May you be rooted deep in love and founded
securely on love... that you may really come to know [practically,
through experience for yourselves] the love of Christ, which far
surpasses mere knowledge without experience. (Ephesians 3:17,19 AMP)
The Holy Spirit, with all that the gift of the Spirit
means of enduement and endowment and instruction and strengthening, is
not a substitute for experience.
We are very often found asking that
certain things shall be done for us by the Holy Spirit which the Holy
Spirit will never do. He has to lead us into experience. It is the only
way in which He can answer our prayers.
Many prayers are answered
through experience. You ask the Lord to do something, and He takes you
through experience, and you arrive at the answer in that way.
You had
not meant that, of course: you wanted the Lord to do the thing there and
then as a gift, as an act; but that would have been merely objective,
something given, whereas He wants to make it a part of yourself, and so
He answers prayer by some experience.
Steadfastness worketh
experience, and if there is no experience, what is the good of anybody
or anything?
So then, experience is of greater importance than
being delivered from tribulation.
Tribulation worketh experience.
Oh,
how often we have asked the Lord why He allowed this and that, or why He
did not do this or that. Why did He not hinder Adam from sinning? Why
has He not stopped the world in so many things that have had most
terrible results? Experience is very largely the answer.
Experience is
very important because, after all, it is the very quality of service.
When we come to real life, and we are really up against things and the
issues are of the greatest consequence, we do not want just information,
we want experience, and we go where experience can help us. Is that not
so? Thus experience is the very body and quality of service and
usefulness to the Lord.
~T. Austin Sparks~
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