A HIGHER DEGREE OF CERTAINTY

The wisdom of the fathers

A HIGHER DEGREE OF CERTAINTY

The indwelling of the Spirit secures a higher degree of certainty than we could have with the visible Jesus without the Spirit. The Scriptures want us not only to understand, but to know. Understanding is through the mind, but knowledge is through the consciousness. It is not the intent of the Bible that we should rest on a "perhaps" or a "guess so." Take the concordance, and you will be astonished to see how often the words "know" and "knowledge" are used in the Bible, and what we may know by the Holy Ghost.

"They shall know my voice"; "We know we have passed from death unto life"; "We know all things work together for good";

There is a vast range of truth that is so adapted to your consciousness, that you may know it as certain as an archangel. There are facts in relation to the divine government, etc., that you cannot know; but those facts that lie between you and God, — between you and heaven; all those that come between you and your God, — the moral facts between you and your fellow-creatures, you can know with absolute certainty. When the Holy Ghost comes to abide in your heart, He takes His abode in your spiritual nature. We must remember there are three kinds of knowledge. We have a body of bones, muscles, nerves; there is sensibility. We know all material facts through the sensibilities. Behind that we have a mind, which Paul calls the soul; through that we have knowledge of time, cause and effect, recollection, imagination, and deduction; that is mental knowledge, and is in many cases more certain than the other.

You are conscious of spiritual facts and states without education, whether you have done much thinking or not. The spirit gets its knowledge by intuition, not by the reasoning powers.

You will find that the Bible explains this; the Holy Spirit operates on that part of your nature. The witness of the Spirit is not to your physical — it is not to your reasoning faculties. A religion that has to reasoned out has not yet got into the central heart.

(from "Love Abounding" by G.D. Watson)