I have mentioned one thing in my preface, which, due to its extreme importance, I would like to mention again here. This concerns the warning that we should never analyze ourselves. After reading a book of this nature, it would be very easy for us to unconsciously have excessive self-analysis. When we pay attention to the inner life, we tend to be lead into excessive analysis of our own thoughts and feelings and the activities of the inner man. In this way, we may advance much outwardly, but in reality, the self-life will become more difficult to reject. If we turn inward exclusively, we will lose all peace. When we expect to see holiness filling us, yet find that our condition is not as we have expected, we will naturally feel uneasy. God has no intention that we engage ourselves in such introspection. This is the cause of spiritual lethargy. Our rest comes from looking to the Lord alone and not to ourselves. The amount we look to the Lord is the amount of deliverance we will receive. We rest on the accomplished work of the Lord Jesus and not on our volatile experience. Real spiritual life depends not on continuous analysis of our own feelings and thoughts but on looking away to the Savior!

The readers must not be misled to think that all supernatural things are to be rejected. My purpose is only to help you test if these things are from God. I firmly believe that many supernatural things are from God, and I have seen many of these things. However, I must also admit that there are many supernatural things that are falsely claimed to be from God. I do not have the slightest intention that men would reject everything supernatural. I am merely pointing out the basic difference in principle between these two things in their manifestations. If a believer encounters supernatural things, he should test them carefully according to the scripturally revealed principles before he makes the decision to accept or reject them.

Concerning the problem with the soul, I feel that many believers often drift from one extreme to the other. We commonly consider it to be soulish when one is too emotional, and we think that to be soulish is to be emotional. For this reason, we label the emotional and easily-excited ones as soulish. But we have to realize that an intellectual person is not spiritual either. We are acutely aware of the fact that many people have taken the intellectual life to mean the spiritual life. This is another thing that we have to be aware of.

We must never allow the activity of our soul to cease completely. It is very easy for us to fall into extremes. Either we fall into one extreme, or we fall into the other extreme. At one time we might have considered the emotion and the excitement in the soul to be good and might have walked according to them. Now that we know they are wrong, we begin to suppress them and to restrict their activities. This sounds good, but such actions do not make us spiritual. I deeply feel that if the readers of this book have but a very slight misunderstanding concerning this point, their life will become very dead, for their spirit will then be imprisoned by their dead emotion, and will not have the opportunity to express itself. If excitement is an expression of the spirit's feeling, it is most valuable. In short, if a believer over-suppresses his emotion, he will only become a person living in his mentality and will not be a spiritual person.