I
October, 1941
S76
TH E K I N G ’ S
B U S I N E S S the Spirit-Filled Maintained
How the Life of Christian Is
By RUTH PAXSON
sense you do begin to live there. You will never find the Christian life any thing but arduous and. hard as long as you are unfilled with the Holy Spirit, and yet it is true that it is the Spirit- filled Christian toward whom the devil is most furious in his attitude, and on whom he makes the most diabolical as saults. Put, friends, when we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we know how to meet that. We know that Satan is a de feated foe, and we learn from Romans 8 that even with those severe diaboli cal attacks made upon us, we can have a heart filled with the peace of God that passeth all understanding. We can have the rest, the quietness, and the joy of the Lord in the midst of it all. To have victory, we need to under stand something of the devil’s tactics. The story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 is tty? Scriptural illustration of Satan’s methods. Have we not every right to believe that Ananias and Sap 7 phira were a part of that Spirit-filled Church? And yet the devil got place in their lives. When Ananias and Sap phira imitated the generosity of Bar nabas in order that they might receive praise from the Church, they secretly kept back part of the price of the possession they sold, yet pretended to contribute the full proceeds. Sudden death was the result for both of them. A terrible judgment! What was the sin? Keeping back part of the price? Yes, but back of that was lying unto the Holy Ghost. What was the real sin ? It was giving ’’ Satan place, allowing him to implant a thought in the mind. “Why hast thou conceived this thing In thine heart?” said Peter. The next
the greatest proof and the greatest man ifestation of the infilling of the Holy Spirit is the control by the Holy Spirit. That control is manifested and main tained through our continuous obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ and to the will' of God as revealed in His Word. That will of God will be manifested in our walking in the ways of God. It will be well to think of three com mands that deal with the negative side of maintaining the Spirit-filled life. No - Standing R o om fo r Satan The first command is in Ephesians 4:27: “Neither give place to the devil.” Let us keep quite constantly in mind that the devil’s hatred is primarily • toward the Lord Jesus Christ. He hates you and me as Christians because we are in Christ. But he hates Christ be cause Christ took from him a subject in his evil kingdom and a slave in his service, when each of us received the Lord Jesus as his personal Saviour and came out of the kingdom of Satan and was translated into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. The devil hates us because we repre sent Christ in this world. We are the visible, tangible part of the Lord Jesus Christ that he can now reach and touch. He especially hates the Spirit-filled Christian, because the Spirit-filled Christian is his greatest menace. He makes the Spirit-filled Christian a tar get for his severest temptations. This may sound discouraging^ to you because you thought that you were not going to have; any struggles or hard times and that you were going to live on Easy Street as soon as you were filled with the Holy Spirit. In one
[In the previous articles in this series. Miss Paxson has shown the absolute ■contrast of the believers position since he passed beyond the Cross, the Great Divide, and has been delivered position- ally from the sphere of Satan, the world, and the flesh, to be in Christ, in the Church which is His Body, and in the Holy Spirit. Following the descrip tion of this positional sanctification, Miss Paxson dealt with the Christian s progressive sanctification through the working of God the Holy Spirit. In the installment preceding this present ar ticle, she discussed the Lord Jesus Christ's words in John 7:37, " I f any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink,” showing that they express im portant conditions for the infilling of the Holy Spirit. — E ditor .] O NCE FILLED, are we always filled? No! There are perhaps thousands who have known in times past what it was to have a definite experience of the infilling of the Holy Spirit that marked a crisis in the life, yet who cannot truthfully say that they know they are filled with the Holy Spirit today. Through sin that comes into the life and that remains there unconfessed and unpardoned, through disobedience to God’s will, which means an unyielded place in the life, or through anything that hinders the sustenance of that life and growth- in It, 9 "There is no limit to what God will do through any man, provided he doe s not TOUCH THE GLORY ! But how guilty we Christian workers are! We not only touch the glory, but too often we take it to ourselves."
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