In today’s MLJ Monday, the Doctor is urging us to not despise the experience God seeks to offer us. I have written a number of similar posts from his writings before, but I thought this one was well worth sharing — if only because it so strikingly challenges us today.
“. . . in a most extraordinary way we seem to be excluding experience altogether. The slogan is, ‘Take it by faith.’ Of course, that is essential in your conversion — justification by faith only. And it is right to say to someone at that point, ‘Believe this word.
Risk your all upon it. Trust yourself to it.’ That is a correct initial statement to make, but you must not stop at that. You then say to him, ‘Now, that is all you do at this moment. But if you do that you will be given an experience, an assurance, and you will know for certain.’ But so often that second step is left out today, and many people teach that experiences do not matter. ‘Do not worry about your feelings,’ we are told, right through the whole of the Christian life. From beginning to end it is, ‘Take it by faith, do not worry about your experiences.’ They say it almost in a patronising way. ‘There are some people,’ they add, ‘who talk about great experiences, but that is not great faith. You know real faith is a man who believes, though he has felt nothing.
Well, as I say, that is all right at a preliminary stage, but if you have never felt anything, if you have never had any experience. I say it is not faith, it is mere intellectual assent, and intellectual belief. Because the whole of the Bible teaches experiences of God. And we are meant to experience God. We are meant to know Him, not simply to believe, and to go on ‘holding to our beliefs,’ and ‘taking it by faith’. That is only the first step, and it is to be followed by a realisation, by an understanding. And I feel that it is this error at this point that accounts for so much of dead orthodoxy, and is such a grievous hindrance to revival.
Let me sum it up like this: I am not interested in experiences as such. I am not saying that men and women should simply seek experiences. No, what I am saying is, seek God, seek to know God, seek to know His love, seek to be filled with this knowledge, and all the fulness of God. No, not the experience itself, but to experience Him, and to know Him. These men of the Bible knew Him. They spoke to Him. They realised His presence. So have all the others whose lives I have been quoting to you. But this seems to have vanished out of our whole conception and I suggest that this may be because we have become so afraid of false experiences that we are shutting out experience altogether. We are so afraid of certain excesses that we are guilty even of quenching the Spirit. This is a painful matter — I am saying it to myself as well — but the trouble with all of us is that we are much too healthy. Humility is not frequently observed today. A bouncing superficial self-confidence is the order of the day, not meekness, humility, mourning for sins and a consciousness of unworthiness and imperfection. No, we are resting on our oars. We are satisfied.”
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