Sword of the Spirit

The Full Blessing of Pentecost  - The One Thing Needful By Andrew Murray How it was bestowed from Heaven (Excerpts - continued 3) "If ye love me, keep my commandments.  And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter,  that He may abide with you for ever;  Even the Spirit of truth;" JOHN xiv. 15, 16. They waited upon the Father until the performance of the promise came and they were filled with the Spirit.  The ten days of waiting were for them days in which they were continually in the Temple "praising and blessing God" and "continuing instant in prayer and supplication."  It is not enough for us to endeavour to strengthen desire and to hold fast our confidence.  The principal thing is to set ourselves in close and abiding contact with God.  The blessing must come from God;  God Himself must give it to us; we are to receive the gift directly from Him.  What is promised us is a wonderful work of divine Omnipotence and Love.  What we des

The Full Blessing of Pentecost - The One Thing Needful By Andrew Murray How it was bestowed from Heaven (Excerpts - continued 2) "If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth;" JOHN xiv. 15, 16. Man has two great enemies by whom the devil tempts him and with whom he has to contend. The one is the world without, the other is the self-life within. This last, the selfish Ego, is much more dangerous and stronger than the first. It is quite possible for a man to have made much progress in forsaking the world while the self-life retains full dominion within him. The self-life is the natural life of sinful man. He can be liberated from it by nothing save by death that is, by first dying to it and then living in the strength of the new life that comes from God. The forsaking of the world began at the outset of the three years discipleship. It was at the end of t

The Full Blessing of Pentecost - The One Thing Needful By Andrew Murray How it was bestowed from Heaven (Excerpts - continued 1) "If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth;" JOHN xiv. 15, 16. "Nothing for nothing": the maxim holds good also in the life of the kingdom of heaven. The parables of the Pearl of great price and the Treasure hid in a field teach us that, in order to obtain possession of the kingdom within us, we must sell all that we have. This is the very renunciation that Jesus literally demanded of the disciples who had to follow Him. This is the requirement He so often repeated in His preaching: "He that forsaketh not all that he hath cannot be My disciple." ~ The two worlds betwixt which we stand are in such direct conflict with one another, and the world in which we by nature live exercises such a mighty influence o

God and the Institutional Church By Kathryn Kuhlman, Glimpse Into Glory If our institutional churches are to be the kind of churches God wants them to be, if they are to carry out the work, the purpose of the Church, they must open their eyes and realize the day and the hour in which we are living.   We’ve come to the place where the world is literally challenging the Church. The youth of this generation have every right to challenge the institutional church.  Yet this could well be the finest hour of the institutional church. If only they could realize it.  But the Church must do something about the Holy Spirit.  The institutional church must realize we are still living in the day of Pentecost.  The institutional church must not close its eyes and say, “We will accept only a portion of God’s Word, and forget the rest.”  This comes from the highest authority in Heaven and Earth.  For to this glorious body of believers that we call the Church, Jesus gave the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Je

The Full Blessing of Pentecost - The One Thing Needful By Andrew Murray How it was bestowed from Heaven (Excerpts) "If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth;" JOHN xiv. 15, 16. It is evident without proof that, if the fulness of the Spirit thus dwells in Jesus, a personal relationship to Him is the first condition for the reception of the full gift of the Comforter. It was to attain this end that the Lord Jesus throughout all His three years work on earth kept the disciples in such close converse with Himself. He desired to attach them to Himself. He wanted them to feel themselves truly one with Him. He wanted them to identify themselves with Him, as far as this was possible. By knowledge and intercourse, by love and obedience, they became inwardly knit to Him. This was the preparation for participating in the Spirit of His glorification. The lesson

The Full Blessing of Pentecost - The One Thing Needful By Andrew Murray How glorious it is (Excerpts - continued 6) "They were all filled with the Holy Ghost." ACTS ii. 4. Beloved fellow-Christians, this summons comes to you. "One thing is needful." Alike for yourselves and the whole Church of the Lord, this is the one thing that is needful: we have to be filled with the Spirit. Pray do not imagine that you must comprehend or understand it all before you seek and find it. For those that wait upon Him God will do even that which has not yet entered into their heart to conceive. If you would taste the happiness, if you would know by personal experience the unutterable blessedness, of having Jesus in the heart, of having in you His Spirit of holiness and humility, of love and self-sacrifice, of courage and power, as naturally and continuously as you have your own spirit; if you would have the Word of God in you as light and power, and be enabled to carry it about as a

The Full Blessing of Pentecost - The One Thing Needful By Andrew Murray How glorious it is (Excerpts - continued 5) "They were all filled with the Holy Ghost." ACTS ii. 4. It is the blessing of Pentecost that will make the Church of Christ what God would have her be. We have spoken of what the Spirit will do in individual believers. We have also to think of what the blessing will be when the Church as a whole shall apprehend her calling to be filled with the Spirit, and then to exhibit the life and the power yea, and the very presence of her Lord to the world. We must not only seek and receive this blessing, every one for himself, but we must also remember that the full manifestation of what the blessing itself is, cannot be given until the whole body of Christ be filled with it. "If one member suffer, all the members suffer with it." If many members of the Church of Christ are content to remain without this blessing, the whole Church will suffer. Even in individua