The Cross and the Eternal Glory # 19

The Spirit of Glory: The Medium of the Glory (continued)

I am compelled to close at this point, but I want you to grasp one thing, just to carry away with you this one thing, there is a tremendous difference, indeed, there is all the difference of two worlds, even among Christians. Of those on the one side, who have the Word of God, believed it to be the Word of God, would lay down their lives for it as the inspired Word of God, and yet, and yet, it is just a book of commandments and laws and regulations and what-not. Then on the other hand, those to whom this Book has come alive by the Holy Spirit, and they are seeing by the Holy Spirit far more than just the written letter.

If you get into the one realm, you see, you get a dozen more, a score, a hundred different interpretations of the same passage of Scripture, and you are all at variance. One says it means this, and another says it means that, and that is because it is all approached by the natural mind, it is still the Word of God. The only way to get over that, the only to come to oneness of mind, oneness of heart, oneness of understanding, and to move livingly with the Lord, is for the Spirit Himself, Who knows what the meaning is,  dwelling in our hearts, to tell us that. Not to go beyond the Scripture, that is not what we are talking about, extra to the Scripture, but bearing witness in our hearts that this is God's mind about that.

And so I say to you: the Holy Spirit has come, He has come to take up the Word of God, and pass it from becoming just a book of commandments, into the realm where it becomes the Book of Life, that we really live "by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord," that His Word is made alive to us by the Holy Spirit in that true sense of Life. We may be fascinated with its studies and its subjects and think that is life, but that is not what I am talking about. It may be tremendously interesting, but that is not what I mean. Life is something which changes us, that is the point, transforms us.

Now the test then, of whether we have even the Word of God in a legal realm, or an intellectual realm, or whether we have it in the Spirit, is the effect that it has in our lives, the transforming effect, or to gather it all up again into this Word, "Glory! Glory!" And if you know what I am trying to talk about, you know how great a thing that is. Have you, have you really, dear friends, come to know so truly, so really, the Holy Spirit indwelling as teacher, as illuminator, that you have passed out of the merely intellectual realm where the Heavens are opened and the Word of God lives for you? That is a dispensational matter; and it makes a very great deal of difference in which realm we live.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 20)