, you are not living saintly.  Can not you understand this?” –The Rule of a Saintly Life

Men and women who walk with God also recognize what is not of God and are faithful to the souls of all, “warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus.”  Colossians 1:28    But a man of God (or a woman of God) will point you to God.  To do otherwise is to set up an idol.

I have heard appeals made to consecrate to the church, but I do not read such an appeal in the Word of God.  “And who then is willing to consecrate his service this day unto the LORD?”  1 Chronicles 29:5     A brother described himself as “a son of the church”, but I read in the Bible that we are the sons of God.  (1 John 3:2)  “Personal love for God is the only safeguard for the soul against idolatry and error.”

I will quote again from Brother C. E. Orr from The Rule of a Saintly Life:

“There is not enough living from the heart among the saints.  There is too much coldness, formality, and dullness among us.  This is a plain statement, but it is the fact.  The reason why there is such formality and dullness is because there is not enough heart-living.  There is too much doing and not doing because it is taught that we should do certain things and not do certain things.  The things we do and do not do should be done from the power of a living ‘truth in the inward part.’  This only will save us from cold formality.  If you were only able to receive it, I would say that too many are doing things merely because the Bible says so.  Wait a moment, and let me explain.  The Bible teaches (in principle) and preachers teach that it is distrusting God to take medicine.  Now you can say, ‘I will not take any medicine because the Bible says, ‘God will heal all my diseases,’’ and yet you may not be healed.  Why is it?  It is because you have not made that word you see on the printed page a living power in your heart.  Jesus says, ‘If ye abide in me and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what you will and it shall be done unto you.’  Multitudes are claiming that promise and getting no results.  What is the trouble?  It is because the word is not abiding in their heart in its power.  Peter said, ‘Such as I have.’  He had something.  He had healing truth as a power in his heart, and he gave it from himself to the man and he was instantly healed.” – The Rule of a Saintly Life

“Too many are trying to live what some one else teaches instead of getting the truth in the heart.  Did you not know that you can get nothing from heaven except there be a heart conviction by the spirit for the thing desired?  You want to be saved because you do not want to go to hell; you want to be healed because you want to be well; you want your daily bread because you don’t want to go hungry; but there is no heart conviction for the things you are desiring.  You pray with your lips, but there is no mighty pleading of the Holy Spirit in you, and you get nothing from heaven to your life.  You may think that I am severe.  I am telling you truth because I love you.

“Jesus says, ‘My sheep hear my voice and they follow me.’  You are to hear more than the preacher’s voice, but there are those who are hearing no more.  You are to listen for the voice of Jesus in the voice of the preacher, and if you can not hear it, do not follow.  You have heaven to gain for yourself.  You have your own life to live.  Do not look around and compare yourself with some one else.  Look to heaven and live to please God.  He will tell you how to live.  His Spirit will write it in your heart.” – The Rule of a Saintly Life

There is only ONE WAY to rightly hold the truths of the Bible, whether we are focusing on trusting God as we should or any other aspect of living for God.  What is that way?  “Cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.”  Matthew 23:26    God works from the inside out.  He is interested in the things which accompany salvation, but He is intent on people being saved, made new creatures in Christ Jesus.  Then they will bear fruit, and possess the potential to bear much fruit.  God is not interested in people attempting to bear fruit unto God on their own; He is not interested and does not accept things that accompany salvation that do not originate in salvation.

Those who are shepherds of the form are not like God; they are really shepherds of an idol of man’s devising.  “As many as desire to make a fair show in the flesh . . .”  Galatians 6:12    Men look on the outward appearance; God looks on the heart.  (1 Samuel 16:7) To rejoice in outward compliance while inward compliance to God is weak or non-existent is futile and a misrepresentation of the true gospel.  If one was to say, “All our people trust God; they avoid the medical profession,” then something very significant is left out.  WHY do they do as they do?

“Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men:  Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvellous work among this people, even a marvellous work and a wonder: for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid.”  Isaiah 29:13-14

God is interested in the motivation of the heart.

But how can we know the motivation of the heart?  Including our own hearts?  Here, too, the answer is in the Bible.  “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”  Jeremiah 17:9    This is true of the defiled heart.  Only a work of God done in the heart can change this condition, and it is possible for the heart to re-defiled after being washed and made clean.  Who can know it?  We cannot know our own hearts by our own efforts, whether we have had our hearts changed or not.  We can not know.  Leaning to our understanding – even the very best, the very most insightful, of our understanding cannot accurately inform us of just what we need.  Only God can understand the human heart totally and completly.  This inner man is beyond the reach of the outer man’s resources.  Thus God has made it.

But, back to the question: “Who can understand his errors?”  (Psalms 19:12)    We can only understand what we need so badly to know as God reveals to us what is in us.  “I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.”  Jeremiah 17:10    God reveals to us our condition by how we do in our trials, our afflictions, our temptations.  In this way, by being taught of God, we can keep our own hearts, keep in the love of God, etc.  Without this continual help, there is no living a holy life.

People have power in themselves to live a good, moral life.  They can behave responsibly by self-discipline.  They can fairly well live up to the standard of an Old Testament experience without a regenerated heart.  But God has provided more now.  And He requires more now.  To live saintly is to receive all that God has for us and to walk in the light of what He has provided.

At a glance, we can see that the shepherds of the form of godliness, so to speak, are leaving out the crucial factor.  God has so designed it that no one live a holy life, acceptable to Him, without His continual assistance.  When our faults, our secret faults are discovered, and our errors are exhibited to our eyes and the eyes of others, we are faced with the question of what we are going to do about it.  This is conviction, involuntary humility indeed, and we find ourselves in a valley of decision.

This happened to Peter.  God had dealt with him in the matter of associating with Brother Cornelius, and Brother Peter had accepted and acted on that light.  As is quite common, there were enormous repercussions.  It was fundamentally ultimately addressing just how Jewish a gentile brother was required to be.  So what Peter did (in obedience to God) caused an uproar.  Eventually, in this spiritual tumult, Peter made a mistake.  He leaned to his own understanding instead of asking God what to do.  He used fleshly wisdom to follow a course of action that seemed best to him.  You can read about it in Galatians 2:11-14.  But Brother Peter was a true man of God and he learned from having his reins thus pulled upon by God.  He humbled down, accepted and received the public admonition by Brother Paul.  How do we know?  “Even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you; as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.”  2 Peter 3:15-16

The inspired scriptures that have come down to us in our time are wonderfully designed to reveal how God deals with all of us, how He leads, how truth is preserved in such a way that the gates of hell cannot prevail against it.  There was no consensus, not at first, in the early morning Church of God against circumcision or the keeping of the Mosaic law.  And when God caused this issue to become the burden of the hour, so to speak, the scriptures faithfully tell us enough of the commotion, so that the trusting heart can see how God separates the precious from the vile.  Little by little, it became plain that outward circumcision did not matter (any more); that inward circumcision – the work of grace in the heart – was all that mattered.  “But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.”  Romans 2:29

But there were shepherds of the form of godliness, who exulted in a outward show of godliness, who were not led of God, who were stubborn and entrenched.  They did not see the truth that is forever settled in the heavens on this point.  It seemed to them that the oracles of God were being lost.  They dug in and ended up fighting against God and the direction in which He was leading.  It came to this: “Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision [division].  For we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.”  Philippians 2:2-3    It came to this: “Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?” (Acts 15:10)  The reality, slowly unfolded to sober thinking of His children by God Himself, was that God was changing dispensations, that the old covenant consisted of types and shadows, valid and essential to the new covenant, but now passing away.  But many, not being led of God, did not survive spiritually; they remained shepherds of the form of godliness.

If we focus our eyes on how others have walked in the light they had, if we do not delve into the roots of truth, then we get out of touch with God.  We get lost in how people tried successfully or not successfully to follow eternal truth in their time.  Divine trust is far beyond Brother Warner or Brother Byrum.  It is forever settled in the heavens.  It is not given for people to hold in their minds whether they decide to live up to it or not.  It can not be truly appropriated at the mental level; it must be lived from the heart.  God has made it that way.  “That no flesh should glory in His presence . . . that, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.”  1 Corinthians 1:29,31    “Thus saith the LORD, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches:  But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the LORD which exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight, saith the LORD.”  Jeremiah 9:23-24    God has got it fixed so that men cannot capture truth for themselves without sinning and leaning to their own understanding.  “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness.”  Romans 1:18

I am learning how to trust Him

     With my life and for all things,

And my spirit, filled with glory,

     In exceeding gladness sings.