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Spirit-Led Identity Change
The leading of the Holy Spirit is an essential part of living as God created us to live. Without properly learning this process, we cannot overcome sin.
For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. …that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
…For if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. (emphasis added)
(Romans 8:2, 4, 13-14)
August of 1974 was the first time I was forced to seriously consider what it meant to be led by the Spirit. I had become a Christian almost three years earlier, when I was fourteen years old. I believed the gospel, dedicated my life to Jesus, and did my best to live as He wanted. I wasn’t perfect, but I was making progress.
Leading up to that day in August of 1974, a set of significant events occurred. I joined a Charismatic church and began to move in the gifts of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12-14). The next six months of my life were a whirlwind of spiritual excitement. I was on fire for the Lord, spoke in tongues, began writing Christian music, and shared in meetings. Life never looked better. I was thrilled to be serving a God who was moving in the world with power!
Then came that day in August – the one that forced me to rethink my assumptions about being led by the Spirit. I didn’t have a clue that everything was about to change in an instant.
I was sitting in the pavilion of a recreation club my family belonged to, and I suddenly felt as if a cloud of demons descended on me, bringing confusion and accusation. (I call them demons, although I realize they were at least, in part, psychological “demons.” Whatever they were, they felt like real demons – and the whole experience was scary!)
I resisted them in the name of Jesus, and they didn’t totally overwhelm me, but they also didn’t leave. I kept resisting for years, and the cloud still refused to leave. I wondered if the life I had known up until that point was gone forever.
I remember one time sitting in a chair in my parents’ house, crying as I considered what was happening in my life. I wasn’t suicidal, but I was tempted to ask God to take my life and end my misery. Instinctively, an optimistic thought rose up and said, “It’s not that bad. You’ll be all right soon.” My heart sank as I realized that for the first time in my life this instinctive response was wrong. It was that bad, and I wouldn’t be all right soon.
Fortunately, shortly after the “cloud of demons” experience, some friends in church pointed me to some written material that helped greatly. It gave me the best description I have ever read of what had gone wrong and how I should fix it. The material was the first two sections of the third volume of Watchman Nee’s series, The Spiritual Man.[1] It described two problems, passive mind and passive will, that gave a pretty good explanation of the mistakes I had made and what I should do to fix them. To this day I am grateful for God’s mercy in arranging for this book to so quickly end up in my hands. What were the chances that this would happen?
To be honest, however, I have mixed feelings about the full message of the three volumes of The Spiritual Man. I have read them perhaps five or six times over the past forty-eight years, hoping that I would find some way to agree with them, but I still find much of what Watchman Nee wrote in them confusing at best and misleading at worst. (So for Watchman Nee fans – I really did try to like the books – but I finally concluded that I disagreed with a good deal of what they had to say.)
In short, I believe that Watchman Nee’s attacks on what he calls “the soul life” in the first two volumes of The Spiritual Man are confusing. In my opinion, they can easily lead to the sorts of passive mind and passive will problems he helps correct in the third book.
Putting that aside for now, however, I still believe that the sections of the third book on passive mind and passive will saved me from a great deal of confusion. They told me that my problem was that I was trying to have God think for me (passive mind) and make decisions for me (passive will). What I needed to do, instead, was to actively think and decide as I discovered the will of God. Though I should rely on His strength by faith, I needed to do this it in a way that involved me using my mind and will to discover and apply truth.
Watchman Nee portrays the human heart as being like a battlefield, and when we become passive, dark spiritual forces can come in and take ground from us. The answer to that is to recognize the problem and actively take back the ground. God does not want to directly control us as if we were robots. He instead wants to guide us as we engage with Him. If we expect Him to take over, He will refuse to do so – and demons may imitate Him and take any ground we naively surrender.
My problem had been that when I first experienced the power of the Holy Spirit, I had been so eager to avoid doing anything in my own strength that I became passive. I was so committed to following the Holy Spirit rather than following my own mind, will, or emotions that I sought to remove myself from the equation. Unfortunately, this sincere attempt to follow Jesus had led me into a harsh condemning world of spiritual voices that told me I needed to follow their every demand. They were so tenacious and intimidating that I wondered if my life would ever return to full sanity.
For example, one time when I tried to be funny (not an uncommon activity for me as a teenage guy – or as an adult), the voices told me I was engaging in silly talk and needed to confess this sin to everyone who had seen me.
and there must be no … silly talk …
(Ephesians 5:4, NAS)
I cautiously stood my ground. I believed that there were times when it was OK to goof around, but I had to admit that I wasn’t really sure what silly talk meant. (I now know from the context that it has to do with sexually inappropriate foolish speech, but I didn’t know that back then.) The spirits used my uncertainty against me: “You’re relying on tradition. Just because Christians don’t usually confess sins like this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. You have to be led by the Spirit – not the standards of your culture or your church. Are you really concerned about what is right in this situation, or are you just afraid to look bad? Face it; you’re proud. You’re unwilling to humble yourself before others.”
If I took their side and said, “OK, I’ll confess,” other voices (or maybe my conscience) would say, “You’re going to ruin your witness by acting like a religious nutcase. You don’t really think that this condemning compulsion is the Holy Spirit, do you? You are just grasping for an easy way to end the struggle.”
I did want an easy way to end the struggle! I was becoming like a man who was being tortured for information he didn’t know. Eventually he begins to speak random answers, hoping that he will say something – anything – that will make his tormentors stop. I was tired of the ongoing interrogation. If I had to look like a religious nutcase to end it, that felt like a small price to pay.
Yet giving in to the demonic voices didn’t bring peace. Every time I caved into their demands, new demands came. Any ground given to the spiritual terrorists only gave them a greater place from which to press their attacks.
So I fought back as best I knew how. The next chapter will describe how I slowly discovered God’s path to overcome these attacks.
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