My mother’s health issues have put me a bit behind in my study of the fruit of the Spirit, so I haven’t talked about it much. It is, however, a study worth talking about. The "love" week was wonderful, as was the "joy" week.
This morning, my A.W. Tozer devotional had this to say:
But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. –1 Corinthians 2:14
The doctrine of the inability of the human mind and the need for divine illumination is so fully developed in the New Testament that it is nothing short of astonishing that we should have gone so far astray about the whole thing. Fundamentalism has stood aloof from the Liberal in self-conscious superiority and has on its own part fallen into error, the error of textualism, which is simply orthodoxy without the Holy Ghost. Everywhere among Conservatives we find persons who are Bible-taught but not Spirit-taught. They conceive truth to be something which they can grasp with the mind. If a man hold to the fundamentals of the Christian faith he is thought to possess divine truth. But it does not follow. There is no truth apart from the Spirit. The most brilliant intellect may be imbecilic when confronted with the mysteries of God. For a man to understand revealed truth requires an act of God equal to the original act which inspired the text….
Conservative Christians in this day are stumbling over this truth. We need to re-examine the whole thing. We need to learn that truth consists not in correct doctrine, but in correct doctrine plus the inward enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. We must declare again the mystery of wisdom from above. A re-preachment of this vital truth could result in a fresh breath from God upon a stale and suffocating orthodoxy. (The Pursuit of Man, 76-77, 84)
I am a believer who was blessed with good biblical teaching from the onset of my walk with Christ. And one of the things I learned was that I need both the written word and the Spirit in my life. Anyone can read the Bible, but without the illumination of the Holy Spirit we can never understand the depths of what God wants to impart to us.
In the grip of His grace,
Robin
Once again, I am not disappointed when I visit your blog. Thanks for sharing this A.W. Tozer passage and your thoughts. I feel like I am finally realizing the truth of this. In my early Christian experience, Bible knowledge was everything. We’d have memory verse contests and Bible quizzing. College classes on every book of the Bible. No room for the Spirit’s leading. That always bothered me as I struggled to fulfill my “witnessing” requirement each week. I think when we see ourselves as God sees us, we have to realize our utter dependence on the Spirit’s direction.