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deception, discerning the spirits, ecstasy, exhortation, experience, eyes of the heart, feeling, God's guidance, joy, Matthew Henry, peace, sensual experience, spiritual blessings, T.A. Sparks, the new self, the old self, worldly spirits
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (Jn 14:15 ESV)
Picture Credits http://www.pamelavcarmichael.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/the-blessed-life_4034.jpg
Are we still looking for continued peace, joy, and wellbeing? If we only learn to listen to His Spirit’s guidance more closely and more often, we will experience all of God’s blessings in an ever increasing measure, for it is written,
But this command I gave them: ‘Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people. And walk in all the way that I command you, that it may be well with you.’
But they did not obey or incline their ear, but walked in their own counsels and the stubbornness of their evil hearts, and went backward and not forward. (Jer 7:23-24 ESV)
In Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary on Jer 7:21-28 we read,
The promise is very encouraging. Let God’s will be your rule, and his favour shall be your happiness. God was displeased with disobedience. We understand the gospel as little as the Jews understood the law, if we think that even the sacrifice of Christ lessens our obligation to obey.
Isn’t it amazing that God becomes our personal God simply because of our obedience toward His will? You see, it does not depend on our self-will. We may claim to be Christians and that we all believe in the same God. However, if we refuse to listen to His Spirit’s voice, He won’t be our God and we won’t be His people as verse 23 immediately suggests. Not easy to digest, is it? If Jesus Christ’s father is not our God because of our disobedience toward His leading, who then might our spiritual father be?
Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. (Jn 8:42-45 ESV)
Interesting, isn’t it? They did not believe Jesus BECAUSE He told them the truth. They wanted to believe a lie because their character was already closely related to Satan’s – without them knowing about it, of course. Brothers and sisters, that is a horrible deception when we believe we have known God, yet it was Satan whom we called our god because he, the devil, fulfilled our carnal desires. Digging deeper into this very topic, I want to begin with a quote from T. Austin Sparks, once again, in order to point to the possibility that we might have believed a lie although we thought our or others’ spiritual experiences were of divine origin. TAS said,
Whenever God in Christ is revealed in the inner man, deception and Satan’s power are destroyed, and the man is set free. Against this inshining, Satan works by every conceivable means, ranging from open assault to destroy the messengers, to beautiful substitutes for the truth.
http://www.austin-sparks.net/english/books/001342.html
Beautiful substitutes for the truth… Hmm… What could these substitutes be and, if they truly exist, what do they look like? At first they must appear in some way or other appealing to us since, if not, would we call them “beautiful”? Furthermore, if they only offer a substitute for the truth instead of the truth itself, how could this fact escape our notice?
To begin with, we can say that which is appealing to the natural man is disgusting to the spiritual man. Our flesh is attracted by what we perceive with our senses to be beautiful, by watching nature, a sunset, or human beings, for instance. And what feels good to our bodies is appealing to us as well. This is not wrong in itself since God put a longing for beauty and enjoyment into our very hearts. However, our God is Spirit, not flesh!
Whether the spirits of people of who we think they are beautiful are really beautiful too is of no interest to the natural man. Just think about the big sellout of beauty in advertising and especially pornography. The body (flesh) has become like a good that can be advertized and sold. I did not mention this in order to condemn anyone who is still attached to these things because I know that God does not condemn us, either. Instead, He gives us a new heart and mind that are no longer interested in the way this world (and its ruler Satan) present their” truth”.
As for beautiful bodies, it is the exact opposite for those whose spirits have been enlightened by God. If they see physically beautiful persons, they do not feel attracted by the flesh (body) any more. But when they sense God’s Spirit in other people, this observation makes their hearts leap with joy. Furthermore, they are attracted by their spirits only! That means, the appearance is of no interest for the spiritual man who knows that it is only the heart that matters.
From hence, we might as well assume that Satan can easily capture the carnal Christian by deluding the soulish and sensual life of the old self nature. Since, if the old man has died, Satan’s possibilities to deceive are no longer effective. Instead, the spiritual man who always beholds God in Christ “knows” the truth because God’s Spirit teaches his enlightened human spirit on a permanent level. I am going to offer you now another quote from T. Austin Sparks, taken from another article.
How near to the truth in perception and interpretation can the mystical go! What wonderful things can the imagination see, even in the Bible! What thrills of awe, amazement, ecstasy, can be shot through an audience or congregation by a master soul! But it may all be a false world with no Divine and eternal issues. It may all go to make up this life here, and relieve it of its drabness, but it ends there. What an artificial world we live in! When the music is progressing and the romantic elements are in evidence—the dress and tinsel—and human personalities are parading, see how pride and rivalry assert themselves, and what a power of make believe enters the atmosphere! Yes, an artificial world. We have been in it and know the reactions afterward.
How hollow, how empty; Dead Sea fruit! The tragedy in this melodrama is that it is ‘real life’ to so many. This soul-world is the devil’s imitation. It is all false, wherever we may find it, whether associated with religion or not.
http://www.austin-sparks.net/m/Books-001341.html
Yes, TAS is right! Playing beautiful music, singing songs, even experiencing ecstatic feelings in one’s body can make you feel happy for a certain time. And you might be inclined to believe that God was the author of what you have felt. Maybe He was at times, but not necessarily so. Having been part of the Pentecostal Church and of the Charismatic movement, I know how this deception works. Once you are in it, you can hardly sense the difference between God and Satan any longer unless God opens up the eyes of your heart and sets you free, which is a both necessary and painful process to come to grips with. Wherever we do not see Christians being changed continually, but remaining on the same spiritual level for years, we may know that there is something wrong with them. They are spiritual babies that never grew up into Him and thus can neither share His sufferings nor enjoy the glory of God. God who never sleeps works through His Spirit in His children 24/7 in order to change them because He longs to see the perfection of His Son realized in His sons and daughters so that they can finally join Him in His eternal life (see Jn 17:3) and blessings, even now, even here, even today…
Although the last quote from TAS below does not sound that hopeful at first sight, I thought I should add it on here, though. We may not believe that deception would be an intrinsically unnatural phenomenon for us. Au contraire, deception is closely related to our Old Adam nature until God finally lets us share in His divine spiritual sight. TAS said,
Man is by nature now a deceived creature. Deception is deception, and the deceived never know it until they are enlightened or delivered. It is like a disease. There are forms of mental sickness which cause those who are so suffering to believe certain things which to the healthy mind are ridiculous and impossible. It is useless to argue with them, and futile to try to convince them of the untruth of their beliefs. Indeed, it is cruel at times to oppose them. If you are to live with them in any measure of peace and be at all helpful, you have to take the attitude of agreeing with them and deal with the situation along some other line. Otherwise it is going to be continual clash. The only way to change their convictions is to heal their sickness.
http://www.austin-sparks.net/english/books/001342.html
Very good, Susanne. There is a difference between law keeping out of duty and obeying someone because we love them and want to please them.
“What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away. Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of my mouth, and my judgment goes forth as the light. For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” (Hos 6:4-6, ESV2011)
True obedience comes from a love relationship and a desire to please the one we love, not a sacrificial attitude of law keeping and fear of punishment. God has always wanted a people who love and obey Him out of love.
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Yes and amen, Michael. Very well said! ⭐
Indeed, law-keeping with the power of the old self never worked as we can see when we read the OT. Before we have been enabled by God to love HIM more than anything else, we won’t be able to obey Him perfectly.
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Yes, and we love Him because He first loved us and sent His Son to die in our place so we could be given new hearts to love Him with. It is ALL by His great love and grace that we change and are transformed into the sons and daughters of God. Bless you, my sister! ⭐
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Amen again, my brother.
All happens by grace, even obedience out of a God-given new heart that finally loves unconditionally like God loves. Unimaginable, isn’t it…? 🙄
God bless you and keep you always, Michael!
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Yes… totally beyond our wildest dreams… “But as it is written, Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for them that love him.”
(1Cor 2:9, KJ2000)
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You made me grin, Michael, “beyond our wildest dreams…” 😀
But the very Scripture you pasted confirms the truth of what has been said by you before. Also,
“Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” (Ps 37:4 ESV)
ALL the desires of our hearts – no exceptions! What a mystery… ⭐
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I don’t know how to explain it but this did touch my heart. Maybe because I have been freed from a lot of things. I mean I thought I needed a specific addiction to help me with stress. I have learned that not to be the case, Although I do some times have to remind my self of that. This also has great timing as I have found many delusions I was under in the past. I would rather not get into them as I regret being under such delusions. I am still seeking the truth as I am sure there are things I still think that are not the truth.
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Wonderful that your heart has been touched, Fred. 🙂
“Still seeking the truth” sounds good to my ears. Only if we stop seeking before we have found what we were looking for, we are in great danger of remaining in the darkness of deception.
May God bless you and keep you,
Susanne
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Susanne, thanks for your excellent blog on the blessing that comes as we obey God. I would like to show how easy it is to miss His voice and be seduced by the tempter. Please forgive me for being inspired by what you share to write another blog post. Feel free to not moderate this if you feel it is too long. You wrote,
“To begin with, we can say that which is appealing to the natural man is disgusting to the spiritual man. Our flesh is attracted by what we perceive with our senses to be beautiful, by watching nature, a sunset, or human beings, for instance. And what feels good to our bodies is appealing to us as well. This is not wrong in itself since God put a longing for beauty and enjoyment into our very hearts. However, our God is Spirit, not flesh!”
John wrote,
What appealed to Eve in her natural person was what Satan targeted and he has gone on to do just that with every human since. Regarding the nature of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and her reaction to it we read,
“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.”(Gen 3:6, RSV)
She saw that it was good for food – “the lust of the flesh.” She saw that it was a delight for her eyes to look upon – “the lust of the eyes.” She saw that was desireable to make her wise – “the pride of life.” This is the root of all sin and how he temps us. He has perfected this down to a science on how to tempt mankind to fall into his traps and take them captive and it is exactly how Satan temped Jesus in the wilderness. He tempted Jesus to use His God given ability to turn stones into bread so He could eat after fasting for 40 days – “the lust of the flesh.”
Then Satan tried another piece of his arsenal tempting Jesus with a show of the glories of the kingdoms of the world in an attempt to appeal to the lust of the eyes, and if He caved into that temptation they would all be His for they were Satan’s to give. All He had to do was bow down and worship the devil.
Then there is the pride of life. What form would that come in?
Aw yes! If you can’t get a man to fall to the lusts of the eyes and of the flesh and he quotes scripture and stands on his holiness, you pull out the old standby, you tempt him with holy things! You tempt him to use his spiritual powers to make a show if it before all men that they might follow YOU and give you the honor that belongs to God.
This is the sneakiest temptation of them all. Aren’t we who are born of the Spirit of God, the children of the King? Aren’t the gifts of the Spirit He has given us subject to us and given “without repentance.” Shouldn’t we us them to show all men what God does for those who are His chosen ones? Won’t they see this and bow down before us in tremendous altar calls at our feet, all for “the glory of God?” Yes, we can gain the admiration and riches of the whole world in the business of God and loose our souls, because Jesus made it clear that if we lift HIM up before all men and not ourselves, HE would draw all men nigh to HIM and NOT TO US! What a near miss! Yet, this is done every day in the name of “bring men and women to Christ” for the sake of building up the kingdoms or men. What a difference we see in the attitude of the first Apostles in the early church!
Oh, the idolatry that exists today in the name of the Living God and it is nothing more than Satan feeding the pride of life!
Dear saints, “Let no one disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, taking his stand on visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head [Jesus Chrrist]…” (Col 2:18-19, RSV)
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You are so welcome, Michael. You wrote,
“Please forgive me for being inspired by what you share to write another blog post. Feel free to not moderate this if you feel it is too long.”
Nooo!!! That is exactly the way God works in your case as we have seen it in the past. So, why apologizing for what God has been doing through you? 🙄
I know that your comments and blogs come into being after praying to God. If that which someone wrote was Spirit-led and helpful for others, too, I will always moderate it. The only comments I delete – long or not – are those where I sense false (seducing, deceiving, confusing) spirits behind. They often begin very cautiously in order to attack later when a comment string has reached a certain length. In order to avoid this, I delete comments as soon as possible when I sense God nudging me to do so. If I do not obey Him immediately in these cases, I know I will lose His peace until I finally trash all deceiving responses.
After reading your whole reply just now, I can tell you it will turn out a beautiful and Spirit-led blog post. Excellent, Michael! ⭐ That was a great exposition on 1 Jn 2:15-17, verses that had been on my mind too. 😉
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Thanks Susanne. I understand what you mean by the way certain people come on at first like they agree, even with flattery, only to get around what they really wanted to say that ends up being an attack or a seduction to pull you over to their way of thinking. The Pharisees and Saducees did this all the time with Jesus, but He nipped it in the bud before they could spring their traps for He could see their hearts. For instance…
May our Lord bless and keep you free, always.
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Thank you, Michael.
It is always important for me to remember that our fight is against the unseen evil forces, never against the human beings who are controlled by them. But loving our neighbors does not mean that we need to submit to their spirits when we have realized they were led by Satan.
May you be kept free and blessed by our Lord too! ⭐
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Thank you so much for the link to my blog, once again, Michael. 🙂
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Your are welcome, my friend. Thank YOU for your inspiration and that link to the T. Austin-Sparks book. It is truly amazing and humbling how clearly he saw the kingdom of God vs. the kingdoms of men. 🐻
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You are so welcome, dear Michael.
I am convinced TAS had entered the kingdom of God during his lifetime. Therefore he knew what he was talking about. Everything else that does not spring from our own experiences is hard to read for me since it is often “empty” and somehow “dead”.
Susanne 🐱
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Yes, Susanne, I have never found a Christian writer that had such profound insight into the workings of the hearts of men or the heart of God and Jesus like this man. Unless God does a much deeper work in my life, my missives will never hold a candle to his writings. But in the mean time I will keep seeking God to go deeper in my life. Like Paul put it, “Death works in me that life might abound to others.” This truly is the pattern of the Son.
Michael 🐻
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Thanks for confirmation, Michael. BUT your writings have been God-inspired too, so, no need to sell yourself short at all!!!
Susanne 🐱
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🙂
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Hahaha…
Michael, your smiley was posted at 2:22 pm my time. BIG GRIN! XD
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Oh Lord let us all talk to Dad and ask that He will enable us to listen to Him more better
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AMEN!! Very well said, Ken. ⭐
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Forgive me if this comment is interrupted. Computer problems have been a challenge.
I found this post resonated with me, Susanne. Not really a surprise, since so many of your posts do. 🙂
From what I can tell, the heresy that Matthew Henry identifies, i.e. that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross makes obedience to God irrelevant, is nearly as common among Christians as legalism. The first ignores the letter of the law; the second ignores the spirit of the law.
I am reminded of Hebrews 5:13-14: “For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.”
I would go so far as to say that the majority of Christians today do not qualify as mature. When immature Christians encounter suffering, their faith is often shaken. The assumption seems to be that Christians are promised by God they will never have to suffer. Nothing could be further from the truth! Unfortunately, the church has done little to correct this error. Suffering is not a very palatable topic.
Which ties directly into your point about our difficulty recognizing the truth. There is a scene in the low-brow comedy “Shallow Hal”, which (by analogy) perfectly captures this. Jack Black, as the the lead character, judges beauty solely by outward appearance. Black finally realizes the foolishness of this, when confronted by the children in a hospital burn ward.
Keats wrote that beauty is truth, and truth beauty. To recognize either, we have to have eyes to see. Thank you for helping to open ours, Susanne.
With love,
A. ❤
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I have had computer problems lately too, Anna. From hence I can relate. The Scripture from Hebrews you shared fits perfectly! ⭐
Yes indeed, suffering is not for everyone, but with God’s help we can go through every valley of the shadow of death, I believe.
I did not know “Shallow Hal”, however, this analogy is a great illustration of what I theoretically pointed to in my article. Beauty is truth and vice versa – I like that! Thanks for sharing this, dear Anna! 🙂
Much love ❤
Susanne
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Great comment, Anna. Truth is beauty and beauty is truth. In the kingdom of God, this is more true than ever… He sees truth as holiness in His saints, or how much Christ rules and is manifest in their lives. In that light, take a look at this verse,
“Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name; worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.” (Ps 29:1-2, KJV)
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