- Overcomer Literature Trust
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
The Truth sets free.
How men - even religious men - can be ignorant of the truth, we see from one of the interviews of the Lord with the Pharisees. “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free”, He Who is the Truth said. How the film of untruth enveloped them in spite of their knowledge of the Scriptures; was evidenced in their quick reply, “we . . . have never been in bondage!” “He that committeth sin is the bondservant of sin”, replied the Lord, Who knew the truth about sin and their real condition. These religious men lived and acted day by day believing a lie. They thought they were righteous, and had never yet been in bondage; yet they were all the time “bondservants of sin”. They needed to know the truth, and nothing else than the truth would make them free. The vital thing, then, for us all is, that we should know the truth, as revealed by the Holy Spirit of Truth. He alone can lead us into all the truth and this He can only do as we recognise our need of the truth hour by hour and day by day, as we admit that the fallen life of Adam is so POISONED BY THE SPIRIT OF A LIE THAT IT HAS NO TRUTH IN IT, and that truth, as God means truth, can only come to us continually by and through the Spirit of Truth. We need every moment to be guided into all truth, lest we stray into by-paths which look right and yet lead away from the truth of God.
The supreme evidence of the Spirit of God possessing and filling a believer is the presence in him of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth, making him 1. love the truth, 2. desire the truth, 3. seek the truth, 4. obey the truth, 5. witness to the truth, and 6. suffer for truth, because he “cannot” act contrary to the truth which has illuminated and taken possession of his inmost being.
“When He, the Spirit of Truth is come...” said the Lord, “He shall guide you into all truth.” That He abides in the midst of the Spirit-filled believers as the Spirit of Truth is seen in the fact that the first recorded grieving of the Spirit was not a sin against Him as Love, but as the Spirit of Truth. And that walking in truth was the supreme condition for the ungrieved presence of the Spirit of God among the believers, is shown by the sharp judgment of the Spirit of Truth through Peter, upon Ananias and Sapphira. Peter did not sacrifice truth for love, in a vain expectation of obtaining the ‘one accord’ of the community, but love was retained by the sharp dealing of the truth. The sin could not be covered or minimised; although it was only in the first instance a deviation of truth by giving a false impression. Ananias had ‘kept back part’ of the price of his land, and laid it down as if it were the whole. It does not appear that he spoke a ‘lie’. He just sought to appear to be what he was not. It was his wife who told the bald untruth. But the Spirit of Truth possessing Peter laid bare the truth with knife-power incisiveness, and terse, clear, words describing the action as it was in the sight of the God of Truth. Just as Christ once plainly said to Peter, “Get thee hence, Satan”, because He saw the source of Peter's words, so Peter now exposes Satan as the father of lies by saying to Ananias, “Why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?”
This record about Ananias shows that the Spirit of Truth is the first proof of the purity and power of the Spirit possessing a man. This is the “power of Pentecost” which the Church of God needs: this clear vision of the truth about itself, the condition of men, the work of Satan and the holiness of God. The keen knife-like power in dealing with all that is contrary to truth is the supreme mark that the Spirit of Truth possesses and controls believers in His fullest power.
It was the Spirit of Truth co-witnessing with the truth about the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, which enabled the apostles boldly to proclaim the truth to the people of Jerusalem, knowing that God would bear witness to His Son. It was the Spirit of Truth who used them to press home the truth that they had slain the Christ of God.
“The Kingdom of God is not in word, but in power”, wrote the apostle Paul to the Corinthians. Not in talk but effect! “And He”, the Spirit of Truth, “when He is come, will convict....” This is the need of the Church at this time - conviction of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment - to see the truth about sin, as sin is to God; and to have the Spirit of Truth so indwelling each believer that day by day and hour by hour he is being led into “all the truth” concerning things around him and within him, as they appear in the sight of God, so that he is a faithful witness to truth at all times and in all places.
It was so in the life of the apostle Paul. Was it ‘false brethren’ he had to meet? “To whom we give place in the way of subjection, no, not for an hour, that the truth of the Gospel might continue with you” (Galatians2:5), he wrote to the Galatians. Was it an erring Apostle, who was a pillar of the Church? “I resisted him to the face”, he wrote, for he and others led by him, “walked NOT UPRIGHTLY according to the truth of the Gospel” (Galatians 2:11-14). Paul knew that it is purest love to tell the truth for the salvation of the soul even as he did to the Galatians, though he ran the risk that they who had once been ready “to pluck out their eyes” to give him, had it been possible, would now think him an ‘enemy’ because he told them the ‘truth’.
It is very clear that the Divine nature is first ‘Truth’ and then ‘Love’, and that the characteristic of the Divine nature imparted to a believer by the incoming, indwelling, and infilling of the Holy Ghost bears the very same marks. The soul filled as Peter was at Pentecost will be filled with the Spirit of Truth: the believer possessed as Paul was by the Holy Spirit will have the same keen insight into what is truth, and the same selfless faithfulness of obedience to the Spirit of Truth, “speaking truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15), and also compelled by the Spirit of Truth in him to recognise the same Spirit of Truth in others. “We can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth”, wrote the apostle. Truth recognises Truth in another, as ‘like’ recognises and is joined with ‘like’. ‘Views of truth’ - in the sense of aspects of the revealed things of God - may vary according to the age and growth of believers; but the Spirit of Truth in a believer cannot but recognise and unite with the same Spirit of Truth in another.