There must be a new approach to the study of psychology. The teaching of Professor William James of Harvard on the subconscious mind has made a profound impression upon the minds of the students in this subject.
Here is a quotation from Professor James, from The Psychology of Orthodoxy, by Elwin Lincoln House:
It (the subconscious mind) is the abode of everything that is latent, the reservoir of everything that passes unrecorded or unobserved. It contains, for example, such things as all our momentarily inactive memories, and it harbors the springs of all our obscurely motivated passions, impulses, likes, dislikes, and prejudices; our intentions, hypotheses, fancies, superstitions, persuasions, convictions, and in general all our non-rational operations come from it. It is the source of our dreams, and apparently, they may return to it. In it arise whatever mystical experience we may have, and our automatism, sensory or motor; our life in hypnotic and hypnoidal conditions, if we are subject to such conditions; our delusions, fancies, ideas, and hysterical accidents, if we are hysteric subjects; our supra-normal cognitions, if such there be, and if we are telepathic subjects. It is also the fountain head of much that feeds our religion. In persons deep in the religious life, as we have abundantly seen—and this is my conclusion—the door into this region seems unusually wide open; at any rate, experiences making their entrance through that door have had emphatic influence in shaping religious history.
In the above quotation, you notice they are unable to locate the subconscious mind, or tell what it is. They give it credit for doing things that only the human spirit can do. But they do not know that man is a spirit.
Dr. House states that the subconscious mind is greater by far than the conscious mind. He tells us the part that it plays in man. He tells us that it is the storehouse for memory.
He quotes this Scripture, “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7). Here he comes very close to the real truth of the subject.
We know that apart from revelation knowledge, all the knowledge that has been gained down through the ages has come to us through our five senses.
All students are conscious of the limitations of sense knowledge. Careful students recognize that there is a spiritual man as well as a mental and a physical man. Few have realized that the spirit is the real man.
They do not understand that when God created man, He created him in His own image and likeness.
“God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). That is a striking statement, but it fits into the picture perfectly.
Man has a mind that receives all of its impulses from the five senses. The mind has no creative ability. It cannot invent. It can experiment, as in chemistry, but it cannot develop anything that its senses have not already brought to it.
The imagination can only build pictures out of the material the five senses have brought to it.
The natural human mind has no creative element in it.
The thing that first acquainted me with the limitations of sense knowledge was the fact that none of the heathen nations have ever needed a patent law or a copyright law.
I knew that the people of India, Japan, and China had as fine an intellect as any of the Anglo-Saxon races. I knew that the old Greek minds were on the same plane, if not above the modern natural man.
I knew that the Arabic peoples, and all of the vast armies of peoples in the East, have fine intellects.
Why have they never created anything?
Why were there never any inventors or great scientists among them?
They have produced metaphysicians and philosophers, but they have never produced a creative or an inventive personality.
Then I saw this fact: the mechanical Renaissance started after Germany began to receive eternal life.
It spread into the Scandinavian Peninsula when they received eternal life.
It gripped England, and she began to create and invent following the receiving of eternal life.
I noticed another thing: the countries governed by state churches, where there are no nonconformists, show little creative ability.
For example, Spain, Northern Ireland, Portugal, and Italy were far behind England, Germany, and the Scandinavian Peninsula.
This awakened me. Slowly the truth began to dawn upon my consciousness.
There had been no creative ability until Christianity had been introduced.
This eternal life did something to the converts.
Did it do something with their minds? No. The mind is not recreated, but is still subjected to the senses.
I then began to study about the recreated human spirit.
As you know, the part of man that receives eternal life in the new birth is the human spirit. He possesses the same mind he had before he was born again.
In Romans 12:1, a suggestion is made: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”
I asked, “Paul, why do you want the human body presented as a living sacrifice?” The answer was, “Because it is the home of the five senses.”
The five senses have been the tutors of the brain. The brain has no way of acquiring knowledge but through these senses. We have discovered that the brain has no creative function or ability. It can grasp the messages of the senses, it can correlate and classify them. It can arrange this knowledge so that it can and will be utilized to advantage.
Wisdom
The most startling thing that we discovered was that the brain cannot give wisdom. The five senses cannot give wisdom.
We know that wisdom is the ability to use knowledge to advantage. From whence did this ability come?
Then I saw that the recreated human spirit has access to wisdom and certain kinds of ability that the natural human spirit does not have.
I saw that love is a product of the recreated human spirit. It was hard for me to realize that the natural human heart cannot produce a love similar to the love of the recreated human spirit.
I saw that what we call natural human love is born of selfishness. Natural man is governed almost entirely by selfishness. His ambitions are born largely of selfishness.
Then the question arose, “Why is it that the recreated human spirit has a new kind of love?”
The answer was obvious. God recreated the human spirit by imparting His own nature to it. The recreated man has God’s nature and ability.
Then I understood 1 Corinthians 1:30: “Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom.”
I saw that the keynote of Paul’s prayer in Ephesians and Colossians was that we might have wisdom.
I discovered that there are two kinds of wisdom. There is the wisdom that Satan gives to man, a cunning, subtle, devilish type of wisdom. We see it in the world today, manifesting itself in lying, deceit, and crooked dealing.
No heathen county has God’s wisdom or ability.
Satan is a liar and the father of lies. When he gives to man his ability, it will be a deceptive, dishonest ability.
Only in the recreated human spirit do we find God’s wisdom and ability.
What Is Spirituality?
It is a recreated spirit gaining the ascendancy over the reasoning faculties and ruling the whole man.
The recreated spirit has been made anew with the love nature of the Father.
Jesus said, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). That life is the nature of the Father.
A man is recreated by receiving God’s nature into his spirit, which makes him a new creation and gives him a new self. The old self was selfish, but this new self is love-ruled.
This new life is like Jesus. It is the substance and nature of Jesus. It is love’s dominion over man. The Holy Spirit comes into the man’s body and brings in more love.
Romans 5:5 says, “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost.”
When the Holy Spirit comes in, He brings the ability of the Father and Son and builds them into us. Their very sufficiency, strength, and wisdom are built into us.
He opens the Word and makes it a living thing to us. He reveals its depths and beauty, its riches and grace.
He has taken the great substitutionary fact out of theology and made it a living reality in my spirit. My renewed mind is actually feasting on the fruitage of that finished work in my own spirit.
The Holy Spirit now is doing the thing that Jesus promised He would do. He is guiding my spirit and my reasoning faculties into the realm of the reality of the new creation, and of my union with Christ.
I begin to understand something of the reality of the finished work of the Master. My spirit catches gleams of the significance of the fact that He sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high. He entered into His rest, and I am invited to sit with Him in the place of rest. I am invited to rest in His rest. What a wonderful fellowship this is.
Now I can see what it can mean to have my spirit in such close communion and fellowship with Him, so identified with Him in this love life that I lose my consciousness of the past. I live only in the consciousness of my present, my new relationship with Him. Out of this new and wonderful relationship, faith begins to grow.
Faith is not a product of the reasoning faculties.
Sense knowledge cannot produce faith, except what is known as sense knowledge faith, faith in the things that the eye can see, the ear can hear, or we can feel or taste or smell. That is natural faith. That is the only kind of faith world folks have.
We have the new kind of faith, the faith that counts things that are not as though they were, and they come into being.
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)
We have the faith that says, “I have what I do not see, but I know that it is mine, and I possess it without seeing it.”
This recreated human spirit that fellowships with perfect love and with the Author and finisher of faith, becomes unconscious of the need of faith or of having faith.
Just as love becomes unconscious of love, only conscious of the object of its love, just so this new creation has breathed into it the quiet confidence of the Creator. He has abandoned himself to love, and out of love has sprung his living faith.
He begins to act love, to do love, and to confess love, and faith’s mighty ability becomes a conscious reality.
Here are a few Scriptures that may help us see the realities of this mighty thing, this new creation thing:
For walking in flesh [the realm of the senses], we do not war according to flesh. For the arms of our warfare are not fleshly, but powerful according to God to the overthrow of strongholds; overthrowing [sense] reasonings and every high thing that lifts itself up against the knowledge of God, and leading captive every thought into the obedience of the Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:3–5 DBY)
When the recreated spirit takes the throne in us and begins to dictate to the reasoning faculties, then there is a chance for the Word to really gain the ascendancy in us.
When we learn to cast down the sense reasoning that dominates all of those about us, and we stand there squarely by the Word—regardless of criticism, regardless of the attitude of others—then we know that the Word is the Father speaking to us now.
Here is another great Scripture that I have given to you in this book. I will let Him speak to us again through it:
And to know the love of Christ, which passeth [sense] knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. (Ephesians 3:19)
Really, that means to be filled with the fullness of the Father.
That does stagger sense knowledge reasoning, doesn’t it? That the Father would talk about our being filled in our spirits with Himself.
His fullness is made up of love, the Master’s love; of wisdom that only a few of us have ever participated in; of grace that can put up with the most unruly and ungodly; and of strength that makes us omnipotent in our spiritual life.
To be filled with His fullness beggars description! It means to be overwhelmed with God.
You remember, He said:
Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit. (Ephesians 5:18)
He would have us drunk with Himself, just overwhelmed with Himself. To be drunk with love! To be drunk with grace and with all the sweet attributes of the Father Himself!
Well, that is ours. We may be filled with the very fullness and completeness of the Father.
Do you wonder how it can be done? Here is the answer:
Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us. (Ephesians 3:20)
The heart almost stops. Can this be true, that the One who raised Jesus from the dead has come into these bodies of ours and brought into us the ability that was exercised in that mighty miracle of the resurrection of Jesus?
It is true; He has come in! He has come in with His ability, His wisdom, His love, and His grace. You remember I called your attention to Romans 5:5, how He shed love abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
The One who brings love into us has come in and He has brought in that fullness of love.
He has brought in what is told in John 1:16: “Of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.”
This is ours. We can never be cheap and small again, can we? We will never go back to the beggarly resources of sense knowledge. We will never go back to the shallow teachings of mere men.
How shallow psychology looks now. It is the fruitage of sense knowledge.
The religions of natural men are empty, sounding brass and clanging cymbals.
We have found reality at last.
The mysticism of sense knowledge once held us enthralled, but one breath from Him has driven the mists away, and we stand in the fullness of His marvelous grace.
We are new creations now. We are living in the realm of God.
I know a Scripture that fits into this description of the new creation:
For if the trespass of one man allowed death to reign through that one man, much more shall those who receive the overflowing grace and free gift of righteousness reign in life through One, through Jesus Christ. (Romans 5:17 MOFF)
That is not after death; it is now.
We reign in this new realm of life, and we bow to the sovereignty of love.
Spiritual death has held us in bondage through many years, but at last, spiritual death has been swallowed up in life—eternal life, the nature of the Father. Now we take our place in the new realm and reign as the children of God.
We reign as kings. We are not common anymore. We no longer walk as mere men. We don’t act as mere men.
When we go into the throne room to present our needs before the Father, we go in as His children. We have love’s ability to stand in His presence without any sense of inferiority.
His great grace has made us new creations, and He has made us out of Himself. God the Father, through the Word and by the Spirit’s power, has recreated us. We are the products of love. We have love’s ability; we have love’s strength. We can do the work of love.
From today forward, I want you who read this book to look upon yourselves and to think of yourselves as the sons and daughters of love.
Stand in front of the mirror and say to the man or woman you see reflected there, “You are now a new creation, a partaker of the very nature of the Father. You have received the Father’s overflowing grace and the gift of righteousness, and now you reign as a king in this new realm of life.”
You have become a master where once you served as a slave, an overcomer where the forces of the evil one once dominated.
You are now in the Beloved. You are as near to the heart of the Father as Jesus was in His earth walk.