"Experience" vs. Faith

In 1903, Jessie Penn-Lewis wrote these wise words while she was on a missionary trip in India. She points out the vital fact that in looking for the exchanged life we are not to emphasize an experience but that we are to look to Christ in the obedience of faith. Then He will produce the experience as He lives our lives.

Mary N. Garrard, Jessie Penn-Lewis' biographer, includes the extracts "with the earnest prayer that the Spirit of God may make use of them again, for the help of any who, having received the message of the Cross [i.e., the deeper aspect of Gal. 2:20] with joy, have not found it 'work' as they hoped. This is doubtless because they have sought to 'perfect in the flesh' (or natural mind) that which was 'begun in the Spirit,' and can only be wrought out in the spirit and perfected in the life by the indwelling Spirit of Christ."

Here are Jessie Penn-Lewis' words:

. . . I see how the human presentation of the blessed Calvary deliverance has blurred the message and thrown many off the track.

I feel most deeply that the "experimental" side has hidden the power of the Divine side, and prevented the Holy Spirit from showing the work of Christ alone as the basis of faith. In every soul I have dealt with I have seen the disastrous confusion and despair produced by preaching an experience instead of the work of Christ. I can only cry to God to enable you to lift up CHRIST, instead of a dead self.

I have taken every soul I have dealt with to the Lord, and sifted before Him all the fruits of [your teaching] in these confused ones; gone over the Scriptures concerned, and watched and prayed to see where the error is, and clearer and clearer God has shown me it is the danger of preaching an experience instead of Christ. Of preaching a "death" that is not the application of Christ's death by the Holy Ghost, but an experimental "death" beyond that which is written.

"I fear lest . . . as the serpent beguiled Eve by his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ." It is the mind, not the heart, that is the trouble. The mind beguiled from the simplicity of Christ. Your experience may easily be of God and yet the mind not able to interpret it clearly . . . .

But God will bring you through into a large place, where your vision will be of God, and you will carry to all around you the vision of God that brings self to the dust, and does not occupy the souls with their own miserable selves. Then souls will be drawn to the glorious Christ within you, and never see the earthen vessel at all. That is His way--and souls then know that they have met with Him . . . .