Spiritual possession

“ This great statement gives positive emphasis to the law that we can gain actual possession only of that which we have gained conscious possession. Or, in other words, we must become conscious of the existence of an object before we can gain personal possession of that object. We must enter consciously into the life of that which we desire to gain, but we cannot enter into the life of that which we doubt the existence of. Doubt invariably produces a gulf between ourselves and the object of doubt, while faith produces mental and spiritual unity. ”

“ Such a spontaneous impulse is ever the natural result of our own personal possession of Christ. In regard to worldly good the instinct, except when overcome by higher motives, is to keep the treasure to oneself. But even in the natural sphere there are possessions which to have is to long to impart, such as truth and knowledge. And in the spiritual sphere, it is emphatically the case that real possession is always accompanied by a longing to impart. ”

“ He who wishes to serve God acceptably, cultivates all his capacities to the best of his ability, in order to increase his power of leading a useful life, and is therefore constantly adding to himself possessions that can never leave him;—rational and spiritual possessions which, in relation to our internal life, correspond to worldly possessions in relation to our external life, and were therefore signified in the parabolic language of the Lord. ”

“ The objective Divine gift, bestowed once for all and completely, must be appropriated as a subjective personal possession; we must cleanse ourselves, perfecting holiness. Redeemed unto holiness: as the two thoughts are linked in the mind and work of God, they must be linked in our heart and life. ”

“ And the solemn obligations of that most blessed possession by God of us are as solemn as the possession is blessed, and can only be discharged when we turn to Him, and yield the whole control of our nature to His merciful hand, believing that He has not only the right to dispose of us, but that His disposition of us will always coincide with our sanest conceptions of good, and our wisest desires for happiness. Yield yourselves to God, for He has yielded Himself to you, and in the yielding we realise our largest and most blessed possession. ”

“ Is there a foot or an inch of this earth that rightly belongs to us? No. God has put it in our possession, and has given us ability to take from the elements to make habitations to shelter ourselves; but are the elements ours? ”

“ And it is as this separation is accepted and prized and persevered in by us, that the holiness of God will enter in and take possession. And we shall realize that to be the Lord’s property, a people of His own, is infinitely more than merely to be accounted or acknowledged as [p96] His, that it means nothing less than that God, in the power and indwelling of the Holy Ghost, fills our being, our affections, and our will with His own life and holiness. He separates us for Himself, and sanctifies us to be His dwelling. ”

“ When a finite spirit cleaves to the infinite God, there must be longing as an element in all possession and possession as an element in all longing; and both will be fed by contemplation of the self-revealing acts which are the syllables of His name. ”

“ These last words—control and possession—remind us of the great mass of vague tradition and belief to the effect that spirits of the departed may exercise such possession or control over the living. To those ancient and vague beliefs it will be our task in the next chapter to give a form as exact and stable as we can. ”

“ Possess your souls, be your own men, keep up the authority and dominion of reason, and keep under the tumults of passion, that neither grief nor fear may tyrannize over you, nor turn you out of the possession and enjoyment of yourselves." In difficult times, when we can keep possession of nothing else, then let us make that sure which may be made sure, and keep possession of our souls. ”

“ Mark the contrast of this true possession with the false and merely external possessions of the world. Those outward things which a man has stand in no real relation with him. They fade and fleet away, or have to be left, and, even while they last, are not his in any real sense. Only what has indissolubly entered into, and become one with, our very selves is truly ours.
Our possession of God suggests a view of our blessedness and our obligation. It secures blessedness—for we have in Him an all-sufficient object and a treasure for all our nature. ”

“ Nowhere else is it absolutely true that He will 'fulfil the desires of them that fear Him.' But in this region it is. Whatever any of us desire to have of God, we are sure to get. We open our mouths and He fills them. In the Christian life desire is the measure of possession, and to long is to have. ”

“ We have seen that being is the gift promised to the lovers of wisdom, and that the promise may either be referred to the possession of God, who is the fountain of all being, or to the true possession of ourselves, which is a consequence of our possession of Him. In either aspect, that possession is blessedness. If we have God, we have real life. We truly own ourselves when we have God. We really live when God lives in us, the life of our lives. We are ourselves, when we have ceased to be ourselves, and have taken God to be the Self of ourselves. ”

“ In our inner Christian life, in our every-day prayers, in our Christian living, in our churches, in our prayer-meetings, in our fellowship, it must come to that—that God always has the first place; and if that be given Him, He will take possession. Oh, if in our lives as individuals every eye were set upon God, upon the living God, every heart were crying, "My soul thirsteth for God," what power, what blessing and what presence of the everlasting God would be revealed to us! ”

“ Does the man who collects the rents of a mountain-side, or the poet or painter to whom its cliffs and heather speak far-reaching thoughts, most truly possess it? The highest form of possession, even of things, is when they minister to our thought, to our emotion, to our moral and intellectual growth. ”

“ His possession of the human nature gives us confidence in approaching Him, by assuring us of His brotherhood and sympathy; while His possession of the Divine nature assures us that He can make His brotherhood and sympathy effectual. ”

“ But for whom was it written, unless it was for each one of us: “Hedge thy possession about with thorns, and bind up thy silver and gold, and make a door and a bar for thy mouth, and a yoke and a balance for thy words”? [6] Thy possession is thy mind, thy gold thy heart, thy silver thy speech: “The words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried in the fire.” [7] A good mind is also a good possession. And, further, a pure inner life is a valuable possession. ”

“ You appropriate the general blessing, like a man taking in a little piece of a boundless prairie for his very own. Your possession does not make my possession of Him less, for every eye gets its own beam, and however many eyes wait upon Him, they all receive the light on to their happy eyeballs. You can make Christ your own, and have all that He has done for the world as your possession, and can experience in your own hearts the sense of your own forgiveness and deliverance from the power and guilt of your own sin, on the simple condition of looking unto Jesus. ”

“ He becomes 'the Master-Light of all our seeing.' In the mysterious inwardness of mutual possession, the soul which has given itself to God and possesses Him, has not only communion, but may even venture to claim as its own the deeper and more mysterious union with God. ”

“ The great hundredth Psalm, according to its true rendering, says, 'It is He that hath made us, and we are His; ... we are ... the sheep of His pasture.' But God's true possession of man is not simply the possession inherent in the act of creation. For there is only one way in which spirit can own spirit, or heart can possess heart, and that is through the voluntary yielding and love of the one to the other. ”

“ There is another thing which we have to make an effort to do, if we would have the blessedness of this conviction filling and flooding our hearts. For the possession is reciprocal; we say, 'My God,' and He says, 'My people.' Unless we yield ourselves to Him and say, 'I am Thine,' we shall never be able to say, 'Thou art mine.' We must recognise His possession of us; we must yield ourselves ”

“ It would be so, if it be not true that the inheritance is nothing less than the fuller possession of God Himself.
And how do men possess God? How do we possess one another, here and now? By precisely the same way, only indefinitely expanded and exalted, do we possess Him here, and shall we possess Him hereafter. Heart to heart is joined by love which is mutual and interpenetrating possession; where 'mine' and 'thine' become blended, like the several portions of the one ray of white light, in the blessed word 'ours.' Contemplation makes us possessors of God. ”

“ If it be said that all forms of belief or ceremonial obscure that worship, "in spirit and in truth," which aids high aspiration, my answer is that the incorporation, in beliefs and forms of worship, of what man needs for his spiritual sustenance seems to me analogous to the incorporation in his daily material food of what he needs for his physical sustenance. ”

“ This desire is inherent in man; it was planted in our bosoms by the Almighty, and is as correct as any other principle if we can only understand it, control it, and rightly appreciate the possessions and blessings we enjoy. The earth was made for our possession. ”

“ We are led to believe that there is an opportunity to lay up treasure in heaven; that is, to be in possession of heavenly treasure; or, to use a more proper expression, to be in possession of heaven; because heaven is a state; it is every where where God is ”

“ That the changes which take place, whether in mind or in matter, are all, ultimately, resolvable into the will of the Deity, who formed alike the spiritual and material system of the universe, making the earth a habitation worthy of its noble inhabitant,—and man an inhabitant almost worthy of that scene of divine magnificence, in which he is placed, is a truth, as convincing to our reason, as it is delightful to our devotion. ”

“ And finally, my hearers, from this falls some light upon the mystery that a finite creature can receive and possess the infinite God. To speak of giving and possession and enjoyment is after all but speaking in figures. ”

“ An everlasting possession is well worth contending for. Couldest thou but for a moment behold what eternal glories they enjoy, who in this life were exposed to all torments and sufferings, thou wouldest cheerfully submit to them all, and take up thy cross with joy ”

“ Is there really a spiritual world, inhabited by spirits who are not mere phantoms, but real, substantial, human beings, with spiritual bodies in human form? If so, where is it, and of what concern is it to us? ”

“ They were then established, as we heard this morning, upon the rock of revelation.
There is a great difference between the possession of the Holy Ghost and the mere possession of the Spirit of God. Everybody has the Spirit of God, that is, the honest hearted, those who are living according to the best light they have. All Christian Churches have it, those who seek truth and righteousness. ”

“ All the distinctly religious interests and forces, reverence of Deity, repentance before God, gratitude, faith, love, hope, spiritual joy, aspiration, desire of immortality and endless blessedness, thus brought into concurrent action with the Christianly enlightened natural conscience, bring an immensely advantageous condition for the actualization of the ethical life. ”

“ They leave us the spiritual—that is, command of the conscience, soul, heart, and judgment—the spiritual—that is, the distribution of heaven's rewards, and punishments, and pardons—without check, without control, in the secrecy of the confessional—and that dolt, the temporal, has nothing but brute matter for his portion, and yet rubs his paunch for joy. ”

“ But so surely as we believe the laws of the spiritual life to have been revealed to us, so, not less, surely, though without the same sanctity, have been revealed the laws by which body, mind, and moral nature flourish or decay. ”

“ If thou servest God what wilt thou more? If God be thy possession, what wantest thou more? Delight Him in seeking Him, and be confident to obtain Him, for He loves His creatures, and takes contentment that they should obtain the end for which He created them. ”

“ That connection teaches us that the measure in which a man feels his true possession of God here and now, is the measure in which his faith rises triumphant over the darkness of the grave, and grasps, with unfaltering confidence, the conviction of an immortal life. ”

“ When there is a right arrangement of right realities in the residence, and a right development of faculties and affections within the resident, and such an adjustment of the spiritual states with the surrounding conditions, that, as these act and react upon each other, the laws of the universe break into conscious harmony, or the will of God is realized in a life of blessedness; that harmony, that blessedness, is what we mean by heaven; and the conditions of its realization constitute the law of salvation. ”