You must warn each other every day, while it is still “today,” so that none of
you will be deceived by sin and hardened against God. (Hebrews 3:13 NLT)
We talk about our motives, and we say, "Our motive was right!" We talk about our
conscientiousness, we talk about our intentions; but you and I do not know what
lies behind what we call our good motives. There is a deceitfulness about this
human heart that defies our greatest attempt at tracking it down, and we shall
never do it.... Here is where the church has become such a confused thing, and
such a tragedy; for the prevailing idea is that if you give yourself over to God
He will take you up and use you: "Bring over your humanity and consecrate it to
the Lord! Consecrate your old man to the Lord, and go out and serve the Lord,
with a consecrated old man!" it is utterly contrary to the teaching of God’s
Word. The result is that in the work of God all the world over you have people
serving the Lord in the energy of the flesh, in the reasoning of the flesh, in
the emotions of the flesh. Meet them, counter them, frustrate them, and you meet
something evil; you meet with a fight, a division, a schism, a scattering, and
wholesale resignations.
Do you see what a havoc the enemy can make in that which is called the church,
because people with best intentions and purest motives have come to serve the Lord
with all their own intelligence, their own strength, and their own emotion? They
have not seen that God has closed the door to the old creation, and that
God’s attitude is this: "The only thing that can satisfy Me, that can serve Me
is My Son, and if you are going to come into My service, He has to be the energy
of everything, the Life of everything, the Wisdom of everything!" He has to be
the governing, ruling reality in everything. It is not to be a matter of your
impulses, but of His urgings and leadings by the Holy Spirit; not your sitting
down to reason out what it would be good to do for the Lord, what ought to be
done, what needs to be done, but what He shows you, nothing more.... You and I
must not bring over our old creation and give it to God, expecting God to use
it. God begins with birth. The church of the firstborn is something quite new,
and it comes out of a death. That death is the death of an old creation, and the
resurrection is of something that is not the resuscitation of an old creation,
but the resurrection of something wholly of God.