Salvation and the life of God are given to us freely, but the infilling of the Spirit is not. To gain the infilling of the Spirit we have to pay the price. How much of the infilling of the Spirit we gain depends on how much of the price we pay. When we are shopping, the more we pay, the more we can buy, and the less we pay, the less we can buy. To have the infilling of the Spirit we need to pay the price. How do we pay the price? According to the principle, we pay the price by giving the Spirit the ground in us. Before we were saved, we lived in the world and were our own masters. We did not give the Lord any ground and did not care about His authority. Everything that we treasured was ours—our family, children, husband or wife, future, business, material possessions, education, statuses, and all the things we enjoyed. The Lord did not have any ground in us.
We did whatever we felt like doing and were not restricted. Some people are seriously fallen because they give the ground in themselves to gambling, movies, and dancing. They neglect their families and put aside their careers. They only want to dance, play mah-jongg, and watch movies. Inside such ones are all kinds of corrupt things. The more proper ones let their future, education, status, career, and family occupy their entire being. There is no ground for God in them, and the Lord does not have any authority in them. This was our situation before we believed in the Lord. Unfortunately, many of us who have believed in the Lord are still in this kind of situation today. The Lord still does not have any ground in us.
In the Gospels the Lord repeatedly asked people to leave everything (Matt. 19:29; Mark 10:29; Luke 18:29), to sell all that they had (Matt. 13:44-46; Mark 10:21), and to deny the self to follow Him (Matt. 16:24). What the Lord meant was that if we want to become His disciples, follow Him, and gain Him as salvation, the first criterion is that we must leave everything. What does it mean to leave everything? It means that we do not allow anything other than the Lord to occupy us. We do not allow education, money, fame, career, family, or children to occupy us. We have to empty out our hearts for Christ. This is what the Lord Jesus meant. He wants us to leave everything to follow Him. He wants us to pour out everything in our inward being other than Himself so that our hearts can be empty for Him.
Some people have the misunderstanding that the Lord wants us to leave and neglect our family, husband, wife, business, career, and everything. Actually, when the Lord told us to leave everything, He did not mean that we should no longer care for the necessities of life but that all these things must not have the ground in us or occupy us. All the ground in us should be given to Christ. For example, consider a saint who is a student. For him to leave everything does not mean that he should no longer study but that the matter of studying should no longer occupy his heart. His heart should be empty for Christ. Then the Christ in him will lead him how to study and how far he should go in his studies. His leading is always higher than our own seeking.
The Lord said in the Gospels that we should leave our parents, wives, and children. However, in the Epistles the apostles tell the parents to raise their children properly, the children to obey their parents, the husbands to love their wives, and the wives to be subject to their husbands (Eph. 6:1-4; Col. 3:18-21). Furthermore, they tell us to not only provide for our immediate family but also for our relatives. If we do not do this, we are worse than the unbelievers (1 Tim. 5:8). These verses show us that to leave everything does not mean to abandon everything and to care for nothing. Rather, it means that all these things no longer have the ground in us because the ground in us has been given to Christ.
When we have given Christ the ground, He will tell us that He will keep us on the earth to make us more superior and proper than we used to be. When He wants us to put aside our family, it does not mean that He does not want us to care for our family. He simply wants us to give Him the ground and to not be occupied by our family. When He is the Lord in us and gains the authority, He will strengthen us and make us even more able to bear the responsibilities of the family. As husbands, we will be the best husbands, and as parents, we will be the best parents. We will do everything well and properly, yet our families will not have the ground in us because our ground will have been given to Christ.
The source of all our problems lies in whether or not we are willing to give Christ the ground. Perhaps all the saints may say that they are willing because they all desire to be mature Christians. However, I am afraid that leaving everything may be such a big price that nobody would be willing to pay it. However, those who truly know the Lord know that the Lord whom we follow is not so cruel or harsh. Throughout the past two thousand years there have been many who loved the Lord and who suffered poverty and humiliation for His sake, but their enjoyment of the Lord was much deeper and fuller than that of other people. Madame Guyon is a good example. Everyone agrees that she truly loved the Lord. She was born and raised in a noble family. There were many maids who served her. She did not have to wash her own clothes or even comb her own hair. Materially, she was truly rich. However, these things did not have the ground in her, nor could they touch her.
There was a brother whose clothing was very valuable, but his clothing did not occupy him and was not his world. Under the natural arrangement of God, he had a certain status and position to live this kind of a life, but those things did not have any ground in him. He did not love the world. This is the principle of living in the world. On the contrary, someone who may be very poor may want this thing or that thing. This is to love the world. Therefore, those who are rich and have high statuses are not necessarily those who love the world. Twenty years ago there was a brother in northern China who was very poor indeed. He stood up in a fellowship meeting one day and said, “Brothers, we should not love money. We should never love money.” He gave a message on not loving money, but nobody said amen. Why? It was because he did not truly know the meaning of loving money and not loving money. He came to me for fellowship one day and asked me how his message had been that day. I told him frankly, “Brother, when you have made a hundred thousand dollars or two hundred thousand dollars, then you can give the message again. Only then will you know the meaning of loving money and not loving money.” The fact that we do not have money does not mean that we do not love money. I am afraid that money may have far more ground in us than in those who have eighty thousand or a hundred thousand dollars.