Natural man does not have the same kind of faith that the believer enjoys. The natural man believes in the things he can see, hear, taste, smell, and feel.
It was hard for us to grasp this. For a long time, I could not understand the meaning of the word believe in relation to natural man.
Then the Spirit unveiled it to me. Believe is an action word, a verb. Faith is a noun, the result of action. Then, believing, for the unsaved man, would be to act on what God has spoken.
He says to the unsaved man, “If you will take Jesus Christ as your Savior and confess Him as your Lord, I will give you eternal life.”
Then the natural man simply acts on the Word, and the Father gives him eternal life. As soon as he has done this, the Father owns him as His child. In the mind of the Father, he is a believer and possesses all things.
Ephesians 1:3 will illustrate it: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.”
All things are his, but he may not know it. As he grows in grace, he will come to know what he is in Christ.
He cannot grow in grace without the Word. He has the living Word, he has the written Word, and he has the great, mighty Holy Spirit as his teacher so that he may grow in the Word.
As he grows in the Word, he grows in grace. That is, his spirit begins to take on the love nature of Jesus. He becomes gentle and beautiful in his spirit.
He may have been very critical and hard before, but now the very gentleness of the Master has taken possession of him.
The Pauline pictures of full-grown faith are a challenge to him, so he feeds upon the Word daily. He studies to show himself approved unto the Father.
He begins to take over the burdens of those who are weaker than he. Romans 15:1 becomes a favorite with him: “We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.”
He has been an abnormally selfish man, but he now becomes an abnormally unselfish man.
You see, this new babe in Christ is growing very rapidly. The very life of the Father is being reproduced in him. The Word of Christ dwells in him richly. He is passing out of the bondage that held him.
His whole mental life was full of unseemly things. Now his recreated spirit, filled with love, is gaining control of that unruly mind and imagination. He is bringing it into subjection to the Word.
The Word truly begins to dwell in him richly. He feeds upon it, lives in it. He acts upon it.
The Word has become a love letter from the Father to his heart. It is a daily message from heaven’s throne room. It is his communication with the Father and the Master.
After a while, the Word abides in him to the extent that his faith life becomes outstanding
This Scripture becomes a beautiful reality:
If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples. (John 15:7–8)
I hear this new creation say, “I want that eighth verse made real in my life. I want to bear much fruit. I want Him to look upon me as a disciple, as a student, as one who is sitting at His feet practicing the Word.”
You see, this new man that has been begotten in Him, that new self, has utterly displaced the conduct and the practices of the old self.
People cannot understand this. He no longer blasphemes or cares to go with the old crowd. Whenever he goes with the old crowd, it is as an evangelist. He is out seeking the lost.
He has taken Jesus’s place. The Jesus life now rules him. You know, this is the most wonderful thing about this life.
As a natural man, he didn’t understand any of these things; he didn’t care about them. Yet his old associates, old life, and the old habits have all dropped off. He has become an utterly new man.
The Limitations of Natural Man
The natural man is the slave of his senses.
We think of him in the garden, walking with God as a spirit-ruled being. His spirit then dominated everything.
God could communicate with him with the utmost freedom, but when he fell, his spirit became a partaker of Satan’s nature. He lost his contact with God, and when he was driven from the garden, he became utterly dependent upon his senses to support, protect, and care for him.
He is out in a world now where Satan rules. He must have eyes to see the dangers and ears to hear his enemies. He must have taste to know what to eat. He must have a keen sense of smell so as to detect an enemy or poisoned fruit. He must have a sense of touch.
He lives in the realm of his senses now.
All that man has learned since the fall has come through his senses. Man has had no other means of knowledge. He has been shut away from God.
But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. (1 Corinthians 2:14)
There can come no spiritual revelation from God to that man. If he gets any spiritual revelation, it will be from the devil.
That is the reason why angels were the agents of communication under the old covenant. God could not reveal Himself to natural man, but angels could be seen and heard. Natural man could receive messages from them. A voice could speak out of Sinai that Moses and the elders could hear.
How different was the Pauline revelation!
No angels came to Paul and told him what to write. God was in his spirit, and the revelation came through the spirit.
God gave to Paul a revelation of Jesus, an unveiling of Jesus in his spirit. Then his spirit-ruled mind was able to write what the Holy Spirit had given in regard to Jesus.
Since the fall of man in the garden, he has been ruled by his five senses. Satan has been his overlord.
Natural man had Satan’s nature, so it was easy for Satan to reveal his will to him; it is easy for natural man to do the will of Satan.
The believer has the nature of the Father, so that it is easy for the Father to reveal Himself to His child through the living Word.
You see, the Satan-ruled man cannot know the things of the Spirit. All that he knows are the things of Satan, the god of this world.
He can understand the deep things of Satan, but he cannot understand the Bible nor its marvelous revelation.
This Satan-ruled man believes in experiences, either his own or the experiences of other people. That is the reason that you can draw a great congregation of unsaved men if you can get some folks who have had marvelous experiences to tell them. This attracts the man of the senses.
Sense Knowledge Facts to Ponder
We have little appreciated the fact that sense knowledge has had so large a place in the formulating of creeds and doctrines.
If love had dominated the writers of doctrines and creeds, there would never have been a division in the body of Christ.
Sense knowledge springs largely from selfish interests and governs our spirits, holding them in bondage, unless the believer has utterly yielded to the lordship of the Word, to the lordship of love, and to the lordship of the Man Jesus.
Love binds us together and makes us one.
Doctrines that separate the church were never born of love.
As I have studied Calvinism, I have seen with amazement that it is but a sense knowledge philosophy that seeks to cover itself with scriptural quotations. Arminianism is the same.
Remember, truth never separates the church, never divides it into groups, and never makes them antagonistic to each other.
Experiences based upon the senses have caused many dissensions.
In that wonderful movement called the tongues movement, immature believers who had received that startling demonstration felt that they could no longer fellowship with those who didn’t have the same experience.
Most of us can remember how the church was divided over the second coming of Christ. There was another division on the subject of divine healing.
Sense knowledge was the separator and the divider. Love would have held us all together.
The senses are dangerous teachers.
Even if based upon works of consecration, hours of prayer, or confession of sins, experiences cannot be trusted. The Word alone, as unveiled in the Pauline revelation, is the only safe guide.
Don’t misunderstand me. You cannot be guided by the teachings of John the Baptist and Jesus as recorded in the four Gospels in regard to any experience unless that gospel teaching is confirmed, explained, or elucidated in the Pauline revelation, or with Peter’s and John’s unveiling in their epistles.
In the four Gospels, Jesus is dealing almost exclusively with the Jews, the first covenant people, who were natural men, spiritually dead.
In the Pauline revelation, he is dealing almost exclusively with the new covenant people, the new creation folks.
Never preach experiences—preach the Word!
The man who preaches experiences and talks of experiences becomes a dangerous leader.
Let love interpret the Word. Let love govern every action, every decision of your life.
This Jesus kind of love, agape, is the very nature of the Father, and if that governs us, we will be governed by the Father.
Remember, the Word is love speaking to your heart, not always to your reasoning faculties, but to your heart.
There is no division where love rules.
Selfishness is always the senses in supremacy. Remember, the senses are always jealous.
May I offer this suggestion: as a child of God, never seek experiences. Nearly all the experiences are in the senses and these experiences do not give faith in the Word. They give faith in man’s word.
They believe in healing because they saw men healed. They believe in speaking in tongues because they heard them.
I believe in healing because the Word teaches it. I believe in speaking in tongues because the Word teaches it, not because someone else has spoken in tongues, or has been healed, or has had some other wonderful experience.
Never give an experience the first place in your life. The Word must have that.
We do not need to seek the Holy Spirit; He has already been given. He is here.
Luke 11:13 says, “How much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?”
Notice, “your heavenly Father.” That is for a believer. That was not written for the Jews, for He was not the Jews’ heavenly Father.
Galatians 3:2 says, “This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?” That settles the issue!
But, you say, the disciples waited ten days. Yes, but they didn’t know what they were waiting for. They didn’t know that Christ had died for their sins according to the Scripture.
They didn’t know during those ten days why they were waiting in that upper room.
They didn’t know anything about His substitutionary sacrifice.
None of them believed in His resurrection, even when they saw Him after He arose.
They knew nothing about what the three days and three nights meant to the human race.
They didn’t know what Jesus meant when He said they were to tarry and be baptized. They didn’t know that baptism meant the new birth,
They didn’t know anything about the indwelling of the Spirit that was to enable them to speak in tongues. They didn’t understand it.
For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. (1 Corinthians 12:13)
That is the new birth.
Immersion doesn’t mean a filling, for when I immerse one in water, I don’t fill them with water. When they were immersed by the Holy Spirit in that upper room, they weren’t filled with the Spirit until after the immersion.
The question we should ask is the question that Paul asked the Ephesians, “Did ye receive the Holy Spirit when ye believed?” (Acts 19:2 ASV). This is an intelligent question.
When you ask a believer if he has received his baptism and the believer is instructed in the Word, he will say, “Certainly, I have received eternal life. But if you mean, have I received the Holy Spirit, that is another question.”
We do not seek for righteousness. We are made the righteousness of God in Christ.
We do not seek for power because we have the Holy Spirit, who raised Jesus from the dead, within us.
We do not seek for faith because we are believers. We are not doubters; we are the true sons and daughters of God. We are men who act upon the Father’s Word just as Jesus acted on His Father’s Word.
This new order of life—this new type of Christianity that has unveiled to us the truth about sense knowledge and has made us masters in the name of Jesus over the forces that have held us in bondage all our lives—this has become a living reality.
We know now what makes an atheist an atheist, and a modernist a modernist.
We know the why of metaphysics. We understand why men have become philosophers.
It is all sense knowledge seeking after something to satisfy a hungry human spirit that is craving God.
These people are all in one class. They are all sense knowledge devotees.
They tell me they are scientific. What is science? It is but sense knowledge gathering together certain data. They haven’t one thing except what the five senses have contributed.
They are sense knowledge men, ofttimes drunken with the few facts they have collated, gathered, and classified.
Philosophy is sense knowledge seeking after God. No philosopher ever found God in the realm of philosophy. It is the child of the senses.
The seeking philosopher finds only himself, for he is seeking in himself. He can’t seek outside of himself. The natural man cannot find or know aught but himself. The philosopher is a psychical, mental man.
Psychoanalysis is but discovering oneself. He has not discovered the real self for he can’t find that. The real self is a spirit.
The only self he has discovered is the mental self that has derived all his knowledge from the five senses.
When one searches in his inner self, he only finds what he has already built there or what someone else has built.
Philosophy is a total failure in seeking the solution of the human problem.
Psychologists have called our human spirit, “a subconscious mind,” for this searcher in his own self-consciousness has discovered that there is something besides the reasoning faculties.
He can’t find it nor diagnose it, so he calls it a subconscious mind.
It is his spirit. That is not the right way of expressing it. It is himself, his spirit, that the reasoning faculties cannot find or understand even if they found it.
When that spirit receives the nature of God and gains the ascendancy over the reasoning faculties that get their impulses from the senses, then man can study psychology and get to know himself in reality.
There is room for a new psychology, but it will not be called psychology; it would be spiritology.
It is knowledge of the activities and operations of the recreated human spirit in its relation to the renewed mind.