Nearly half the difficulties of anxious souls are the result of confusing the work of the Spirit, which will not be finished while we are alive on earth, and the work of Christ finished on the cross.
They read that “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering,” etc., and if they could only discover these fruits in themselves, they imagine there would be some just ground for considering themselves to be Christians.
They think, moreover, that the presence of the Holy Ghost would make them feel very good, and when they feel the very opposite they are ready to take it for granted that they have “neither part nor lot in the matter.”
This is a complete mistake.
Listen —
“He does not make the soul to say,
Thank God I feel so good;
But turns the eye another way,
To Jesus and His blood.”
Moses was not occupied with his own shining face, neither was Stephen with his, though others saw the reflected glory on both. And the time when the fruits of the Spirit of God are most powerfully produced in us will be when we are most engaged with what Christ is to us, and what He has done and is doing for us. It will be when our hearts are so taken up with Christ that we are neither thinking of good self nor bad self, but only of Him. It is in “beholding” His glory that we are “changed into His image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:1818But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. (2 Corinthians 3:18)).
We have heard of a Christian lady who got so occupied with her own love to Christ that she finally came to the conclusion that she had none. A fellow believer, failing to comfort her, at last left the bedside, and walking to the window sill, wrote upon a slip of paper these words:
I do not love the Lord Jesus Christ,
and handing the slip, together with a pencil, to the troubled believer, quietly said, Will you put your name to that? With no small energy, she immediately replied, I’d be cut to pieces first!
How was this? What made her so suddenly change her tone? The truth was, she both believed in Him and loved Him, but she had been dwelling rather on what she was towards Him than what He was in His own personal worth.