The Believer's Part In Becoming Spirit-filled # 11

Life On The Highest Plane

Cleansing

Faith

It may be some reader is saying "As far as I know I have yielded my life unconditionally to Christ yet I have not the life more abundant which He came to bring. There are still the evident marks of the carnal Christian. Is it possible for one to be yielded and still not be filled with the Holy Spirit?" The emptied life must be filled and waits for faith to claim the fullness.

S. D. Gordon tells of a little girl who was praying and who said, "Jesus, I hear you knocking at the door of my heart. Come in Jesus!" Then rising from her knees she said, "He's in!" Surrender, kneeling at the foot of the Cross, says, "Lord, I am not my own; I yield myself unto Thee; I present my body a living sacrifice." Faith, looking up to the ascended Lord at the Father's right hand, says, "Christ liveth in me; to me to live is Christ." Surrender says, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" Faith says, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." Surrender opens the door; faith believes that Christ enters, fills, abides. You may have crowned Him Lord and yet not have appropriated Him as Life. "And they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit." The spiritual man is one full of faith.

Faith is the Complement of Grace

Did you ever see a perfect rainbow? Looking out over the ocean I once saw distinctly both ends of a rainbow coming up out of the water, as it were, and forming an unbroken arch. Through this beautiful symbol the Holy Spirit interpreted to me a passage of Scripture which revealed the place of faith in the Christian's life in a new and telling way. "Ye are saved by grace through faith - And not of yourselves: it is the gift of God."

God's arch of salvation is all of grace and it is all of faith. From the Godward side it is all of grace; from the manward side it is all of faith. God's grace is always perfect and its work is clear and distinct. But oh! how imperfect is man's faith. Grace has provided in Christ Jesus all that is needed for man's salvation even unto a life of habitual spirituality. But such a life cannot become experimental until faith appropriates in full the provision of God's grace in Christ. Faith is the complement of grace.

Romans 4:16, "Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace."

With no exception everything in the Christian's life is a gift. Grace gives and faith takes. "Faith is man's one activity." Faith must reach up and lay hold upon all that grace has sent down and bestowed in Christ. Grace provides: faith possesses.

This truth stands out crystal clear in the history of the children of Israel. As an outright gift the land of Canaan with its manifold accompanying blessings had been bestowed upon them. It was theirs through promise years before they ever saw it. God constantly spoke of it as there. Yet it was not to be actually in their possession until the oles of their feet trod upon it. Faith must enter in and possess the gift already bestowed in promise.

Josh. 1:2-3, "Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even to the children of Israel. Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given you, as I said unto Moses."

Josh. 1:11, "Pass through the host, and command the people, saying, Prepare you victuals: for within three days ye shall pass over Jordan, to go in to possess the land, which the Lord your God giveth you to possess it."

Furthermore the children of Israel might have entered this land of promise forty years earlier. God led them up- to the very border line of this rich, fertile, beautiful country flowing with milk and honey and laden with fruits. But they turned away through unbelief, suffered forty years of weary wanderings, and died in the wilderness. Only the two men of faith, Caleb and Joshua, possessed their inheritance.

Hebrews 3:17-19, "But with whom was he grieved forty years? was it not with them that had sinned, whose carcases fell in the wilderness? And to whom swore he that they should not enter into his rest, but to them that believed not? So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief."

My Christian friend, everything you need for life on the highest plane has been given you in Christ. God has bestowed upon you also the Holy Spirit who already indwells you and whose chief task is to make you spiritual. Life on the highest plane is already yours. God hath given you every spiritual blessing in Christ. But this life with all its accompanying blessings can only be actualized through faith. Your faith must make experimental what grace has made possible.

~Ruth Paxson~

(continued with # 12)