The Struggles of the Justified

The spirit of sin, or inbred sin, technically called original sin, because it is inherited from Adam, is the state of heart out of which acts of sin either actually flow or tend to flow. Until this state is changed, the conquest of love over the soul is incomplete.

Regeneration introduces a power which checks the out breaking of original into actual sin, except occasional and almost involuntary sallies in moments of weakness or unwatchfulness. These are a source of grief and condemnation to the justified soul. They are a humiliating, yet only temporary defeat. For there is with all well instructed believers a resort to the blood of sprinkling, and a pleading of the promise, "If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous."

Sanctification & the Lodge

QUESTION: Can a sanctified person retain the experience and carry insurance in a fraternal order, although he never attends the lodge or takes any part in the proceedings?

ANSWER: I infer that the new experience is subsequent to joining the order, which he has found not promotive of his spiritual life, and for this reason abstains from its meetings, but continues to pay the dues, because of the loss of money already paid for insurance should he now cease. Knowing, not from experience, but from observation, that membership in such orders is not helpful to the spiritual life, I would suggest to this brother that no financial loss, however great, can outweigh any spiritual loss, however small. Always give the spiritual and not the material side the benefit of your doubt.

— Steele's Answers p. 188.

Spiritual Power is an Endowment

When we inquire into the source of that might by which self is sanctified and Christ's kingdom is advanced, we encounter those who teach that it is developed within us by culture, as strength of body is increased by muscular exercise, and as intellectual strength is attained by severe study wrestling with difficulties. We are told that there is a germ of spiritual might in the most morally irresolute, and feeblest souls, which needs only natural stimulants to develop it into titanic strength. But neither experience, observation, nor history confirms this theory which theologians, from its first eminent advocate, called Pelagianism.

The Natural and the Spiritual

"But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." (1 Cor 2:14 KJV).

In 1 Cor. 2:14 St. Paul describes the natural man as utterly devoid of spiritual perception. Spiritual realities "are foolishness unto him"; and "he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged or examined" (R. V.). Christ foretold this state of things when he declared that "the world," the aggregate of natural men, "cannot receive the Spirit of truth, because they see him not." They have in exercise only sense-perception and reason, neither of which apprehends God and spiritual things. Spiritual intuition is an attribute of spiritual life; and spiritual life is absent, because unbelief bars out the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life. Hence, St. Jude describes "natural or sensual [animal, R. V. margin] men as having not the Spirit."

Just the opposite is the characteristic of spiritual men, "Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God." While the natural man is, by the perverse attitude of his will, an agnostic, the spiritual man is an epignostic, having a clear perception of divine realities, which he is enabled to speak of, not in the terms of groveling human philosophy, but in the words which the Spirit teacheth (1 Cor. 2:13, R. V., margin), "interpreting spiritual things to spiritual men."

— Half-Hours With St. Paul and Other Bible Readings Chapter 14.