God's Power in You

by William Law

Overview

The Power of God’s Love
God has saved us through His Son, Jesus. This redemption was planned in His love before man was first created. Just as Adam’s fall separated us from God, so Christ’s redemption brought us back into God’s presence.
William Law discusses God’s wonderful plan for His creation and how His love has brought it about. Along the way, you will discover…

• What God’s love has done for you
• What it means to have God’s Spirit within you
• The only infallible way to God
• That you will live with God for eternity
• How to experience the presence of God

Through these biblical truths, you will come to know the fullness of God’s personal provision and love for your life.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780883685136
Publisher:	Whitaker House
Publication date:	05/01/1998
Pages:	148
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

William Law (1686–1761) was an English clergyman, noted for his controversial and mystical writings. He is considered one of the great intellectuals of his time.
He was born in England in 1686. He graduated from Cambridge University and became a fellow of Emmanuel College in 1711. His Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor, in 1717, was the first distinct sign that he was an independent religious thinker.
He took a stance against the writings of Locke, pitting himself against many of the leading theologians of his day. One of his works, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, allied him with George Berkeley and Joseph Butler and helped to slow the spread of deism. Several of Law's writings, including Practical Treatise on Christian Perfection, had an early influence on John and Charles Wesley, as well as many others.
In 1740, Law settled in Kings Cliffe, where he proceeded to carry out in everyday practice the ideas that he had set down in A Devout and Holy Life. These ideas included charity to the poor, practices of extreme generosity, kindness to animals, and attention to the smaller virtues. Many of his works caused readers to think seriously about Christianity and therefore to accept Jesus Christ as their Savior.
William Law died in 1761 at Kings Cliffe, his powerful and lucid writing style having transformed many.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1 What is the Spirit of Love?

Some people say there is nothing in all my writings that has affected them more than the spirit of love that breathes in the writings. They wish for nothing as much as to have a living awareness of the power, life, and religion of love. But in a discussion of this love, an objection often rises that this doctrine of pure and universal love may be too refined and abstract. However much one may like it, one cannot attain to it or overcome all that is contrary to it in one’s nature. People may do what they can, but then they are only able to be admirers of that love that they cannot secure for themselves. Such an objection will become nothing as soon as it is looked at from a right point of view. This will occur as soon as the true ground of the nature, power, and necessity of the blessed spirit of love is found.

A DESIRE FOR ALL GOODNESS

Now the spirit of love originates in God’s eternal will, which only desires all goodness. God considers this eternal will in His holy being before anything is brought forth by Him or out of Him. He is the one eternal, immutable God, who does not change from eternity to eternity, who can desire neither more nor less nor anything else but all the goodness that is in Himself and can come from Him. The creation of worlds or systems of creatures adds nothing to and takes nothing from this immutable God. He always was and always will be the same immutable Will for all goodness. As certainly as He is the Creator, He is the One who blesses every created thing and can give forth nothing but blessing, goodness, and happiness because He has nothing else to give. It is much more possible for the sun to give forth darkness than for God to do, or be, or give forth anything but blessing and goodness. Now this is the basis for and origin of the spirit of love in created beings. It is and must be a desire for all goodness, and you do not have the spirit of love until you have this desire for all goodness at all times and on all occasions. You may indeed do many works of love, and delight in them, especially when they are not inconvenient to you or contradictory to your condition, mood, or circumstances in life. But the spirit of love is not in you until it is the spirit of your life, until you live freely, willingly, and universally according to it. This is because every spirit acts with freedom and universality according to what it is. It needs no command to live its own life or be what it is, no more than you need to command wrath to be wrathful. Therefore, when love is the spirit of your life, it will operate as freely and universally as any other spirit. Love will always live and work in love, not because of any particular circumstance or location, but because the spirit of love can only love, wherever it is, wherever it goes, or whatever is done to it. Just as sparks can only fly upwards, whether it is the darkness of night or the light of day, so the spirit of love is always in the same course. This spirit knows no difference of time, place, or persons; but, whether it gives or forgives, suffers or escapes suffering, it is equally doing its own delightful work, equally blessed in and of itself. For the spirit of love, wherever it is, is its own blessing and happiness because it is the truth and reality of God in the soul. Therefore, it is in the same joy of life and is the same good to itself everywhere and on every occasion. Do you want to know the blessing of all blessings? It is that the God of love dwells in your soul and kills every root of bitterness, which is the pain and torment of every earthly, selfish love. All wants are satisfied; all disorders of human nature are removed. Life is no longer a burden; every day is a day of peace; everything you encounter becomes a help to you, because everything you see or do is all done in the sweet, gentle element of love. Love has no ulterior motives and desires nothing but its own enrichment, so everything is like oil to its flame. It must have what it desires, and it cannot be disappointed, because everything naturally helps it to live in its own way and to bring forth its own work. The spirit of love does not want to be rewarded, honored, or esteemed. Its only desire is to propagate itself and to become the blessing and happiness of everyone who lacks it. Therefore, it meets wrath and evil and hatred and opposition with the same one will as the light meets the darkness, only to overcome any opposition with all of its blessings. If you want to avoid wrath and ill will, or to gain the favor of anyone, you might not easily accomplish your purpose. However, if you have no desire except for all goodness, everyone you meet will be forced to assist you in your desire. The wrath of an enemy, the treachery of a friend, and every other evil only help the spirit of love to be more triumphant, to live its own life, and to find all its own blessings in a higher degree. Therefore, whether you consider perfection or happiness, it is all included in the spirit of love. This is because the infinitely perfect and happy God is entirely love, an unchangeable Will toward all goodness. Therefore, every creature must be corrupt and unhappy as far as it is led by any other will than the one will to all goodness. In this you see the foundation, the nature, and the perfection of the spirit of love.

THE ABSOLUTE NECESSITY OF THE SPIRIT OF LOVE

The necessity of this spirit is absolute and unchangeable. No one can be a child of God unless the goodness of God is in him, and he cannot have any union or communion with the goodness of God until his life is a spirit of love. This is the only band of union between God and man. Anything other than this spirit of love is only error, fiction, impurity, and corruption that has gotten into man and must be entirely separated from him before he can have the purity and holiness that alone can see God or find the divine life. Since God unchangeably desires all goodness, the divine will, cannot unite or work with any human will unless it desires with Him only what is good. Here the necessity of the spirit of love is absolute. Nothing can suffice in lieu of this will. All contrivances of holiness, all forms of religious piety, signify nothing without this desire for all goodness. Since the desire for all goodness is the whole nature of God, it must be the whole nature of every service or religion that can be acceptable to Him. For nothing serves God or worships and adores Him except what wills and works with Him. God can delight in nothing except His own will and His own Spirit, because all goodness is included in it and can be nowhere else. Therefore, everyone who follows his own will or his own spirit forsakes the one will to all goodness, and while he does so, he has no capacity for the light and Spirit of God. The spirit of love, therefore, is such a necessity that God cannot exempt any of His created beings from it any more than He can deny Himself or act contrary to His own holy being. But since it was His desire for all goodness that brought forth the angels and the spirits of men, He can will nothing for their lives but that they should live and work and manifest that same spirit of love and goodness that brought them into being. Therefore, everything except the desire for and life of goodness is a renunciation of faith by man and is a rebellion against the whole nature of God. There is no peace, and there can never be, for the soul of man except in the purity and perfection of his first created nature. He cannot have his purity and perfection in any other way than in and by the spirit of love. For since God who created all things is love, love is the purity, the perfection, and the blessing of all created things. No one can live in God unless he lives in love.

HOW CHRIST IS CRUCIFIED

Look at every vice, pain, and disorder in human nature; it is in itself nothing else but the spirit of man turned from the universality of love to some self-seeking or self-will in created things. Love alone, then, is the cure of every evil. Whoever lives in the purity of love has risen out of the power of evil into the freedom of the one Spirit in heaven. The schools of religion have given us very accurate definitions of every vice, whether it is covetousness, pride, wrath, or envy, and they have shown us how to think of them as conceptually distinguished from one another. The Christian has a much easier way of knowing their natures and power and what they all do in himself. No matter what you call them, or if you distinguish them with much exactness, they are all just the same thing. They all do the same evil work as the scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, and rabble of the Jews who crucified Christ. They all did the same work, however different they were in outward names, and all vices do the same work as well. If you want a true sense of the nature and power of pride, wrath, covetousness, and envy, such things are entirely nothing else but the murderers and crucifiers of the true Christ of God. They are not the high priests who once, many hundreds of years ago, nailed Christ’s outward humanity to an outward cross, but they crucify afresh the Son of God (Heb. 6:6), the holy Immanuel, who is the Christ, every time a man gives way to wrath, pride, envy, or covetousness. Every temper or passion that is contrary to the new birth of Christ and keeps the holy Immanuel from coming to life in the soul is, in the strictest sense of the words, a murderer and killer of the Lord of life. And wherever pride and envy and hatred are allowed to live, the same thing is done that was done when Christ was killed and Barabbas was saved. Therefore, the Christ of God was not first crucified when the Jews brought Him to the cross. Adam and Eve were His first real murderers. The death that happened to them in the day that they ate of the earthly tree was the death of Christ, or the death of divine life in their souls.

CHRIST REDEEMS US THROUGH THE SPIRIT OF LOVE

Christ would never have come into the world as the second Adam to redeem it if He had not originally been the life and perfection and glory of the first Adam. He is our atonement and reconciliation with God, because we are put back in that first state of holiness through Him when He is brought to life in us. We again have Christ in us as our first father, Adam, had Him at his creation. If Christ had not been the life that was in the first Adam, Adam would have been created to be a mere child of wrath in the same impurity of nature, in the same enmity with God, and in the same need of an atoning Savior, as we are at this day. God can have no delight or union with any man unless His well-beloved Son, the express image of His person, is found in him. This is as true of all unfallen men as of all fallen men. The former are redeemed only through the life of Christ dwelling in them, and the latter want no redemption. The Word, or Son of God, is the Creator of all things, and by Him everything is made that was made (John 1:3). Therefore, everything that is good and holy in unfallen angels comes through His living and dwelling in them, just as everything that is good and holy in redeemed man comes from Him. He is just as much the preserver, the strength, the glory, and the life of all the thrones and principalities of heaven as He is the righteousness, peace, and redemption of fallen man. This Christ has many names in Scripture, but they all mean only the following: that He alone is and can be the light and life and holiness of every creature that is holy, whether in heaven or on earth. The wrath of nature is wherever Christ is not. This wrath is nature left to itself and its own tormenting strength, to feel nothing in itself but the vain, restless discord of its own working. This is the sole origin of hell and every kind of curse and misery in created beings. It is nature without Christ or the spirit of love ruling over it. Here you may observe that wrath has in itself the nature of hell, and it can have no beginning or power in any creature unless that creature has lost Christ. When Christ is everywhere, wrath and hatred will be nowhere. Therefore, whenever you willingly indulge in wrath or let your mind work in hatred, you not only work without Christ, but you also resist Him and withstand His redeeming power over you. You do in reality what those Jews did when they said, "We will not have this man to reign over us" (Luke 19:14). Christ never was, and never can be, in any man except purely as a spirit of love. The vanity, wrath, torment, and evil of man is solely the effect of his will having been turned from God, and this can come from nothing else. Misery and wickedness can have no other foundation or cause, for whatever wills and works with God must partake of the happiness and perfection of God. This, therefore, is a certain truth: hell and death, curse and misery, can never cease or be removed from God’s creation until the wills of men and women whom He created are again what they were when they came from God. They will then be only spirits of love that desire nothing but goodness. The whole fallen creation must groan and travail in pain (Rom. 8:22), and this must be its purgatory until everything that is contrary to the divine will is entirely taken from every creature.

THE SPIRIT OF LOVE WILL PURIFY

Every son of fallen Adam is under this same necessity of striving for something that he neither is nor has. This is so for the same reason: the life of man has lost its first unity and purity and therefore must be in a working strife until all that is contrary and impure is separated from man and he finds his first state in God. Purification is what is necessary, and nothing can take its place. But man is not purified until every earthly, wrathful, sensual, selfish, partial, self-willing inclination is taken from him. He does not die to himself until he dies to these inclinations, and he is not alive in God until he is dead to them. Man needs to be purified only because he has these inclinations; therefore, he does not have the purification that he needs until they are all separated from him. It is the purity and perfection of the divine nature that must be brought again into him, because in that purity and perfection he came forth from God. He could have nothing less since he was once a child of God who was to be blessed by a life in Him. No one who is impure or imperfect in his thoughts and actions can have any union with God. You are not to think that these words, the purity and perfection of God, are too high to be used when looking at God’s spirit of love, for they only mean that the will of man, as an offspring of the divine will, must want to work with the will of God. Only then can man truly stand and live in the purity and perfection of God, and whoever does not want to work with God’s will is at enmity with God and cannot have any life and happiness in Him. Now, nothing wills and works with God except the spirit of love, because nothing else works in God Himself. The Almighty brought forth all nature for this one end: that boundless love might have infinite height and depth in which to dwell and work, and that all the striving and working properties of nature can only give essence and substance, life and strength, to the invisible spirit of love. Then this spirit may come forth and manifest its blessed powers, so that men and women born in the strength and powers of nature might communicate the spirit of love and goodness and give to and receive from one another mutual delight and joy. Anything that is below this state of love has fallen from the one life of God and the only life in which the God of love can dwell. Partiality is a temper that can only belong to men and women who have lost the power, presence, and spirit of the universal good. Those who carry the attitude of "this is mine; that is yours" can have no place in heaven, and they cannot be anywhere because heaven is lost to them. Do not think, then, that the spirit of pure, universal love, the one purity and perfection of heaven and all heavenly natures, can be carried too high or have its absolute necessity too much asserted. There are no degrees of higher or lower in this matter, for the spirit of love does not exist until it is absolutely pure and unmixed.

Table of Contents

Part 1--The Spirit of Love1. What Is the Spirit of Love?2. The Needed Response to the Spirit of Love3. Man's Nature versus God's Goodness4. The Need for Perpetual Inspiration5. The Seed of Heaven in Man6. Jesus Is Our Only Salvation7. Christ, the Second Adam8. More than Knowing9. The Spirit of Love Delivers Us10. The Absolute Importance of Faith11. True Yieldedness to GodPart II--The Spirit of Eternity12. The Entrance of Evil into the World13. The Need for New Birth14. The Life of Christ in Us15. The Pearl of Eternity16. The One Way of Salvation