Experience is not what a man thinks through, but what he lives through. The Bible is like life and deals with facts, not with principles, and life is not logical. Logic is simply a method of working the facts we know; but if we push the logical method to the facts we do not know and try to make God logical and other people logical, we shall find that the experience of life brings us to other conclusions. God sees that we are put to the test in the whole of life. We have to beware of selecting the portions of life only where we imagine we can live as saints and of cutting off any part of life because of the difficulty of being a Christian there. Christian experience means that we go to the whole of life open-eyed, wearing no doctrinal or denominational “blinkers” which shut off whole areas of unwelcome fact. Our faith has to be applied in every domain of our lives.
Our Lord’s teaching is so simple that the natural mind pays no attention to it, it is only moral perplexity that heeds. For instance, Our Lord said: “Ask, and it shall be given you.” These words have no meaning for us if we are wearing any kind of ecclesiastical “blinkers,” and are refusing to see what we do not wish to see. “I can live beautifully in my own little religious bandbox.” That is not Christian experience. We have to face the whole of life as it is, and to face it fearlessly.
The difficulty of Christian experience is never in the initial stages. Experience is a gateway, not an end.
There are definite stages of conscious experience, but never pin your faith to any experience; look to the Lord Who gave you the experience. Be ruthless with yourself if you are given to talking about the experiences you have had. Your experiences are not worth anything unless they keep you at the Source, viz., Jesus Christ. It is tremendously strengthening to meet a mature saint, a man or woman with a full-orbed experience, whose faith is built in strong emphatic confidence in the One from Whom their experience springs.
The next best thing to do is to ask, if you have not received; to seek, if you have not found; to knock, if the door is not opened to you.
