The Foundation of Spiritual Education

Mat 11:29 Take my yoke upon you and learn of me.

Before we can ever be apostles, that is sent ones, we have to come under discipline to be desciples, to be taught ones, and that in an inward way.

Every true child of God is brought into the School of Christ under the hand of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the annointing, and there the first great work of the Holy Spirit is to present Christ to the heart as God's object for all the Holy Spirit's dealings with us. Thus Christ is first of all presented and attested by God as the object of His pleasure. "My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."

He makes us to know that we are one thing and Christ another. The Holy Spirit takes pains to make all who are under this discipline to know in experience, in an inward way in their own hearts, the altogether "other-ness" of Christ from themselves.

Then the Holy Spirit makes known the Divine purpose in connection with that inward revelation of the Lord Jesus, namely, that we should be conformed to the image of God's Son. He works to bring us to the place where we realize how impossible the situation is apart from miracles of God, that of ourselves we can never be like Christ. It is God's own doing.

We shall never find rest unto our souls until we have first of all learned the utter difference between Christ and ourselves, and the utter impossibility of our ever being like Him by anything that we can find in ourselves, produce, or do. We cannot produce from this nature anything acceptable to God.

The person who really does begin to move [grow] is the person who has had his final despair over himself, and has come to see quite clearly by the Holy Spirit's illumination that it is "no longer I, but Christ."

That is the essential foundation of spiritual growth, spritual knowledge, spiritual education.

[T. Austin Sparks, The School of Christ]