SPIRITUAL LIVING
Believers today have many misunderstandings with regard to spiritual living. We can only briefly look at a few now:
A. Conversation
"For you are not the ones speaking, but the Spirit of your Father is the One speaking in you" (Matt. 10:20). A believer may think this means that God will speak on behalf of him, that he need not speak, and that God will speak words out from his mouth. Such a believer "consecrates" his mouth to God. He does not make any decision and expects to be God’s "mouthpiece." His lips and vocal cords fall into passivity, and he allows any outside supernatural force to use him. Some who deliver messages for the Lord think that they do not need to use their mind and will during the meeting and that they simply need to offer their mouth passively to God and allow God to speak through their mouth. The consequences of this action are: (1) the believer himself does not speak; (2) neither does God speak, because God does not regard man as a recorder; and (3) evil spirits utilize the believer’s passivity to speak through his mouth. This often causes the believer to experience a kind of power speaking through his mouth, enabling him to receive "messages from heaven." Since what is spoken may be very good, the believer considers these words to be from God.
The verse in Matthew simply refers to a situation in which one is persecuted and tried. It does not say that the Holy Spirit will speak on behalf of the believer. The experience of the apostles Peter and John before the Sanhedrin later confirms this.
B. Guidance
"And your ears will hear a word behind you, saying,/This is the way, walk in it" (Isa. 30:21). Believers do not realize that this verse specifically refers to the Israelites—God’s people in the flesh—during the millennium. At that time, there will not be the counterfeit work of evil spirits. Believers consider this kind of guidance by a supernatural voice to be the highest leading. They think they are superior to others, having supernatural guidance all the time. They neither use their conscience nor their intuition. They just passively wait for a supernatural voice. They assume that they do not need to think, consider, choose, or determine, but just "obey" passively. They allow a voice to substitute for the function of their intuition and conscience. As a result: (1) the believers do not use the conscience and intuition; (2) God will not command them to make them obey as a machine; and (3) evil spirits will use a supernatural voice to replace revelation in the intuition. Then evil spirits will attach themselves to the believers.
From that point on, believers no longer care for the prompting of their intuition, the voice of their conscience, what they understand and sense, or what others say. They just stubbornly follow the supernatural voice without even considering it for a moment. Their moral standard gradually falls, and they are not even aware of it because they have allowed evil spirits to be a substitute for their conscience, and they can no longer discern good and evil.
(Spiritual Man, The (3 volume set), Chapter 37, by Watchman Nee)
