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regards us as being in the Spirit. It is either in the flesh or in
the Spirit. If you have fully received the gospel you have
received the remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit;
then God regards you as being in the Spirit. Hold on to that
and work things out from that and God will help you. You will
find that the positive side of the truth will begin to take shape in
your soul in regard to Christ, instead of wondering all the time
whether you are a Christian or not.
That is not contemplated in Scripture. When you put your faith
in Christ things are settled. It puts you in a certain direction in
regard to the testimony so that you do not go back; the Spirit is
there to help you. It is a wonderful thing when we come to see
that God presents the truth to us and then raises questions
with us as to whether we are in accord with it. You say, ‘Well, I
am not quite in accord with that’. Then you find that to be in
accord with the truth you must go this way. The Spirit of God
thus has His way with you and you say, ‘I will go’. You put your
foot forward and go along that way and, perhaps to your
amazement, you find that the Spirit of God helps you. Well,
that is the way the truth works. Of course, if you do not put
your foot forward in the path of the will of God you will not get
divine help, because it involves faith. That is what we had
earlier, “The steps of the faith ... of our father Abraham”,
Romans 4: 12. It is one step at a time, but if you step out in
faith, as Abraham did, you will get divine support because of
the presence of the Holy Spirit, and that is Romans 8. The
flesh is with us, and will be until the end, but we are not in the
flesh. Hold on to that. That is not the way God regards us; He
regards us as being in the Spirit. If we act in the flesh, well, we
have let the enemy temporarily get an advantage. So we get
back to the Spirit, we speak to the Spirit,
call upon the Spirit, and ask Him for His help; He is with us all
the time. This is Christianity.