May you be rooted deep in love and founded securely on love... that you may really come to know [practically, through experience for yourselves] the love of Christ, which far surpasses mere knowledge without experience. (Ephesians 3:17,19 AMP)
The Holy Spirit, with all that the gift of the
Spirit means of enduement and endowment and instruction and strengthening, is
not a substitute for experience. We are very often found asking that certain
things shall be done for us by the Holy Spirit which the Holy Spirit will never
do. He has to lead us into experience. It is the only way in which He can answer
our prayers. Many prayers are answered through experience. You ask the Lord to
do something, and He takes you through experience, and you arrive at the answer
in that way. You had not meant that, of course: you wanted the Lord to do the
thing there and then as a gift, as an act; but that would have been merely
objective, something given, whereas He wants to make it a part of yourself, and
so He answers prayer by some experience. "Steadfastness worketh experience," and
if there is no experience, what is the good of anybody or anything?
So then, experience is of greater importance
than being delivered from tribulation. "Tribulation worketh experience." Oh, how
often we have asked the Lord why He allowed this and that, or why He did not do
this or that. Why did He not hinder Adam from sinning? Why has He not stopped
the world in so many things that have had most terrible results? Experience is
very largely the answer. Experience is very important because, after all, it is
the very quality of service. When we come to real life, and we are really up
against things and the issues are of the greatest consequence, we do not want
just information, we want experience, and we go where experience can help us. Is
that not so? Thus experience is the very body and quality of service and
usefulness to the Lord.