The most pitiful thing today is that Christians appear to have growth in almost everything; but their spirit, which is for fellowshipping with God, has not grown. After believing in the Lord for years, one may still say, "I do not feel that I have a spirit." How different is our thought from God's thought! We are like the Corinthians in that we try to utilize the intelligence in our minds to search for the so-called spiritual knowledge, and we really do acquire a great deal of it. But growth in the mind is not and cannot substitute for the growth of the intuition. In God's view, we have remained the same. Please remember that God wants us to grow not in our knowledge, eloquence, or gifts. He only wants the growth of our spirit, our spiritual life, and the intuition of our spirit. He expects the new life that we received in our regeneration to grow. The old creation should be totally forsaken. Otherwise, even if we are full of eloquence, knowledge, and gifts, He will still say that we are fleshly believers, babies without an inch of growth in the spiritual life!

When a believer is overly influenced by the flesh, he cannot successfully become a spiritual man and take solid food. Only one who has a sharp intuition and unceasingly fellowships with God will really know the deep truths. If one's intuition remains weak, he cannot help but drink milk. It is said that milk comes from the mother after she digests solid food. This means that the fleshly believers are unable to fellowship with God clearly in their intuition. They can only depend on more experienced believers to tell them the things of God. Experienced believers fellowship with God through their intuition, transform what they know into spiritual milk, and give it to fleshly believers. At the very beginning of a young Christian's life, the Lord allows this to happen. However, the Lord does not want His people to be dull all their life and unable to fellowship directly with Him. Drinking milk only means that one cannot fellowship directly with God and needs the transmission through others. A full-grown man is one that has his intuition well exercised; he knows how to discern. If we cannot fellowship with God and know the things of God in our intuition, all of our idealistic thinking is useless. The Corinthian believers had much eloquence and knowledge and many gifts, but their spirit was very inactive. The church in Corinth was of the flesh because they only had what was stored in their minds.

Many Christians today err in the same way as the Corinthian believers. They study theology with their dispassionate mentality to search out the hidden meanings in the Bible in order to arrive at the best explanations. The Lord's words are spirit and life, but they do not receive them as spirit and life. They only want to satisfy their own "lust for knowledge" and want to tell others, either verbally or by writing books, what they have learned. Although their meanings, theories, and outlines are the best, and although they appear very "spiritual," in reality they are dead in God's view. Their knowledge comes from the mind of one person and is transferred into the mind of another without passing through the spirit. Those who listen to them or read their writings may say that they have been helped, but what kind of help have they received? Nothing has happened other than the addition of a thought into their mind. This kind of knowledge has no spiritual effect. Only that which comes from the spirit will enter into man's spirit. Whatever comes from the mind will enter into man's mind. Furthermore, only that which comes from the Holy Spirit will enter into our spirit, and only that which comes out of the Holy Spirit through our spirit will enter into someone else's spirit.