THERE is one thing absolutely certain: no truth can be known to any sanctifying purpose that is taken up as a mere dogma. Christ Himself is the Truth. The truth, therefore, can only be learned to purpose as He is known. The word reveals Him; but the word is only understood through the Spirit, while in the new man only can that be received by faith which the Spirit opens up.
The truth, in fact, is life; for Christ is life as well as truth; and in the harmony in which truth is presented to us in the word, it is intimately connected and interwoven with our daily life and walk in Christ.
The truth is sanctifying only as it is thus known; and thus known, it will be sanctifying. What the Spirit teaches is received in the channel of experience: the heart is prepared to receive it. Nothing is put there by God (who only can put it there) that does not make manifest its Divine origin, and lead to communion with Him from whom it came. The heart, however, is not simply prepared to receive it, but needs the truth for which it is prepared. Nothing can satisfy, nothing still the conscience that is awakened to a sense of shortcoming and need, but the fitted truth, known in power, about which it is exercised before God.
When the matter of forgiveness of sin through the blood of the cross is settled, the Holy Spirit having demonstrated in the conscience the present and eternal efficacy thereof, the craving of the new man is after conformity to Christ. Like water, it never can be still till it has found its level; hence, in the healthy action of the new man there is a continual growth, continual growing up into Christ, though struggling with the flesh notwithstanding. There is satisfaction, indeed, with the measure attained, so far as that which is reached is truth, and, therefore, real gain; yet what we know through the unction received, only seems to show us how little we do know. Hence there is a forgetting of the things which are behind, and a reaching forth to the things which are before. But in the day in which we live,―and that is the day, practically, which we have to do with―it is well to consider what a vast amount of that which is really the truth of God, and which we talk of “holding,” is only picked up on the authority of some teacher (I object not, surely, to human instrumentality; “Feed my sheep” was the chief Shepherd’s charge to his servants), and not being carried to God, and weighed in the balance of the sanctuary, and then fed upon in the inner man, it is held in the head apart from living communion with Him whose truth it really may be; the consequence of which is, that it puffs up, and devours with spiritual pride, those who make their boast in it; and thee, with lowly words on the lip, practical lawlessness in the life is the wretched result.