The Secret

E. Stanley Jones was a missionary, a theologian, and a prolific writer. He wrote the following in his devotional book Victorious Living about how the early church expressed the living Presence of an indwelling Christ:

"Most of Christendom [today] stands with the disciples [before Pentecost] and confesses that Jesus Christ is the Son of God but is appalled and dismayed that this does not solve their spiritual problems. It leaves practically all their great problems intact. To recognize Christ as the Son of God is a more or less outer thing, a matter of the perceptive intelligence, a matter of our conscious mind. This may not touch the subconscious at all. But the Holy Spirit does.

"For the area of the work of the Spirit is in the subconscious as well as the conscious. This is important, for it brings salvation where we need it. The subconscious can be cleansed, converted, controlled, and united with the purposes of the conscious mind by, and only by, the Holy Spirit. Following Christ as an example will not do it, for this is more or less outer. It has to be deeply inward and permanently inward. Even seeing the Holy Spirit as an influence coming now and again into the life will not do it. The Holy Spirit as a living Person must permanently abide in the depths of our being, assuming full control, and cleansing, directing, and co-ordinating the powers of the instincts to the purposes of the Kingdom of God. The disciples after Pentecost were not mechanically trying to copy Christ in their actions, they were joyously expressing a new life that welled up from within. The Christian life was not a force pump, but an artesian well.

"Therefore their lives were not mechanically and jerkily trying to copy an Example, they are rhythmically and harmoniously giving vent to an inner Life. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was left out of the control of the Divine. Therefore they were no longer double-minded--conscious and subconscious warring with each other--they were single-minded because single-controlled. They were Spirit-filled men."