Truth in the Inward Parts # 2

All Untruth Is satanic

satan is described as the liar and the father of lies. For that reason all untruth is an abomination to God. God has consigned all liars to the lake of fire; He has excluded from the New Jerusalem everything that maketh a lie. God hates everything that is not true, and true right through and through like Himself. He must have truth in the inward parts.

The interference of satan with God's creation - man - resulted in man becoming something false where God is concerned: he is a misrepresentation of God's mind; and he is a deceived creature. "The god of this age", says Paul, "hath blinded the mind of the unbelieving." Man is a deceived, blinded creature; but God desires "truth in the inward parts."

Now, you see how large a matter this is, and one is hard-pressed to know what to say, and what not to say about it. But let us dwell for a moment upon this clause "the inward parts" - the inward parts. You will detect in this Psalm that that is running right through. Here it is: "create in me a clean heart"; "renew a right spirit within me"; "a broken spirit and a contrite heart Thou wilt not despise". You see, it is all this innermost realm of things that has now arisen as the "real" need. No more deception, no more falsehood, no more mocker, no more make-believe, no more going on as though it is all right when it is not all right; no more using external means to cover over inward unreality; no more going to meetings, and saying prayers, and joining in the whole system, when the inward parts are not right before God. Seeing then that we are what we are by nature now, this represents a re-constituting of us. Anything that does not minister to that is  false in itself. Any system of religion that just puts on from the outside, and covers over the inner life by mere rite and ritual is false, it is not true. The work of God is to reconstitute human nature. And that, of course, involves two things.

On the one side, it involves a breaking down. And if you know anything about God's dealings with lives who come into His hands, there is undoubtedly a large place for that - a progressive breaking down; a getting to the root of things, and undeceiving us. If we have any illusions about ourselves, they will all be gone when God has done with us. If we are governed by any kind of falsehood about ourselves, and our position, and our work, when God has done with us, that will all be gone. He is going to break us down until we see ourselves stark, as an unclean thing, with all our righteousnesses as filthy rags. So He will break us down, and He does.

But there is the other side, of course, all the time, for God is not only, and always negative; there is the constructing, bringing up to the place where anything that is false, anything that is not absolutely transparent and true, straight, clear, is hateful to us. More and more our inner man revolts against our own falsehood. Any exaggerations comes back on us at once with conviction of wrong; any false statement hits us hard, and we know that we have not spoken the truth. It is a tremendous thing to get into the hands of the Holy Spirit, until, like God, the one thing that we hate is anything that is false. "I hate", said David, "every false way". We must come there. But we must be lovers of the truth. And this is going to pursue us everywhere; it will pursue us into our own life withing ourselves, that we are not deceiving ourselves at all. Before God we know exactly what God thinks about us, and we know where we stand in the light.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 3 - "Truth In the Social Life")