Absolute Surrender: "Having Begun in the Spirit"

Absolute Surrender

By Andrew Murray 

"Having Begun in the Spirit"

The words from which I wish to address you, you will find in the epistle to the Galatians, the third chapter, the third verse; let us read the second verse also:
“This only would I learn of you,
Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
Are ye so foolish?”

And then comes my text—
“Having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?”

When we speak of the quickening or the deepening or the strengthening of the spiritual life, we are thinking of something that is feeble and wrong and sinful; and it is a great thing to take our place before God with the confession:
“Oh, God, our spiritual life is not what it should be!”

May God work that in your heart, reader.

As we look round about on the church we see so many indications of feebleness and of failure, and of sin, and of shortcoming, that we are compelled to ask:
Why is it?
Is there any necessity for the church of Christ to be living in such a low state?
Or is it actually possible that God’s people should be living always in the joy and strength of their God?

Every believing heart must answer:
It is possible.

Then comes the great question:
Why is it, how is it to be accounted for, that God’s church as a whole is so feeble, and that the great majority of Christians are not living up to their privileges?
There must be a reason for it.

Has God not given Christ His Almighty Son to be the Keeper of every believer, to make Christ an ever-present reality, and to impart and communicate to us all that we have in Christ?
God has given His Son, and God has given His Spirit. How is it that believers do not live up to their privileges?

We find in more than one of the epistles a very solemn answer to that question.

There are epistles, such as the first to the Thessalonians, where Paul writes to the Christians, in effect:
“I want you to grow, to abound, to increase more and more.”

They were young, and there were things lacking in their faith, but their state was so far satisfactory, and gave him great joy, and he writes time after time:
“I pray God that you may abound more and more; I write to you to increase more and more” (1 Thes. 4:1,10).

But there are other epistles where he takes a very different tone, especially the epistles to the Corinthians and to the Galatians, and he tells them in many different ways what the one reason was, that they were not living as Christians ought to live; many were under the power of the flesh.

My text is one example.
He reminds them that by the preaching of faith they had received the Holy Spirit.
He had preached Christ to them; they had accepted that Christ and had received the Holy Spirit in power.

But what happened?
Having begun in the Spirit, they tried to perfect the work that the Spirit had begun in the flesh by their own effort.

We find the same teaching in the epistle to the Corinthians.

Now, we have here a solemn discovery of what the great want is in the church of Christ.

God has called the church of Christ to live in the power of the Holy Spirit, and the church is living for the most part in the power of human flesh, and of will and energy and effort apart from the Spirit of God.

I doubt not that that is the case with many individual believers; and oh, if God will use me to give you a message from Him, my one message will be this:
“If the church will return to acknowledge that the Holy Spirit is her strength and her help, and if the church will return to give up everything, and wait upon God to be filled with the Spirit, her days of beauty and gladness will return, and we shall see the glory of God revealed among us.”

This is my message to every individual believer:
“Nothing will help you unless you come to understand that you must live every day under the power of the Holy Spirit.”

God wants you to be a living vessel in whom the power of the Spirit is to be manifested every hour and every moment of your life, and God will enable you to be that.