They Immediately Left their Nets and Followed Him.

I began last time talking about how we must become more familiar with the Spirit of God. That’s what I’m aiming at. I said that there is no way to be a Christian without learning to live and walk and abide in the Spirit of Christ. There is no Christianity without the Spirit. There is only anti-christianity. I mean, without the Spirit of Christ, there is something else reigning in the heart of man, calling itself God, but having a very contrary nature. If we are going to be Christians, we must be men and women who live in the Spirit of God. “Those who are led by the Spirit, these are the sons of God.” 

And then I told you that the sure way to find the Spirit, to begin to feel His presence, His movings and teachings in the heart, is to turn your attention inward (not outward), and in great humility, to pay careful and continual attention to that light in your heart that exposes evil. Now, this is not the only or the greatest manifestation or work of the Spirit of God, but it is a sure manifestation, and it is the place and the way where you must begin to find Him, hear Him, and learn to follow Him. 

You have all experienced two things in you that have a contrary nature. The one is YOU in your fallen condition. It is a soul, fallen from the life and nature of God, living in a temporary body of flesh and blood, “conducting itself in the lusts of the flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind.” It is a life of self, that looks into the world and pulls all things towards itself. It stands in pride and self will; it sends its desires out into the world after possessions, and after pleasure, and praise, etc. It lusts after what it does not have. It envies when others have it. It gets angry when it cannot take it. And it gets scared when it thinks it may lose it. This is the life of man in his fallen condition. 

And yet there is something else in us that is sown into man by the good Sower. There is something that condemns and abhors evil, both in others and in ourselves. There is something that feels peace in doing what is right, and finds joy in the truth. And this something is close enough to you to know your thoughts, your motivations, and the intentions of your heart. It knows your words before they come out of your mouth. It knows what is underneath your masks, and often makes you see it and feel it. 

This is not the voice of your flesh, nor the voice of Satan, nor the voice of your culture, nor the voice of your natural conscience. It is the light of Christ shining IN your conscience. It is the Spirit of Truth convincing you of sin, righteousness, and judgment. And here is where you must find Him, listen to Him, and begin to follow Him. 

You have all experienced this, although, if you are like me, you have perhaps spent years thinking little of it, overlooking it, ignoring the convictions that came from it, and trying to find peace by running away from this inward witness. Think back on your life. Think about your childhood. Do you remember times when, even as a child, this “swift witness” (Mal. 3:5) appeared in your heart and, contrary to your intentions, interrupted your pleasure in sin? Do you remember something within you suddenly making you feel uncomfortable, or dirty, or even scared, when you followed your friends into evil, or gave away your innocence, or looked upon things that were unclean? 

I’m sure that many of you do. And the more you think about your past, the more you will remember these occurrences, and understand that they cannot have fallen man, or fallen spirits as their origin. There is a light given to man in his heart. Jesus is called “the light that enlightens every man that comes into the world.” (John 1:9). Paul tells us that there is a “Word that is near us, in the heart and in the mouth.” He says, “what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.” (Rom. 1:19). Jesus tells us that there is a seed that is sown into every kind of soil, a talent that is given to man, a treasure hidden in our own field. There is much we could say about this gift of God, this implanted Word, this Seed of the kingdom. But all I want to say about it now, is that finding it, turning to it, loving it’s appearing, and following it, is how you begin to become familiar with the Spirit of God. Here, in your own heart, is where you must find Him, and here is where you must follow Him. 

You cannot first know Him or follow Him by studying His words, or listening to others talk about Him. No, this may be good and helpful, but that is for later. You must first start to know and follow Him by turning inward to His light or voice, by agreeing with what you hear or feel there, and by submitting your will to the Spirit of Truth. If you try to study His words without first giving Him your will, then you will not understand Him. You cannot understand Him. 

Jesus says,“If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God or whether I speak on My own.” You must first will to do His will, and then you will understand His doctrine. But if you apply yourself to study His doctrine while still living in a contrary will, then you will fail to understand his doctrine. Man’s understanding always follows his will. It comes out from his will, and then defends and justifies his will. 

This is how Christianity starts. It starts with turning inward and surrendering your will entirely to the Spirit of God, in whatever measure you can see it or feel it. You cannot skip this step. You must not think that you can grow without starting here. This is how you get on the train, so to speak. And though you will (of course) not know all that this means in the beginning, it must be the continuous posture of your heart all the way through. 

Christianity begins, and continues, in an entire submission of the will to the One who visits you. And when Christians try to follow Christ, to live and walk in the Spirit, to grow in grace and wisdom, without an entire surrender of their will, they begin a journey that will lead to disappointment and deception. There is no question about this. Our independent will must be laid down every step of the way, because our own will—acting independently of God—is the cause of our fall, and the only reason why we need to be saved. 

Now, returning to what I was saying before: I know that everybody in this room has felt some measure of the stirrings, callings, invitations, persuasions, awakenings, teaching, and convicting of a Spirit that appears in the heart and calls you from sin and self, to righteousness and humility. There is no doubt in my mind that even the youngest ones here have been visited by the grace of God. The grace of God appears to all men, bringing salvation, and teaching them to deny ungodliness and earthly lusts. But here is the question that I want to lay before you: When you have heard His voice speaking to you in THIS way, have you turned to it, and taken it as your leader? Have you bowed your neck, put it under His yoke, and begun to follow Him? 

This is the question. And this is where people lose their way right at the beginning. All are visited by the Spirit, but few unite their will to the One that visits them. They feel a touch of His love, a flash of His light and heavenly perspective. For a time they feel His presence, or His conviction, or a measure of His power. He convinces them that He is real and true and good. The Lord visits the soul. But then what happens? Very often, they become believers in Christ without becoming followers of Christ. I mean, they see enough to confess that He is true, and to believe the testimony of Scripture. They begin to read the Bible, to go to church and to Christian meetings. But their heart does not remain turned and submitted to the light that originally visited them. They pay more attention to the outward words of Scriptures and preachers, than they do to the inward Word of life and light in their own heart. And so they lose their way. They lose sight of their guide. 

I say again that I believe every word that is written in the Scriptures. I honor the Scriptures, and read them every day. But unless we keep our hearts turned, and our wills submitted to the Spirit that wrote them, we will lose our way. Unless we “will to do His will”, turning inwardly and continually to the One who manifests His will to us, we can never rightly understand His doctrine.

This is the reason that Paul was sent by Jesus to turn people from the darkness in them, to the light in them; from the power of Satan in them to the power of God in them. He wasn’t first sent to turn them from one book to another, or from one theology to another. First they must turn from the darkness to the light in their own heart. First they must become familiar with the One who can “do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us.”

What I am trying to suggest to you, is that it is easy and common to believe in the Spirit, and yet to not really know Him, first, because we do not recognize the beginning of His appearings in the heart; and second, because we do not turn our hearts to Him there—inwardly watching, waiting, seeking, and submitting. We feel convictions, but we don’t abide with the One who convicted us. We have moments of visitation, but we do not drop our nets (like Peter and Andrew) and follow the One who visited us. 

I believe that this is the primary reason why Christians do not become familiar with the Spirit, why they don’t know what it means to walk in the Spirit, pray in the Spirit, worship in the Spirit, love in the Spirit, be a temple of the Spirit, be led by the Spirit, be washed and purified by the obedience to the Spirit. These are familiar words but foreign realities to many of us because we have not learned to turn, to watch, and to follow the Spirit that appears in the heart.  

Now, one of the most important things we need to understand about growing in familiarity with the Spirit, is that the Spirit does not stay in the same place. I don’t mean He moves around in a physical sense. I mean He comes to us, appears to us, and then, if we are going to stay with Him and have fellowship with Him, we must continue with Him in a journey. The Lord appears in the darkness of our hearts in order to call us OUT of that darkness. He finds us living in the flesh, so that we will follow Him out of flesh. Or in the language of the Old Testament types and shadows, He appears and calls us out of our country, kindred, and father’s house, to a land that He will show to us. He comes into Egypt, manifests His judgments, and then expects us to follow Him out, staying close to Him, fixing our eyes on Him. He does not leave you in Egypt with a new belief. He does not leave you in the flesh with a new status or position. 

I know there are many in the church today that speak as if there were no inward journey for the Christian soul. They say that Christ did everything, and there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. They say that the moment we “accept Jesus into our lives” we are instantaneously perfect and complete in God’s eyes, and only need to “see what we already are,” or enjoy living in the “present truth”. There are many little phrases like this that are extremely popular, and extremely comforting to the wrong nature in man.

I once believed and taught similar mistakes. But I thank the Lord that, in His great mercy, He began to show me my own heart. He let me see that I wanted to believe I was somehow perfect, even while I lived in a nature and will that was contrary to Christ. He let me see why I loved to say I had been translated and transformed, when I hadn’t really changed at all. I saw that I wanted God to call me righteous without actually making me righteous. I wanted to say I had finished the race without ever having run, that I had won the battle without ever fighting the fight of faith; that I was walking in the Spirit while I still lived in the flesh; that I had put on the new man, without ever having put off the old man; that God saw me differently than how I really was; that I could claim His name without sharing His nature; and that He did not care about, or perhaps did not even see, that I continued my friendship with the world, living in the lusts of the eyes, the lusts of the flesh, and the pride of life. 

Oh how hard it was for me to see these things in my own heart! And there is much I could say about this great error if that were my subject right now. Let the following suffice for now: Yes, Christ has finished His work. He has done everything that was necessary, and everything that was possible to open a way for man to return to paradise. There was nothing left unfinished that Christ could have possibly done for us. BUT to suggest that what Christ has finished without us is instantaneously received and experienced and completed within us, is a very great perversion of Scripture, a complete denial of everything Christ and His apostles have told us about being a disciple, and a contradiction of our own daily experience. And truly, I believe that this is perhaps the most attractive, and therefore the most dangerous lie of our generation. 

But let me return to the inward journey. There is an inward journey because there is something that we must leave behind, and something that we must lay hold of. There is an inward journey because there is an old man to put off, and a new man to put on. There is a “laying hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of us.” There is a returning to the Father’s house. There is daily dying, a daily carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus so that the life of the Lord Jesus can be manifested in the body. These words signify a true inward change, a true journey from one nature to another. We are not only renewed in knowledge, we are changed in nature, conformed to His death, and transformed into His image. And to experience any of this we need to stay very close to our Guide. 

This is what it means to walk by faith, and why faith is said to be a “walk”, and not just a belief. We are told to walk by faith, to live by faith, and not just to believe by faith. What do I mean? I mean that faith comes out from God, enters into the heart of man, and LEADS us somewhere. Real faith does not just sit there in the brain as a lifeless thought, conclusion, or opinion. Faith is a spiritual thing, a mystery, a gift of God. Christ is the author and finisher of faith. It comes out from Christ, it unites the soul to Christ, and it leads the soul on in the way that is Christ. 

Human beliefs are often nothing more than deductions or conclusions based on opinions or intellect. But faith is a different thing altogether. It is a taste of the substance of things hoped for. It provides the soul with a measure of evidence of the things not seen. It springs from the living Word in the heart. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by this Word that we have been talking about, the Word that is near, in the heart and in the mouth. When it is received, it unites us to a living Savior. When it is obeyed, it follows in His footsteps, and never allows you to remain where you are, or as you are. It is a living experience, a living connection with a living Redeemer, and it leads you in a new and living way.

Faith has had the same effect in the lives of everyone who ever experienced it. It has never simply believed true facts. It has always seen Christ’s light, united the heart to Him, and followed in His footsteps. This is what happened with Abraham, the father of faith. Please don’t believe the popular idea that Abraham had only correct beliefs about God in his mind, and that these beliefs were credited to Him as righteousness. No. The faith of Abraham was a seeing of Christ’s Day (John 8:56), and a walking with Him out of one life and into another. By faith Abraham left his country, kindred and father’s house. By faith he followed in “hope against hope”, finding what was unseen to have more substance and evidence than what was seen. “He did not consider his own body, already dead (since he was about 100 years old), nor the deadness of Sarah’s womb,”… “but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God”. (Rom. 4:19-20) By faith his heart saw Christ, united to Christ, followed Christ on a journey, in which he was taught to let go of everything he had in this world, in order to lay hold of an eternal inheritance. This is the faith that became righteousness in Abraham. And this is the faith that becomes righteousness in us. 

And what I’m trying to tell you is that the Spirit of God, the implanted Word of God, shines His light in man, and awakens faith in the heart, not just to change our beliefs, but to lead us out of one nature into another. And in order to grow in our experience of Him, to continue to hear His voice, to experience the power that the New Testament speaks so frequently of, we must carefully, watchfully, submissively, and constantly turn to Him and follow Him. 

Let me summarize what I have said so far, and then I will finish. True Christianity requires a familiarity with the Spirit of Christ. There is no way to be a Christian without the Spirit. But this is not an uncommon experience only for prophets and apostles, or primitive Christians. This same Spirit that reigned in prophets and apostles also appears in us, and begins His work as a “swift witness” against all that is contrary to the nature of Christ. He appears not just to tell you that you are evil, but to lead you OUT of all evil, by teaching you to follow Him, to cling to Him, to submit to Him. He will teach you the way to stay close to Him, to hear His voice, and this way can be summarized in these words of our Savior: “Deny yourself, pick up your cross, and follow Me.”

Christians are unfamiliar with the Spirit of God, first, because they do not recognize or pay attention to his lowest appearance in their hearts, as the one that convinces them of sin, righteousness, and judgment. And second, because when He does appear, they do not turn, cling, submit, and follow. Faith is awakened in the heart, but they do not obey the faith. They do not walk by faith. They will not go where it is going. They will not actually leave with Abraham, following in his footsteps, out of their own will, out of their own life.