Biblical Psychology

(c) Darkened. Rom. 1: 21; Eph. 4: 18.

(d) Hardened. Isa. 6:10; Jer. 16:12; 2 Cor. 3:14.

(a) Laboratory of Life. Mark 7: 20-23.

(b) Lusts. Mark 4: 15, 19; Rom. 1: 24.

(c) Law of Nature. Rom. 2: 15.

(d) Law of Grace. Isa. 51: 7; Jer. 31: 33.

(e) Seat of Conscience. Heb. 10:22; 1 John 3: 19 21.

(f) Seat of Belief and Disbelief. Rom. 10: 10; Heb.

(a) Inspiration of God. 2 Cor. 8:16.

(b) Inspiration of Satan. John 13: 2.

(d) Indwelling of Spirit. 2 Cor. 1: 22.

(e) Abode of Peace. Col. 3: 15.

(f) Abode of Love. Rom. 5: 5.

(h) Abode of Communion. Eph. 5: 19.

"Bendezvous" means an appointed place of meeting. The heart is the oppointed place of meeting, not only for all the life of the body physically, but for all the life of the soul, and of the spirit. We have made quite clear that the heart is the centre of the bodily life physically, the centre of the soul life, and the centre of the spirit life; and that the Bible places in the heart what the modern thinkers put in the brain.

All through these studies, we have insisted on what the Bible insists on, that our body is the most gracious gift that God has given us, and if we "hand over" the mainspring of our life to Him, we can work out what He works in, through our bodily lives. It is through our bodily lives that Satan works out, and thank God it is through our bodily lives that God's Spirit works out.

God fills us with His grace, fills us with His Spirit, puts all that is wrong right, does not suppress it, does not counteract it, but really readjusts the whole thing. Then begins our work; we work outj what He works in, and we have to beware of that snare of blaming God for not doing what we alone can do. When the Bible says, "Be renewed in the spirit of your mind," it is the he'art that is referred to, renewed by the Spirit of God. The expression of that mind comes through the mechanism of our brain, and the marvelous emancipation which comes slowly and surely is that when the Spirit of God has altered the heart and filled it with a new Spirit, we have the power to will as God wills, and to do wbat God wants us to do.

You remember Jesus Christ puts the test that "if any man love Me, he will keep My commandments;" not some of them, but all of them. No man can keep Jesus Christ's commandments unless God has done a radical work in his heart; then, if He has, that is the

1. The Inner, 2. The Inmost, and 3. The Innermost. Now we come right into the very centre, where we do not know anything but what God reveals. Let me remind you that God's Book counsels, "Guard your heart, for out of it are the issues of life." We are far too difficult to understand ourselves; we must hand the keeping of our hearts over to God. If we think we are simple and easy to understand, we will not ask God to save or to keep us, but if we have come to the condition of the Psalmist in Psalm 139, we will hand the keeping of our souls straight over to Him, and say, "Search me!"

First of all, take (a) Highest Love. (See Ps. 73: 26.) Put the emphasis where the Bible ever puts it, "GOD is the strength of my heart." Mark 12: 30, 31. The highest love of your human heart is not for our kind, but for God. Our Lord distinctly showed His disciples that, if they were going to live the spiritual life, they must barter the natural life for it; that is, they must forego the natural life. Remember what we mean by the natural life, the ordinary, sensible, healthy, worldly-minded life. The highest love is not natural to the natural heart, we naturally do not love God. In this life, we will find out that we are apt to name "God" in thinking by names we ought to apply to Satan. Satan uses the greatest problems in this life to slander God's character to us, and he makes us think of all the calamities and miseries and wrongs in this life as springing from God.

"We have defined love, in its highest sense, as being the sovereign preference of my person for another person. The surest sign that God has done a work of grace in my heart is that I love Jesus Christ best, not weakly, not faintly, not intellectually, but passionately, personally and devotedly, overwhelming every other love of my life.

Another striking verse is Eomans 5:5: "The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given to us." Paul does not say the capacity to love God is shed abroad in our hearts, but "the love of God." The Bible only knows one love in this connection, and that is the supreme, dominating love of God. And Jesus Christ taught that, if our hearts, in their inmost centre, have had the work of grace done in them, we will show the same love to our fellow-men that God showed us.

The natural heart, we cannot repeat it too often, does not want the Gospel, it needs it. We will take God's blessings and lovingkindnesses and prosperities, but when it comes down to close quarters, and God's Spirit informs us that we have to give up our rule of ourselves, and let Him rule us, then at once we understand what Paul means when he says the "carnal mind," which resides in the heart, "is enmity against God." Am I willing for God not to suppress or counteract, but to totally alter the ruling disposition of my heart, until the love of God is shed abroad in my heart? These are the wonderful works of the grace of God, that God can take me by His spirit, through the atonement of Jesus, and alter the centre of my life, and put there the supreme love, the supreme, passionate devotion of my heart, to God Himself.

The modern man does not like His commands; he will not have them, he covers them over and ignores the first commandment. Men put first, "Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself "; the great cry to-day is "love for mankind." Yet the great cry of Jesus is "love for God first/' and the highest love, this great, supreme, passionate devotion of my heart and life, springs from the inner centre changed by God. What a rest there is when the love of God is shed abroad in my heart by the Holy Spirit, when I really realize that God is love, not loving, but love; something infinitely greater than loving, consequently He has to be very stern.

There is no such thing as God overlooking sin. That is where people make a great mistake with regard to love, they say that God is love, and of course Hei will forgive sin; God is holy love and of course He cannot forgive sin. Jesus Christ did not come to forgive sin, He came to save us from sin. The salvation of Jesus Christ is the removal of the sinner in my heart and the planting in of the saint. That is the marvelous work of grace, and to know; whether the natural heart of man wants the Gospel of God, notice the natural enmity of the heart against the working of the Spirit of God. "No, I do not object to being forgiven, I do not mind being guided, I do not mind being blessed, but really it is too much a radical surrender if I have to give up my right to myself, if I have to allow the Spirit of of God to have absolute control of my heart," that is the natural resentment. But oh, the ineffable-, unspeakable delight when made one with God, one with Jesus, and one with every fellow-believer in this great, overhelming characteristic of love, and when life becomes possible on God's plan!

(b) Highest License. In Ezekiel 28:2, there is the presentation of the personality of sin, not only the person with a wrong disposition, like we all have inherited, but the picture of the very being we know as Satan, who is the instigator behind the wrong disposition, inciting to license; which simply means, "I will not be bound by anybody's laws but my own!" The spirit that resents God's law will not have anything to say to Him. "I will rule my body as I choose, I will rule my social relationships as I like, I will rule my religious life as I choose, and I will not allow any creed or doctrine or God to rule me." That is the beginning of license.

Watch how often the apostle Paul warns, "Do not use your liberty for license." What is the difference? Why, liberty is the ability to perform the law, perfect freedom to fulfill all the demands of the law; license is rebellion against all law. If my heart does not become the centre of this awful trust, the centre of divine love, it will become the centre of diabolical license. Do people believe that? Jesus Christ's statements are not accepted by the majority of us nowadays. Immediately we look at them, the intenseness of them, the profundity of them and the fearfulness of them, make us shrink straight away.

A very profitable, a very solemn, and a very awful study is the study of the connection of the phrase " children of the devil,'' as used by Jesus. He is not referring to ordinary sinners; He is referring to religious sinners; natural sinners are called "children of wrath," but whenever our Lord uses the phrase, "children of the devil," He is referring to religious disbelievers, viz.: people who have seen the light and refused to walk in it, will not have it. Remember those two alternatives. Our hearts, thank God! may be the very centre of divine love, making us one with God's thoughts and purposes, or they may be the centre of the devil's rule, making us absolutely one with the being who hates God, one with the "prince of this world," one with the natural life which barters the spiritual.

(c) Darkened. (Rom. 1:21; Eph. 4:18.) Those are striking passages, quite at home in the New Testament, but at home nowhere else.

This is not a darkness that is "intensity of light," it is a refusal to allow any light at all. Read John 3:19, to see our Lord's use of that word "darkness," "This is the condemnation," this is the critical crisis "that the light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil." Jesus said,, on another occasion, "If the light in you be darkness, how great is that darkness." Darkness is "my own point of view;" when once I allow the prejudice of my head to shut down the witness of my heart, I make my heart dark.

When Jesus Christ preached His first public sermon in Nazareth, the place "He wlas brought up in" ((See Luke 4), the people's hearts witnessed to Hira, wonderfully and marvelously, but then their prejudices got in the way, and they closed down the witness of their hearts, and they broke up the service, and tried to kill Him. That is an instance of how it is possible to choke the witness of the heart by the prejudice of the head. That it what Jesus is referring to in John 3. He is talking to a man who is in danger of closing down the witness of his heart because of his Jewish prejudice. Is there any light some of us have been thanking God for? (as the 118th Psalm puts it, "Blessed be God who hath showed us light"), and then is there a prejudice coming in, a closing down the witness of the heart? If so, that is where the darkened heart begins; light does not shine because it cannot. You can only see along the line of your prejudices, until the Holy Spirit has come in; if you will let Him come in with His dynamite power to blow away the lines of your prejudice, then you can begin to "go" in God's light. A darkened heart is a terrible thing, because a darkened heart may make a man happy; a man with a darkened heart may be peaceful, saying, "My heart is not bad, I am not convicted of sin, all this talk about being born again and filled with the Holy Spirit is so much absurdity." The natural heart does not want the Gospel of Jesus, and will fight against it; it needs it, but it takes the convicting grace of God to bring a man or woman to know the radical work of grace that God does in us.

Then (d) Hardened. (2. Cor. 3:14.) The characteristic of hardening is quite familiar in the Bible, but unfamiliar everywhere else. For instance, the Bible says that God hardened Pharaoh's heart. "Whenever a man gets into an exalted position, it is that in which he may show the marvelous grace of God, or else it will harden his heart away from God. You find it true everywhere of the prejudiced heart and the hardened heart, not so much the darkened heart. There is no witness of the heart that is being crushed down, it is simply hard, it is not touched; when God's love and God's works are abroad, it remains like ice; you may smash and break it by judgments, but you simply break ice. The only way we can alter the hardened heart is to melt it, and the only power that can melt a hardened heart is the fire of the Holy Ghost. The heart is such a truly central thing that God alone knows it, and the illustrations used in the Bible are given in varying changing figures, so that we may get a bit of understanding as to how God deals with us. Thank God, everyone of us may have the first, the highest love!

Now take the second column of the outline, (a) A laboratory is a place where anything is prepared for use. Remember, your heart never dies, your heart is as immortal as God's Spirit, for it is the centre of man's spirit. Memory never dies, mind never dies; our daily machines dies, and the manifestation of our heart and life in this body dies, but the heart never dies.

''Son, remember/ ' that was to a man out of the body. The things prepared for use are prepared for use in the heart. (Mark 7: 20-23.) These are staggering verses, and they spring from the lips of the Master of the human heart. They are not the shrewd guesses of a scientist, or the simple invitations of an apostle, they are the revelation of God Almighty, through Jesus Christ. Look at them, and see whether they do not awaken resentment in you unless you have received the Spirit of God.

Those verses mean this, there is no crime ever committed by a human being that every human being is not capable of. How many people believe that? "Why," they say, "that is morbid nonsense; absurd." That judgment means that Jesus Christ did not know what He was talking about, and people are accepting willingly and eagerly and all-embracingly, "Christian Science," that popularization of this other thing, as though there were no such things as sin and defilement, no such thing as death; they say they are all imagination. The consequence is, people are preaching the gospel of "temperament," "cheer up and look on the bright side of things." How can a man live on the bright side of things when the Spirit of God has shown him the possibilities of Hell inside him? The majority of us are shockingly ignorant, simply because we will not allow the Spirit of God to reveal to us the enormous dangers that lie hidden in the centre of our lives. Dangers to you and to me, said Jesus, never come from outside, always from the inside. If we will accept His verdict and receive the Spirit of God, He will see that those things never belch up because He will re-relate the whole heart from the inside.

The "Rendezvous of Perfect Life." Remember "perfect life" is not "perfection;" perfect life is a perfect adjustment of every one of the powers of the heart to God. By perfection is meant, perfect attainments in everything. Perfect life means the perfect adjustment of all my relationships to God; nothing out of joint, but all rightly related. Now I can begin to live the perfect life, that is, I can begin to attain. A child is a perfect human being, so is a man; what is the difference? The one is not grown, the other is. Read Phil. 3: 12-15, and you will find the two perfections put very clearly. "When you are sanctified, says Paul, you are perfectly adjusted to God, but remember, you have done nothing yet, you have attained to nothing in the perfect life yet, you are simply perfectly adjusted to God. The whole life is right, undeserving of censure, now then begin to attain in your bodily life, to prove that your heart is perfectly adjusted.

(b) Lusts. (Mark 4: 15-19; Rom. 12: 4.) What is lust? "I must have it at once!" that is lust. Jesus says that that will destroy every work of grace He ever begins in us. "The lust of other things entering in chokes the Word." Now lust is used once in the Bible of another thing beside wrong. It is used of the Spirit of God, "lusting against the flesh;" that means that the Spirit of God, once He gets in in spiritual new birth, lusts after, must have at once, this body for God, and He will not tolerate for one second "the carnal mind," consequently, when a person is born again of the Spirit, there is a disclosure of the enmity against God. No man knows he has that enemy on the inside till he has received the Spirit of God. Immediately he has, then the carnal mind is aroused, and the carnal mind sneers, and the carnal mind clamors, and the carnal mind says, "No, I will not yield to the Spirit/' and there you have the war described in Galatians 5. The "Spirit against the flesh, and the flesh against the Spirit/' both of them demanding, "I must have this body at once/' while I have to give the casting vote. "Which power am I going to give this body to? Thank God for everyone who has said, "Lord, I give it to Thee; I want to be identified with the death of Jesus Christ until I know that my 'old man' is identified with the cross!"

But watch lust on the bad side; watch where it begins. "You did run well, who did hinder you?" Think what simple things Jesus Christ says will crush what He put in, "the lust of other things," "the cares of this world." Once let a man or woman get worried, and the choking of the grace of God begins. If anyone has really had wrought into heart and head the complete, amazing revelation which Jesus Christ gives, that God is love and that I can never remember anything that He will forget, then worry is impossible, also note how much Jesus Christ talks against worry, and you will find the reason. The "cares of this world' ' produce worry, the "lust of other things" coming in will choke all that God put in. Is the thing that is claiming my attention now the one thing that God has saved and sanctified me for? If so, instantly life becomes simpler, the crowding, clamoring lusts have no life.

(c) The Law of Nature, (d) the Law; of Grace, '(e) the Seat of Conscience and (f) the Seat of Belief and Disbelief. They are all in the heart.

Conscience we call the "eye of the soul," and the orbit of the conscience, the orbit of that marvelous recorder, is the heart, "Having our heart sprinkled from an evil conscience," and God puts the law of grace where the law of nature worked, in the heart* Thank God for His sovereign grace, which can alter the mainspring of life! God alters the mainspring of the life, God alters the heart, God purifies the heart, God fills the heart.

The Seat of Belief and Unbelief. (Heb. 3:12.) There the distinction is made perfectly clear. Your heart must never be an agnostic; your head, if you like, may be. The reason people disbelieve God is not because they do not understand things with their heads, there are very few things we understand with our heads; it is because they have turned their hearts in another direction. Why was Jesus Christ so stern against "disbelief"? Because it never springs from the head, but from the wrong direction of the heart. Every Christian is an avowed agnostic in the head. Have you ever thought of that? How do I know God? All I know of God I have accepted as a revelation, I did not find Him out by my head. "No man by searching can find out God." Next time you meet some agnostic friends, say something like that to them, and see if it does not alter the problem for them.

One has to keep one's mind open about a great many things. Can I have the evil heart of unbelief taken out of me, and a heart of belief put in? Thank God, the answer comes "Yes!" (Ezek. 36:26.) Can I have an impure, defiled heart made pure, so pure that it is pure in God's sight? Then comes the answer "Yes!" (1 John 1:7.) Can I be filled with the Holy Ghost, until every nook and cranny is exactly under the control of God? Then comes the answer "Yes!" (Matt. 3:11, 12.)

Jesus Christ's Gospel works down in the centre first, not in the circumference. He works exactly where we work in the natural world. Nobody is capable of thinking about being born before they are born, or how they will live after they are born into this world, we have to be born into this world to live, and some of us never think about it. Jesus says, "Do not marvel that I say unto you, Ye must be born again." You must be born into this new world first, and if you want to know My doctrine, do My will spiritually, a right relation of the heart to God is essential first. How am I going to get a right heart relationship to God? "Why, simply by accepting God's Spirit. Who will put me in the right place to understand how God's grace works? Let any man or woman receive the Spirit of God and see whether the Spirit of God will not lead into all truth.

(a) The Inspiration of God may dwell in the innermost recesses of my heart. Read the passage and you will be surprised at the seeming slightness of it. (2 Cor. 8:16.) There the inspiration for benevolence and philanthropy springs from God, and God's Book has some stern revelations to make about our philanthropy and benevolence. They spring from a totally wrong motive; the inspiration of God does not patch up my natural virtues, but remakes the whole of the being, and I find that every virtue I possess is His alone. God does not come in and patch up my good works, He turns the whole lot out, and puts in the Spirit that was characteristic of Jesus; it is His patience, His love, and His tenderness and gentleness exhibited through me. "If any man eat My flesh and drink My blood.' ' When God alters a man's heart, and plants His Spirit inside, the actions have the inspiration of God at the basis; if they have not, we may have (b) the Inspiration of Satan. (John 13:2.)

(c) The Indwelling of Christ (Eph. 3:17)— an unspeakable wonder! Those two figures are very remarkable, made one in the mystical body of Christ, that Christ may indwell us. There are three pictures of Jesus given in the New Testament; first, the historic; second, God incarnate; and third, the mystical body of Christ, that is being made up of sanctified believers now. By the sovereign work of God and the indwelling Christ in me, I can show through my body, through my eyes, my life, my bodily relationships, the very same characteristics that were strong in the Lord Jesus, so that men may know that I have been with Jesus as He said, "men seeing your good works may glorify your Father in Heaven."

The thought is unspeakably full of glory, that God the Holy Ghost, the marvelous grace of God, can come into my heart and fill it so full wi,th the life of God that it will manifest itself all through this body that used to manifest the other thing. Other things being equal, that means that I am willing to let it out, that I am willing to keep on that line, to keep in the light, I am willing to walk in the light, I am determined to keep in the light and obey the Spirit. Then those characteristics of the indwelling Christ will manifest themselves.

(d) The Indwelling of the Spirit. This is a much more explaining thing. The man Christ Jesus, His Spirit, His soul, and His body, were kept in perfect oneness with God the Father; when the Spirit of God dwells in me the very same thing happens. My spirit and soul and body are made at one with God, that is the meaning of atonement. Study Jesus Christ's life, always right to God; His outlook on men was always right, His prayer life was always right to God, His outlook down on sin and the devil and Hell was always right; He never ignored any of these facts (like a great many modern people are doing), and that Spirit will produce the same characteristics in me, energizing my spirit by the Holy Spirit, lifting me through the marvelous atonement of Jesus Christ, by the sovereign works of grace, into the same at-one-ness with God that Jesus Christ had. "As He is, so are we in this world.' ' "That they may be one as we are one," not by absorption, but by identification; not the Buddhist teaching, that is so prevalent nowadays, that we have to be absorbed into one great, big, infinite Being, that is not the teaching here, but one in identity. A disposition just like Jesus Christ's, where we are only interested in the things that would have interested the Lord, and we cannot be appealed to by the line on which the world is appealed to.

This is the peace of God, not peace with God; Thank God, there is a peace with God, but this is a different thing. "My peace I leave with you," says Jesus. The peace that characterized Jesus characterizes His saints. The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts, not the capacity to love God, but the very inward character of the love of God. That is what Paul means when he says those words we are so familiar with, "I have been crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God." Not faith in Jesus, but the faith that was in Jesus is in me; the same faith, peace, love and light that characterized Him, characterize me; I am identified with

Him to such a degree that you cannot detect a different spring, because there is not one! "It is no longer my old disposition that rules me," says Paul.

Watch where language fails, and that is where people get confused in the New Testament. If you have not the Spirit of God within you, you find the apostle Paul is trying and straining language beyond its limit, to express exactly what the Spirit of God does; the Spirit of God alters the ruling disposition, and the same man shows himself entirely different. Peace, light and love; that wonderful picture of light, ''No shadow and no variableness caused by turning," — nothing to hide, those are the characteristics of God, and Peter and Paul say, "Walk as children of light." John says, "Walk in the light." 1 John 1: 7 is a wonderful description of the kind of fellowship we will have. Natural affinity does not count here at all, watch in your life how God has altered your affinities since you were filled with the Spirit; you have an affinity of fellowship with people you have no natural affinity for at all; you have fellowship with anybody else who is in the light, no matter who they are, what nation they belong to, or anything else, a most extraordinary alteration.