What is a Sanctified Spirit?
It is a spirit separated. Have you ever looked at the dark, cold ground in early spring, that which would chill and defile your fingers if you drew your hand through? Perhaps it was mixed with the manure of the barnyard and the crawling earthworms that burrowed in it. Yet, have you never seen growing out of that dark soil, a little plant or flower, with roots white as the driven snow, and leaf as delicate and petals as pure as a baby's check? It stood unstained, separated by its own nature and purity from the dirty soil that was all around it.
So the spirit of God is separated in its own divine nature from its own self and the sinful heart. The very first step of sanctification is to recognize this separation and count ourselves no longer the same persons, but partakers of the divine nature, alive unto God as those who have been raised from the dead. As such we are to separate our spirits from all that is not of God - not only from sin but also from the world and from self and our whole old natural life. All our spiritual instincts, senses and organs are to be separated from evil and intuitively to turn away from even the touch and approach of temptation. We are to refuse to hear with our inward ear the stranger's voice, see with the spirit's eye the fascinating vision of temptation, touch in spiritual contact any unclean thing, taste even the forbidden joy. By the quick sense of smell we are also to recognize and turn from the unwholesome atmosphere, and, as evil of any kind is revealed to the spirit, to renounce evil and to ask God to separate it from our spirit and to put the gulf of His presence between the soul and the sin.
It also must be separated ever from the spirits of other, and indeed, from any human spirit that could control it apart from the will of God. All of the aspects of the spirit to which we have already referred must be separated. The higher consciousness that knows God must be separated from all other gods but Him. The moral sense that know right must separate from all wrong. The will must be separated from the choice or inclination of all but His will. The power of trust must be voluntarily separated from every thought of unbelief or distrust. The power of love must be wholly separated from forbidden love. The aim and motive must be separated from all that is not for His glory; the source of its pleasure must be purified and the spirit separated from all joy that is not in harmony with the joy of the Lord.
Is you spirit separated, cleansed and detached from everything that could defile or distract you from the will of God and life of holiness?
Sanctified spirit is dedicated
Its powers of apprehension are dedicated to know God and to count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus (Philippians 3:8). His Word is the object of its deepest study and mediation, and His attributes and His glory the theme of its most delightful contemplation. To know God, be filled with His Spirit, and be ever in His presence is its highest aim. Its will is dedicated to God. It chooses Him deliberately as its portion and its sovereign Lord, and delights to abandon itself to His entire possession and to His perfect will.
It is this element of a single heart and a supreme choice of God which constitutes what the Scriptures call a perfect heat. Every moral sense in the sanctified spirit is dedicated to God. It chooses His standards of right and wrong and desires above all things to bear His image and be conformed to His nature.
~A. B. Simpson~
(continued with # 10)
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