This is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. (1 John 5:11 NIV)
It entirely depends upon our
apprehension of the Lord as to what our testimony is. If we are turning to
teaching, to tradition, to interpretations, to human associations, to
Christianity, we are going to miss something, but if we are turning to the
living God, in the realization that He is the living God, we are going to come
into Life; everything is going to be all living in our experience right from the
beginning. It is not unnecessary to say a thing like that. We said at the outset
we wake up, and some of us awoke too late. The thing that kept us asleep –
though we did not know we were asleep, except that there was a restlessness, a
sense of dissatisfaction, a turning from side to side, and a sighing and
groaning – was the fact that we had been associated with Christianity and the
things of the people of God from so early in our lives. Our Christianity and our
relationship with the Lord was something into which we were brought in infancy,
and it had all become a matter of a system of the things of the Lord around us,
with which we were quite familiar. We had been taught to say prayers, and go to
meetings, and so on. One day we awoke to the fact that this God was a living
God. We had been associated with Him in a way for a long time, but He was not
personal to us, not a living God.
Forgive me for going back to
such an elementary stage, if it is necessary to ask forgiveness, for it is just
possible there are some among us whose relationship is of that kind. Maybe you
are associated with things related to the Lord, but what about this question of
your own personal, inward enjoyment of the living God, of His really being to
you a living Person? We must begin back there, and all this is nothing to you
unless the Holy Spirit has made it real, or does make it real, in your
experience. I do know that it is true to fact in the life of a great many, that
the day comes when, though they have been associated with the things of the Lord
for a long time, they suddenly wake up to the fact that the Lord is a living
Person. That contains so much for us as we come to realize it. It means
everything to us from every point of view. We are the Lord's now! We know the
Lord!