“And you will know the truth and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
Knowing the truth is more than hearing and believing the truth; truth must be experienced. The disciples on the road to Emmaus knew the truth, but they were not set free until Jesus opened their minds to understand the scriptures (Luke 25:45).
The fact is that we can’t truly believe what we don’t experience; truth that is not experienced may be more dangerous than error. After all, the scribes and pharisees were seated upon the seat of Moses, Jesus said (Matthew 23:2); they were the source of authority as to what the scriptures said; they knew the truth, so they were not victims of ignorance; they were victims of the failure to experience what they taught!
The great deception that has fallen upon Christianity is that we are taught that, having believed, we have arrived at our destination. A person who believes that will not go any further; there will be no hungering and thirsting, no wrestling with God through the long night; no divine illumination in the morning. Instead, they go forth believing that the world is their oyster, that they are now equipped to do what Jesus told the disciples before He departed this world; “You will be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
But unless truth is experienced in the life of a believer he has nothing to take into the world; no-one should venture forth to do the Lord’s work until they are first divinely equipped to do so. The Lord also told the disciples; “And, behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high” (Luke 24:49). There is to be a “tarrying” before a “going forth”. The tarrying is the period of preparation, during which the truth becomes more that scriptural knowledge; it becomes lived experience!
There is a theory that the Word of God, being the divine seed, should produce the same fruit wherever it is scattered and irrespective of the spiritual condition and maturity of those by whom it is scattered; this is not so and Jesus pointed to this in the parable of the sower.
Christianity will always reproduce itself after its kind; a worldly Church, acting out the Word without the Spirit, may venture across oceans to witness to other cultures and peoples, but she is bound to bring forth in those distant places a faith very much like her own.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel about on sea and land to make one convert; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves” (Matthew 23:15).
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