Dear —, I have your letter. I am sure that the enemy is very busy, as well as the evil heart within. What you need is real, thorough deliverance from yourself—i.e., the flesh in the first place, not to speak of power to overcome evil in practice.
You speak of evil thoughts, unbidden and hated, springing up in the heart, even when you seek to be occupied with the Lord; this, too, even when really thinking of Him. Then you stop to confess them, and the occupation for a moment in confession only provokes another evil thought; and so it is, as you say, ‘an unending,’ ‘all-day work.’
My feeling is, that you have never really enjoyed full deliverance from self and flesh. You are what Scripture calls still ‘in the flesh,’ though a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. Your recognition of and occupation with the truths of Scripture, being far beyond the work in your conscience, has been, and is, a great snare to you. I hardly know of anything that is more hurtful to the soul than the craving of mind, which you have fed from time to time with divine truths ... All this has been a snare of the enemy, from which may you be fully delivered!
I believe that if your soul was free, you would find that the simple yet profound truth of ‘reckon yourselves dead,’ &c. (Romans 6), would so act that the thought of turning aside to confess what would spring up unsought for in your soul would be found to be really and only allowing the flesh a triumph in leading you to be occupied with it.
Where there is no will, such thoughts will be left, turned aside from, and treated as ‘not I.’ Of course, when the soul is not free, I could not say that you could do so at all. But were freedom enjoyed, you would not be the sufferer from such things. The presence of them would indicate that you are not free. Yet I feel a difficulty even in telling you this, because from your intellectual knowledge of things (which can hardly be called divinely—received knowledge), you would be tempted to go through known truths of deliverance, and seek to find out what your experimental response to them is, in order to obtain what you do not possess...
Were I to enter upon the doctrine of your questions, I feel I would but injure you. What I would simply say to you is, when evil thoughts are presented to your soul, unsought for and hated, do not stop, and cease from your measure of occupation with the Lord, to confess them. If will enters, they must be confessed; but if not, pass them by, as you would avoid an evil person who is not yourself, and whom you know is incorrigible, and with whom contact was only misery and defilement. “Avoid such, and pass not by them” (Prov. 4:1515Avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it, and pass away. (Proverbs 4:15)), but leave them there. To own them at all is but to give the flesh the place it seeks—a recognition in some way or other. This even, when it is only to abhor its workings, will be a satisfaction to the flesh.
O that you had grace to leave the flesh unrecognized and disowned, and to pass on, conscious that it is always there, and will be in you till the end! How blessed that one can, by grace, disown and refuse to hear its suggestions when it works, knowing through mercy that It is no more I!’
Your case has been, or is one, that is common to most of the Lord’s people, if not to all. I refer now to the uprising of unsolicited and hated and wandering thoughts. You should simply go on and take no notice of them whatever; as by doing so you only give flesh the place it seeks. Go on as not hearing these suggestions: be, as it were, deaf to them. Confess to God if you find will enter; but not so as to be occupied with the analysis of the evil; rather look up to Him—the sense of weakness and impotency filling your heart, and, in the attitude of dependence of soul, pass on, with your eye resting upon Him, out from whom strength comes wherever there is conscious weakness. —Yours faithfully, &c.
“The passage (2 Corinthians 5) has been one of much consideration. I do not doubt, the saints too will be the subjects of the judgment-seat. They will be manifested before it, but that their persons will be called into question, that could not be. They are justified. They rise not to judgment, but to life. So that the question of their persons, i.e., of themselves, is settled.
“But in happy family order, the discovery of wrong tempers or hidden breaches is a most welcome process. Far better to have such things manifested than smothered. The discovery or confession of them is the best kind of healing.
“All work of this kind should have been conducted and concluded by the light of the Spirit in us. But by reason of flesh, this is not so. This process is hindered and left imperfect. But the light of the judgment-seat of Christ will not be so hindered. There will be no flesh to contend with it as a rival energy. It will manifest all—and that light and that operation will be a needed work to make the saints happy in their social eternity.
“But observe this, as another once remarked, the thought of this judgment-seat gives the apostle no uneasiness about himself—it rather makes him think of others; for he says: ‘Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men.’
“This is a very happy thought. He was not distressed about himself when he thought of judgment.”
“Beloved, all of us are a compound, Jesus was a combination. In Jesus all graces were mingled, and mingled in their due proportions—in us grace and corruption are compounded together. In Him, as another has said, there was nothing salient—all was duly mingled. In us there is nothing of perfection. All, in one way or another, is moral unfitness.
“But the day is at hand, when the flesh will have perished in its own corruption, and the new creation in Christ shall shine in its purity as well as in its glory.”