“Behold, I send my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, till they present right offerings to the LORD.”  (Malachi 3:1-3 RSVA)

The whole concept of fiery trials being necessary to make us mature individuals has, for the most part, been lost on a generation whose parents cut their teeth on Timothy Leary’s teaching of “If it feels good, do it” and Dr. Benjamin Spock’s seditious book on  raising children without firm correction when they needed it,” least we hurt their little psyches.” Thinking ourselves wise, we have become a nation of fools. In the book of Hebrews we read:

And have you forgotten the exhortation which addresses you as sons?– “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor lose courage when you are punished by him. For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time at their pleasure, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12:5-11 RSVA)

When was the last time you heard a pulpiteer preach from this text or an educator stress the need for discipline in the classroom?

When I was a teenager my parents made me be home by 9 PM and I hated it. I was complaining about it to one of my buddies who had no curfew imposed on him and said, “I wish I had parents like yours and was free to come home when I wanted.” To this he responded something that blew my mind. He said, “At least you KNOW that your parents love you!”

I remember in the early 70’s after coming to Christ, I started going through trials after a fantastic honeymoon period with Jesus being closer in my daily life than I ever knew possible. I wondered why these trials… what had I done? Was God mad at me? It was then I discovered that God uses the personal cross to correct us and to straighten our paths. Then after many months of trials I noticed one day that I had not gone through any for a couple of weeks. All of a sudden I felt insecure and wondered if God was no longer my Father. I had come to see that His chastisement of me was really a sign of His love and that I was NOT illegitimate, but a son.

The trials have continued through the years and often they were very grievous. I shared some of them with a church lady one time and she responded by saying, “I don’t know why you are STILL a Christian!” I am still a follower of Christ because we share a common Father.

“Although he [Jesus] was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and being made perfect he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him”
(Hebrews 5:8-9 RSVA)

Well, dear saints, I have to apologize for not posting anything new for a couple of months. We had an unfinished home on 20 acres that we started back in mid 2009 that I had to complete and put on the market. It was designed like a hunting lodge, rustic with a vaulted ceiling, three bedrooms and one and a half baths. Anyhow, it has now sold and I can get back to putting my head and heart on things eternal, once again.

I recently had a series of communications with a brother by email in which he ended up criticizing me for not going back into the institutional churches of men and trying to fix them after God told me to leave them once and for all and seek Him alone.

This came yesterday in a very timely way in my email devotional from T. Austin-Sparks. God once again verified to me that I heard His voice and that He has me right where He wants me, seeking that city whose builder and maker is God which has its foundations built on Jesus Christ alone.

Don’t say that the things which God has made clean are impure. (Acts 10:15 GW)

“Who was I that I could withstand God?” Now what we have here is that, over against the sovereignty of the Spirit, was the fixed tradition of Peter in the one case, and the same in the case of those at Jerusalem who “contended with him” for doing what he did. On a later occasion Peter fell into the same old traditional snare and Paul had to contend with him very strongly about it. The point is that the Lord was making for spiritual increase, but an obstacle encountered was this unpreparedness to leave room for the sovereignty of the Spirit. If a child or servant of God in his or her secret walk and history with God is led to move in a way that is not according to the recognized and established system, but new and different, and seemingly in violation of all the accepted and fixed conventions or associations, there is all too often a repetition of what took place in Jerusalem; a suspicion, a contention, and an opposition.

Now, dear friends, look here: we have got to take ourselves honestly in hand over this or we may be found to be “withstanding God” and “limiting the Holy One.” Read the Gospels and the Acts again, and ask the question as you proceed, “How can this, and that, and that be interpreted or construed as doing violence to an accepted and long established Divine order?” You will not get far before you are in the company of those who opposed Christ at every step, and of the Judaizers who pursued Paul across the world with the one object of making his ministry impossible. They were very jealous and zealous for the divinely established order – as they believed it to be. Do you not recognize that every movement of God down the ages has been in conflict with something that men believed to be the Divine order, and those concerned have been regarded as doing the Devil’s work? It was so with Christ, and it was so with the apostles. It has been so again and again when God has moved to enlarge His people by ignoring their fixed framework of custom. It is so easy to use thoughtless and misapplied slogans, or apply fragments of Scripture wrongly (such as, “By their fruits ye shall know them”). Very often such damaging dagger-thrusts are only because of a failure to give the Lord room and right to take some of His children by a way that is new, unusual, or very strange…. So we see that for all enlargement and increase we must leave room for God to do new things, strange things, things that we cannot understand for the moment. We only put ourselves outside of His intention to enlarge spiritually if we bind Him to our own fixed judgments.

By T. Austin-Sparks from: Hindrances to Fullness of Life 

I have been a reactionary most of my life, sad to say. One day about 20 years ago I was praying and I heard Father say, “Michael, is there a Book of Re-Acts?” I said, “No Lord, just a Book of Acts.” Then He said, “Learn from this.”

As I read the Book of Acts again I was amazed at how much of it was the acts of the apostles and saints as they listened to and obeyed the Spirit. I had to do some serious soul searching after this encounter as to how many things I believed that were simply a reaction to what happened in my past. And He STILL is showing me things that are more a reaction rather than walking in All Truth as the Spirit was sent into our lives to make happen.

Did I get this message from the Bible? No, I got it from the mouth of God. Jesus said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that PROCEEDS from the mouth of God.” Did the Word who created all things stop talking with the closing of the canon as most Biblicists believe? I think not! We talk about a “Personal Saviour” and “Personal Salvation” and then set out to depersonalize our walks in Christ by following the traditions of men and what THEY say about the scriptures.

What is most interesting to me is that the early church members had no personal copies of the scriptures or personal Bibles as we have today. That eunuch from Ethiopia had to pay much for a copy of Isaiah to read on his way home and he was stumped by what the prophet said until the Spirit in Philip revealed it to him and he was converted on the spot!

The early church had ears that could “hear what the Spirit was saying to the churches,” but by the end of the first century their hearing had become dull and as a result they had gone off coarse as they had heaped to themselves teachers to tickle their ears teaching Gnosticism and Judaism. This is what 1 John is all about, trying to get them to return to the voice of God instead of the voices of the deceivers that were among them in the form of many anti-christs.

As for the power of tradition, God had to rebuke Peter, who was hung up on his Jewishness, for isolating himself from the Gentiles who would and did come to Christ. Concerning this matter, he even said to the Spirit on one occasion, “Not so, Lord!” Now there is the worst from of religious blindness possible! Calling God “Lord” and refuting his commands because of our perception of what the scriptures say. Like Jesus said to the Jews, “You make of no effect the commandments of God with your own traditions.” “Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for man.” “If you had known what this means, ‘I will have mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless”… His concept of obedience to the Word of God and theirs was miles apart.

It is obvious to me that if we are truly of the NEW Covenant we are not to live by the letter of the law or the letter of the scriptures, but by the Spirit that God has put in us to “lead us into all truth” (Jesus’ words, not mine). The sin against listening to and obeying HIS voice is what must be dealt with, which is mostly a result of our reactions to the past. The doctrine of Sola Scriptura is a REACTION of the reformers to the Papal decrees called “bulls” and such and it is flawed because of the flesh which seeks to enforce it even to this day.

Something deep and lasting happened to Paul between his Damascus road encounter with the living Christ where he said, “Who are you, Lord?” and when he was able to write many years later, “For me to live IS Christ and to die is gain.” That something is called the way of the cross of Christ which puts to death the First Adam and makes way for the pre-eminence of the Last Adam, Jesus Christ in a life.

Whether we search the scriptures because in them we think we will find life like the self-righteous Pharisees of old or whether we become spiritualists and listen to every voice that speaks to us from the ether waves, we are equally deceived. Why? Because the human heart is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things. It will always grasp on to a message that fortifies its position and pre-eminence over its own life and the lives of those around it. Unless we have been converted and given an NEW heart, the heart of Jesus, and Christ’s Spirit within to lead us and then take up our crosses and follow Him, we will be deceived. That which is born of the flesh IS flesh, but that which is born of the Spirit IS spirit.

Knowing this I often pray, “Oh Father, don’t let me miss the high calling IN Jesus Christ you have on my life. Search me out and root out everything in me that is not of your Son. Conform me into the image of Christ, the Last Adam, and put on the cross all that is in me of the First Adam.” I know that only when His deep cleansing is going on will I hear His voice clearly and will be able to read the scriptures with HIS full Light bringing them forth to accomplish what they were intended.

 “In Him was life and the LIFE was the light of men.” It is always Life then Light.

For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think [of himself] more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure [Grk. metron] of faith (Romans 12:3).

I have observed that a great many of the saints of the Lord are finding themselves rejected by the leaders in Christendom and it is out of concern for these precious ones that I have written this piece.

In the institutions of men that are drunk on power there are very few sober thoughts. Sober thinking is thinking with the mind of Christ who took on the form of a servant and lived a life and died a death for the benefit of all. The problem with institutions is that they have the life of Christ organized out to them and take on a life that is against the life which Christ desires to manifest in His saints, giving each member of His body a measure of the Spirit by which to serve one another. The mindset of that system is that the person at the top (pastor, apostle, evangelist, bishop, C.E.O., etc.) has every ability to do everything that needs to be done and that other people exist to augment those abilities. The trouble is that this is exactly what has been going on in the visible church for almost 1900 years and a disease called, “give us a king” (see 1 Samuel ch. 8: 4-7) has settled into the minds of the faithful who populate the church system and they “love to have it so.” Thus the prophesy is fulfilled spoken by Jeremiah almost 3000 years ago…

 An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule at their direction [by their own power]; my people love to have it so, but what will you do when the end comes? (Jer. 5:30-31 RSVA)

I believe that we are seeing “the end” of the visible church that is now laced with false teachers and false prophets and pastors and leaders who rule by their own fleshly charisma drawing away disciples after themselves. Paul saw this coming as well and spoke to the elders of the Ephesian church about it and it brought him to tears to see it coming (see Acts 20: 29-31).

How opposite this is from how the Spirit moves among us with HIS measures of grace given to each member to function not according to the dictates of an office holder, but rather to function according to the will of Jesus where all that is done is done in a mindset of pure servant-hood and laying down our lives for one another.

These delusional leaders which are so common in this system, might have a metron in which they are gifted by God and as a result gain much attention because of this gifting. But the mindset of the systems of the world soon has them trying to minister outside their metron and they fail every time. Not only that, but they take over in an area that God has given to other members of Christ’s body in their metrons and now the body is robbed many times over. Like all diseases, this infection soon becomes exponential and it is not long until the whole body is functionally dead and enveloped in dead works generated by man, simply because each member is not answering to the Head who is Christ but rather the will of an over bearing human with a title.

What happens to the dear saint that is caught in that system who desires to be obedient to the Spirit of God dwelling within them? They end up suffering much confusion because the Spirit is telling them to do one thing while the management is demanding that they do “the program” it has generated. Eventually, the poor saint that seeks to obey the Spirit leaves that system (or is driven out, branded as a “rebel”) and finds himself fulfilling another scripture as they follow their Lord…

 Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and forever. Be not carried about with various and strange doctrines. For it is a good thing that the heart be established with grace; not with foods [strange doctrines], which have not profited them that have been observing them. We have an altar [filled with spiritual food], of which they have no right to eat who serve the tabernacle. For the bodies of those animals, whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest for sin, are burned outside the camp. Therefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered outside the gate. Let us go forth therefore unto him outside the camp,bearing his reproach. For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come. (Heb 13:8-14 KJ2000 – emphasis added)

If they had “strange doctrines” circulating through the church in 55 A.D. when this was written, how much more it is true almost 2000 years later? As we obey the Spirit and our high callings to be conformed to the very image of Christ we will find that we must go “outside the camp” of Christendom because the spiritual atmosphere there is too stifling under all that man-made control which conflicts with what the Spirit is asking us to do. Just as Jesus was rejected and persecuted by the chief priests and elders of Judaism, so it will be with those who follow Him (see Mark 8:31 and John 15:20).

Jesus Christ is the same now as He was when the Book of Hebrews was written under His inspiration. The further one gets from eating the doctrines of men, the more he will find that God has a table set for Him with the wonderful truth of the true gospel of Christ. Yes, there is a reproach associated with following Jesus outside the camp whether it be the Baptist camp, the high church camp, the Pentecostal camp (or any one of 33,000 different denominations and Christian sects we have today), but going outside the gate unto Him and the call of HIS voice is worth it.

Remember that these saints of old mentioned in Hebrews chapter eleven never found an earthly city that they could call theirs, either, but they sought that kingdom that comes not with outward observation, a heavenly city with a heavenly temple made of living stones where Christ has been made the Corner Stone of all that is built upon Him. Just as that Precious Stone laid in Zion was rejected by the builders 2000 years ago, so it is with today’s church builders, so don’t be surprised that as you are laid upon Him by God, you will be rejected as well.

As it is written, “Behold, I lay in Zion a stumbling stone and rock of offense: and whosoever believes on him shall not be ashamed.” (Rom 9:33 KJ2000)

Jesus said unto them, Did you never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same has become the head of the corner: this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes? Therefore I say unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. (Mat 21:42-43 KJ2000)

It is evident that the church has gone full circle in the last 1900 years and its visible form is being rejected by God and once again “given to a nation” that will bring forth the fruits of God’s kingdom in His love. Listen to the voice of the Spirit and seek to operate inside your God given metron, building up the body of Christ in His selfless love as the Bride makes herself ready.

Has God revealed His Son in us as He did with Paul? If not, how will we ever be a witness of who He is to the world? Forgive me while I quote from our brother, T. A. Sparks once again, “The church has no existence in the thought of God apart from the revelation of Jesus Christ, and it is judged according to the measure in which Christ the Son of God’s love is in evidence by its existence. ” I am bone tired of all that is being sold as “the church,” even house churches that do not manifest Christ’s life and love. “In Him was life and the LIFE was the light of men.”

“It pleased God… to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him.” (Gal.1:15,16)

1. Everything Tested by Inwardness

Since Paul’s day so very much of Christian activity has been the furthering of a movement, the propagating of a teaching, and the furthering of the interests of an institution.  It is not a movement, nor to establish a movement in the Earth and to get followers, adherents, members, support.  It is not an institution, even though we might call that institution the church. The church has no existence in the thought of God apart from the revelation of Jesus Christ, and it is judged according to the measure in which Christ the Son of God’s love is in evidence by its existence.  It is not a testimony, if by that you mean a specific form of teaching, a systematized doctrine.  No, it is not a testimony.  Let us be careful what we mean when we speak about “the testimony”.  We may have in our minds some arrangement of truth, and that truth couched in certain phraseology, form of words, and thus speak about “the testimony”; it is not the testimony in that sense.  It is not a denomination, and it is not a “non-denomination”, and it is not an “inter-denomination”.  It is not Christianity.  It is not “the work” – oh, we are always talking about “the work”:  “How is the work getting on?” – we are giving ourselves to the work, we are interested in the work, we are out in the work.  It is not a mission.  It is Christ!  “…That I might preach Him.”  If that had remained central and pre-eminent all these horrible disintegrating jealousies would never have had a chance.  All the wretched mess that exists in the organization of Christianity today would never have come about.  It is because something specific in itself, a movement, a mission, a teaching, a testimony, a fellowship, has taken the place of Christ.  People have gone out to further that, to project that, to establish that.  It would not be confessed; nevertheless it is true, that today it is not so much Christ that is our work.

Now beloved, an inward revelation is the cure of all that.  Am I saying too hard a thing, too sweeping a thing?  The existence of all that represents the absence of an adequate inward revelation of Christ.  If Christ the Son of God’s love is central and supreme in the heart of the believer so much else goes down, it must go down.  Controversies with God will divide, but those artificial things, those things resultant from man’s activity and his projecting of himself, insinuating of himself into the interests of God, those things cannot abide where there is an adequate inward revelation of the Lord Jesus; they cannot be.  These two things are before us:  one, because of the revelation of Jesus Christ in our hearts we have a passion for Him; on the other hand, because of the absence of a sufficient revelation of Christ in our hearts we are out for other things which we would say are in His interests, and for Him, but which can never, never satisfy God’s heart.  It is the satisfaction of the heart of the Father, which is in view.

Beloved I am speaking about the individual.  I am not justified, and you are not justified, in claiming to be Christians except in the measure in which Christ is manifested in me, in you; and all the force and weight and ingenuity of hell is out against that.  Believers have far more to provoke them to un-Christ-likeness than anyone else in the world.  Believers have far more assaults to churn them up and to make them betray Christ than anyone else.  Hell is dead set against the revelation of Jesus Christ. Everything begins with this, the revelation of Jesus Christ within.

http://www.austin-sparks.net/english/000420.html

I have been going through a time of stripping, loneliness and isolation again and have been asking God, “WHY?” I came across this writing by T. Austin-Sparks that seems to explain why. I know that many of  you will be able to relate.

MDC

Christ has Gathered up Everything and Transferred it into Heaven

by T. Austin-Sparks

The next thing (and for the moment the last thing, but not by any means least in importance) is this: that Christ has gathered up everything and has removed it, transferred it, to heaven. God’s thought is centred in Christ in heaven, and God’s resources are centred in Christ in heaven. That means that the Lord’s people in this dispensation are essentially a heavenly people, and that means that it is quite impossible to attain unto God’s thought or to know God’s resources in Christ until we are a heavenly people. If in any way (and we are speaking to the Lord’s people now, and speaking of the life which we would call the Christian life), or in any measure we are earthbound, it will be in that measure impossible to attain unto God’s thought, and to know God’s resources. God only takes responsibility to supply and to carry on that which is essentially heavenly, and in the measure in which a thing is heavenly, and only in that measure (but surely in that measure), God takes responsibility for it. If it is in any way linked with this world, becoming a part of this world system, related to this earth, it has got to take responsibility for itself to carry its own weight, to find its own resources, to see its own way through.

Now we come back to what we stated earlier. In the end everything is going to be sovereignly tested by those heavenly realities. Where are we today? One of the tests that is being applied today is: How far can that which claims to be of the Lord go on in fulness, in life, triumphantly, without any kind of dependence upon this? How far can the thing go on in famine, in drought, in depression, in all conditions into which this world moves, so that its resources are no longer available? Can it go on mightily, strongly, as though it mattered not what the world does; where God’s work, God’s interests pursue their way in a glorious independence? God is going to place that issue. One of the tests at the end will have to be: How much is this of heaven and how much is this of earth and of man? How much in all this has been man’s? Yes, it may have been endeavour for God, but it may not have been a work straight out of heaven by God. There is all the difference between those things. How far has this been a great deal of busy activity for the Lord, and how far has this been the direct activity of the Holy Spirit from the Lord? There is a big difference between those two, and the test is going to be to be applied severely.

Christ now is in heaven, and when Christ returned to heaven, He transferred the basis of operations to heaven; He transferred all the resources to heaven; He transferred all the the knowledge of God to heaven. And the Lord’s people through this dispensation have to get their knowledge from heaven, their resources from heaven, all their government from heaven. Since the Lord returned it has never been centred and seated in this world.

We can only know Christ after the Spirit, so that Christ for us in this dispensation is spiritual in the sense that all that we know of Him or can have to do with Him can only be in the Spirit. “Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him in this way no longer.” (2 Cor. 5:16). He is known after the Spirit.

Our resources are spiritual. The weapons of our warfare are spiritual. Everything has got to come to us from above. The one great effort of the enemy, which is again and again successful through this dispensation, has been to bring the things of God down to the attachment with this world, attachment to this earth, to make them something here.

Now we come back to the New Testament, and you only need to read John to see how unattached everything is, how everything is lifted clean out of this world, and everything is bound up with the fact that Christ is in heaven, and that the Lord’s people are here but not here, here but not known, in the world but not of it; a mystery people in this world so far as the world is concerned… unrecognised, unknown. And yet by that very means and for that very reason, the most potent force that this universe knows: the spiritual, hidden, secret people of God in this earth.

To take hold of Christianity and mould it, and shape it, and systematise it, and crystallise it, and make it some mighty Movement here; with its roots here, with all its associations such as man can see, appreciate and approve; to register itself upon the ordinary consciousness of this world as being something; all of that is contrary to the Word of God and is contrary to spiritual life and spiritual power. Christ is in heaven, and we are lifted out, translated, seated together with Him in the heavenlies. Our present purpose in this world is testimony only, by which others will be taken out of the nations, a people for His name.

Perhaps one of the things which you and I and the Lord’s people everywhere need to recognise more than anything else at an end time is the fact of our heavenliness. There is going to be a testing of everything which bears the Lord’s name by the law of the beginning governing the end. In the beginning they were a heavenly people, with everything for them in heaven, in Christ, and being drawn from Christ in heaven. All their government, direction, resource came from Him and was in Him as in heaven. The Lord comes back again and again to test things by that beginning, and in the end the test is going to be applied very stringently. We are going to see the outward form of things, which is earthly, man-made, man-constituted, an imitation or a representation of spiritual things, breaking down, shaking at its very foundations. All the organisations of our work are going to be shattered. In the nations all that framework will be broken up. That which alone will be left will be the people themselves, and they will probably be scattered. Then the test will be as to how much of this is Christ here. If there has been dependence upon orders, churches, systems, even meetings and conferences, the many things which in themselves are looked to as the means of support of the Christian life, when they are gone, broken, the question will be, How much of Christ is here? What is the measure of Christ, the heavenly Christ?

You see how that was the crisis for the disciples. They had three years with Him, but there was an outward detachment, an outward dependence, a physical, sentient association. In those days they could say some very bold things, they could make great confessions and professions, they could declare themselves as to Him, Who He was, what they thought of Him, what they believed concerning Him, what they would do for Him. Then He was taken from them, and what was left? No Christ, no life, nothing to live for, everything gone! When the life of senses ceased, the outward order came to an end, they had nothing left, they were in despair, their faith was shattered.

There is much of that today. We do not know how much there is until the break comes, until we are no longer able to do anything for the Lord, until we are no longer able even to pray and read the Word of God, and carry on the usual devotional exercises, until we are no longer able to meet with the Lord’s people. Multitudes of the Lord’s people are coming there now. Over wide stretches of the earth the people of God are being driven, scattered, having everything outward taken. The question is: Why does the Lord allow it? Why is it so, if the Lord is wise, and almighty, and gracious? It is to discover how much the Heavenly Christ is to His people, and how much they depend upon the earthly order of things, even the Christian order.

“That which was from the beginning… Little children, it is the last hour… the one who does the will of God lives for ever“. Do you see the link? If at the end, at the last hour, it is as it was from the beginning, then it will abide for ever, but if it has become something else, it will go. This whole question of heavenly relationship with the Lord is a tremendously searching one, the fact that Christ has transferred everything to heaven and that nothing less than a life in heavenly union with Him will stand the test at any time.

We will ask the Lord that He will take this – if it really is the truth – and search us. It may be that some of us will find comfort, because we shall see this is exactly what the Lord is doing with us. Why isolation? Why the testings? Why the loneliness in spiritual life? To save us from things unto Himself, even Christian things, so that God’s end that Christ may be all and in all shall be reached; not things, but Christ; not Christianity, but Christ; not Christian work, but Christ.

http://www.austin-sparks.net/english/books/002953.html