Experience - Chambers, Oswald
Experiences are apt to be exalted out of all due mea- sure whereas they are but the outward manifestation of the oneness with god made possible for us in Christ Jesus.
Get into the habit of chasing yourself out of the sickly morbid experiences that are not based on having been with Jesus (see acts 4:13); they are not only valueless, but excessively dangerous.
The great bedrock of christian experience is the outside fact of the resurrection made inwardly real by the incoming of the holy spirit. That i may know him, and the power of his resurrection . . . (Philippians 3:10).
If your experience is not worthy of the risen, ascended Christ, then fling it overboard. Whenever ecstasies or visions of god unfit us for practical life they are danger signals that the life is on the wrong track.
Our identity with Jesus Christ is immediately practical or not at all, that is, the new identity must manifest itself in our mortal flesh otherwise we can easily hoax ourselves into delusions.
Being made the righteousness of god in him is the most powerfully practical experience in a human life. Insubordination characterises much of what is called the higher christian life; 4 it is spiritual
Anarchy based on my intuitions, my private interpretations, my experiences, while refusing to submit to the words of the lord Jesus. My experience of salvation never constitutes me an expounder of the atonement. I am always apt to take my experience for an inclusive interpretation instead of its being merely a gateway for one into salvation. We continually want to present our understand- ing of how god has worked in our own experience, consequently we confuse people.
Present Jesus Christ, lift him up, and the holy spirit will do in them what he has done in you. A great deal of what we have to proclaim can never be experienced, but whenever gods standard is presented we are either exonerated or condemned by the way we ourselves carry out the dictates of the holy spirit. Experience as an end in itself is a disease; experience as a result of the life being based on god is health. Spiritual famine and dearth, if it does not start from sin, starts from dwelling entirely on the experience god gave me instead of on god who gave me the experience. When i plant my faith on the lord Jesus my experiences don’t make me conscious of them, they produce in me the life of a child. If my experience makes anyone wish to emulate me, i am decoying that one away from god. Because i have had more experience of life than you have, therefore i can discern gods will better than you can. Not at all.
Whenever i put my experience of life, or my intelligence, or anything other than dependence on god, as the ground of under- standing the will of god i rob him of glory. It is on the line of impulse that Satan leads the saints astray, in spite of Jesus Christs warning so as to [lead astray, if possible, rv ], even the elect. It is spiritual impulse that leads off at a tangent. Satan does not come as an angel of light to anybody but a saint. Whenever we get light from god on a particular phase we incline to limit gods working to that phase forgetting that we cannot tie up almighty god to anything built up out of our own experience.
One mans experience is as valuable as anothers, but experience has nothing to do with facts. Facts pay no attention to us, facts have to be accepted, they are the real autocrats in life. You cannot deal with facts as you like, you may object to them, but a fact is a fact, whether a commonsense fact or a revelation fact.
In spiritual experience it is not your intellect that guides you; intellect illuminates what is yours, and you get a thrill of delight because you recognise what you have been going through but could not state. Whenever the bible refers to facts of human experience, look to your experience for the answer; when the bible refers to standards of revelation, look to god not to your experience.
Beware of making your religious experiences a cloak for a lack of reality.
If you have been going on with god you find he has knocked the bottom-board out of your fanaticism; where you used to be narrow and bigoted, you now exhibit his spirit. Would to god we got finished once for all with the experience of being adjusted to god, and let him send us forth into vicarious service for him!