Gal 3:14 That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.
The witch’s spell was cast to rob of the enjoyment, the living expression of the reality that the Holy Spirit had now become the power of their lives. How set the enemy is against this great, basic fact of the true Christian life!
Firstly the enemy is always seeking to bring around that life a wrapping of death, to smother it, to arrest and check the progress, the development, and the activity of that divine life; to bring us again into the realm of spiritual death, where that life is no longer functioning.
Then he is against our position, as through the cross, outside this world, and is always trying to bring us back into it somehow.
He knows that if he can do it he has finished our testimony, he has robbed us of our position, he has denied the Gospel.
He is dead set against this life of which the Holy Spirit is the energy.
He is after a life in the flesh instead of the life in the Spirit, to counter a Holy Spirit filled and dominated life.
He is the spirit of this age; he is the spirit that worketh in the children of disobedience; he is the great evil spirit, and he is set against the Holy Spirit of God.
So these believers were knowing something of that historic effort of the enemy to quench the government of the Holy Spirit.
We are in a spiritual succession to these Galatians.
The Christian life is a life with Christ indwelling as its life. It is a life cut off by the cross from the world and all worldly considerations.
It is a life indwelt and governed by the Holy Spirit in all details.
That is where faith comes in. That is exactly the point where faith has its meaning.
It is so much easier for the flesh to walk according to sense than it is to walk by faith in the Spirit.
Life in the Spirit is sometimes so intangible. It calls for such an exercise of faith that you have to commit yourself to the Lord and go on when you cannot see, where you have no feeling, and believe implicitly that the Lord is not going to fail you and let you go wrong...even if He is hidden from your view, covered from your sense; yes, oft-times deeper than your very consciousness itself.
You are living for His glory, and as you are at liberty within your heart to move you have to move and believe implicitly that God is going not only to preserve you from wrong and from mistakes, but is going to bring good out of your faith movement with Him.
That is a life of faith, and our natures do not take to it at all kindly.
It is a life in the Spirit, as differing from a life in the flesh.
The best of the Lord’s people sometimes cry out: Oh, that I might know exactly what it is the Lord is doing! The Lord says: You go on with Me and trust Me. I know what I am doing!
We discover at length that the Lord did know what He was doing. He does make it plain.
He is undoing the mischievous work of the devil from the beginning, that work by which he put into the very nature of man unbelief in God, doubt and questioning of God.
The Lord is destroying that by the very life of faith, and showing to us that God is true and faithful and can be relied upon, and He need give no evidence to our flesh of that fact, but He proves it to those who repose faith in Him as the faithful God.
How do you know? By believing! How do you come to see? By going on and not seeing, but trusting God.
You say it is a difficult life! Well, the witch’s spell can deliver you!
You can have something else in its place!
But you will find that the witch’s spell is an illusion, and there is no substitute for that.
It is the way of a wonderful, continuous discovery of the wonderful things of God.
It is to those who believe that God makes known His deep secrets.
Enrichment of life comes there.
Paul says that this new life in the Spirit, with the Holy Spirit as the power of our life, comes by way of the cross.
~T. Austin Sparks~
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