Living By Your Reason, Emotions, Or Your Will Makes You Ready Prey For Deception

Children of God who lean to the soul on any or all of its sides-reason (intellect), emotion (feelings) or will (volition) will be a ready prey for deception.

First of all, such people are already a contradiction of their essential nature as now - by new birth - spiritual.

It becomes clear at the outset that they are locked up and a law unto themselves.

Their way is the way, and they see no other.

As to further light, they are largely unteachable; as to further experience, they are content; as to another course, they cannot conceive of it.

Christians who live in their own mind will often be found occupied with a question.

They cannot live without a question or a problem.

If one is shattered, they will soon have another.

Thus they go ever round in a circle, and come back to their starting point, making no real spiritual progress.

Like a horse in the ring, they are whipped and driven, and there is no expanse of life or vision.

Or they lash others with their ideas and seek to subject other minds to their own.

It may eventuate in some very weird, unsound and untrue conclusions.

At length somewhere in this occult position-for it is nothing less-a deception will be found, and Satan's hand will be seen.

The same thing is true with regard to Christians living on the emotional side of the soul.

This side demands experiences, evidences, manifestations.

Indeed the whole realm of sense-life governs here.

If we intensify and project our emotional side sufficiently, we can have any experience that is possible.

The whole body and mind can be involved. Vocal cords or solar plexus may be affected. There may be facial distortions, rigidity, 'second sight', visions, extra capabilities, prodigious strength, mirth, ecstasy, etc.

All these, from simple beginnings, may come through the psychical or soul-life as extended and strained along the line of intense desire.

If this is true in these two directions, how true it is on the side of the will.

A forceful, dominating, assertive soul, not under the government of the Holy Spirit, is a terrible menace to the interests of God.

Decisions will be made, courses adopted, objectives secured, positions occupied, in the name of devotion to God, which will be Towers of Babel, Pyramids of Egypt, Ishmaels of Abram (not Abraham).

There will be a good deal of remorse bound up with these achievements eventually, and a wish that they had never been.

The result will be something false, and many may be involved in the tragedy.

~T. Austin Sparks~