Once our heart has God as its goal, we can touch the will of God in a practical way. At this time we need to exercise our spirit. Since God and His will are inseparable, and since God dwells in our spirit as the Holy Spirit, our first practice in understanding God’s will must be the exercise of our spirit to touch the feeling of the Holy Spirit in the depths of our spirit. Under normal conditions this feeling in our spirit is God’s will.
However, our problem is not only that our heart is not absolute, but also that our spirit is too weak. A heart that is not absolute causes us to be confused and unclear about God’s will. A spirit that is weak causes us to be numb and dull in knowing God’s will. This is why, when God’s will is revealed unto us, we are frequently unconscious of it.
Therefore, to know God’s will, our spirit must be strengthened by the constant practice of exercising it. The best way to do this is to have much fellowship and prayer with the Lord. If we can set aside an hour a day to enter into the inner chamber for prayer and fellowship with the Lord, after a certain period of time, our spirit will most assuredly be strengthened and become very keen.
Beside setting a certain time aside for prayer and fellowship with the Lord, we need to practice exercising our spirit in all matters of our daily living. On one hand, we need to deny the self in order to sense the feeling of the Holy Spirit; on the other hand, we need to walk in obedience to this feeling. For example, if someone should discuss business with us, our natural disposition would immediately express our own feeling and opinion. However, if we exercise our spirit to reject our feeling and opinion and seek the mind of God in our spirit, we will touch the feeling of God regarding this very matter. Once we have obtained this feeling and are clear about God’s mind, we will speak and act according to this feeling. We will not employ craftiness or guile, but merely conduct ourselves in a truthful manner according to the spirit. As a result, such exercise of the spirit will lead to a more strengthened and sensitive spirit. Then, knowing God’s will is not difficult.
After having contacted God and obtained the feeling in our spirit, we still need our mind to interpret and apprehend His will practically. Otherwise, the feeling in our spirit is but an unknown burden, and it is not meaningful to our understanding. Hence, we will not know God’s will. For example, if we listen to a speech given in a foreign language, we hear the voice, but if our mind has little training in that language, we can neither interpret the meaning nor understand the mind of the speaker. Thus, the interpretation by the mind is an indispensable factor in the understanding of God’s will. If our mind has not been trained in spiritual things, we have no access to this realm and no way to understand God’s will.
It is regrettable that with many brothers and sisters there is a serious lack of training of the mind in the spiritual realm. Some brothers, when predicting the fluctuations in the stock market and calculating profits and loss, have very clever minds. In addition, some sisters, when chatting with their neighbors, display a very active mind. But when they sit in a meeting and listen to a message, they are incapable of understanding it. It is neither that they are unwilling to listen nor that the message is too profound, but that their mind simply cannot grasp the spiritual content. Even though they strive to concentrate, before long they become very sleepy and doze off. Their mind has not been trained in spiritual things; therefore, they are very ignorant and dull.
The training of the mind is the work of the Holy Spirit. The more the Holy Spirit renews the mind, the more it becomes spiritual and able to cooperate with our spirit. We also have our responsibility, which is to exercise our mind in spiritual matters, set our mind on them, and always turn to the spirit, paying attention to the movements therein. In this way, because our mind is always in contact with the spiritual realm, it becomes keen and living in understanding the feeling in our spirit, and thereby it understands God’s will.
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