The proud human heart never can and never will (believe), for it leaves man with no shred of self-justification. God alone could do for us what we could never do for ourselves, and God took flesh to do it. No one really believes this, although we may say we do, until the Spirit of God reveals it to us. And the Spirit can only reveal it when He has first given us a glimpse of what we really are in the sight of God, and that also is by revelation. He uses means -the Bible, preaching, personal witness, the lives of living Christians, sometimes disappointments, loss or sorrow; but the light has to shine, and we respond to it. That very response is a conviction of the Spirit which we cannot escape. We at last realize what we are and admit it. That is what the Bible calls the gift of repentance, the change of mind concerning ourselves, such a change affecting conduct and producing what the Bible calls "works meet for repentance." This gift of repentance is really the reverse side of that one fundamental response God quickens in us - faith. It is the quickening or re-directing of the one automatic faculty with which the creation is endowed, as well as being the most elementary and utterly simple - the faculty of reception. We have sought to make it clear from the beginning that the Creator-creature relationship is, in the nature of things, of one kind only - that of giving and receiving. The Deep Things of God
Posted on: Wed, 09 Oct 2013 01:17:49 +0000
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