Reality is redemption, not my personal experience of redemption. But redemption has no meaning for me personally until it begins to speak the language of my conscious life.
When I am born again and “have received . . . the Spirit who is from God,” the Spirit takes me right out of myself and identifies me with Jesus Christ so fully that I forget all about my personal spiritual experiences. If I’m still clinging to my experiences, it’s proof that they weren’t produced by his redemption. Redemption leads me out of my own experiences, my own self, all the time. It shows me that my experiences didn’t give rise to reality but rather that reality gave rise to my experiences. My experiences aren’t worth anything unless they keep me at the source, Jesus Christ.
If you hunger for personal spiritual experiences and try to dam up the Holy Spirit in yourself in order to produce them, you’ll find that the Spirit will always burst through and take you back again to Jesus Christ. Never nourish an experience that doesn’t have God as its source and faith in God as its result. Any such experience is anti–Christian, no matter what visions you may have had. Is Jesus Christ Lord of your experiences? Or do you try to lord it over him? Is any experience dearer to you than your Lord? He must be Lord over you, and you must not pay attention to any experience over which he isn’t Lord. There comes a time when God will make you impatient with your own experience, when you’ll say, “I don’t care what I experience; I’m sure of him.”
Be ruthless with yourself if you have a tendency to talk about your experiences. Faith that is sure of itself isn’t faith. Faith that is sure of God is the only faith there is.
