The Holy Spirit Is A Spiritual Flame

"For the good that I would do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do" (Romans 7:19)

The Holy Spirit is also a "spiritual flame." He alone can raise our worship to true spiritual levels. For we might as well know once for all that morality and ethics, however lofty, are still not Christianity.

The faith of Christ undertakes to raise the soul to actual communion with God, to introduce into our religious experiences a supre-rational element as far above mere goodness as the heavens are above the earth.

The joy of the first Christians was not the joy of logic working on facts. They did not reason, "Christ is risen from the dead; therefore we ought to be glad." Their gladness was as great a miracle as the resurrection itself; indeed there were and are organically related. The moral happiness of the Creator had taken residence in the breasts of redeemed creatures and the could not but be glad.

The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of New Testament religion.

~A. W. Tozer~

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The Spirit Is Intellectual

"They received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so" (Acts 17:11)

The flame of the Spirit is also "intellectual." Reason, say the theologians, is one of the divine attributes. There need be no incompatibility between the deepest experience of the Spirit and the highest attainments of the human intellect.

It is only required that the Christian intellect be fully surrendered to God and there need be no limit to its activities beyond those imposed upon it by its own strength and size.

How cold and deadly is the unblessed intellect. A superior brain without the saving essence of godliness may turn against the human race and drench the world with blood, or worse, it may loose ideas into the earth which will continue to curse mankind for centuries after it has turned to dust again.

But a Spirit-filled mind is a joy to God and a delight to all men of good will.

God's method is first to fill the man with the facts of salvation and then send the baptism of fire upon him... God's order is facts and fire.

~A. W. Tozer~