What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?
Offended at His claim to have come down from heaven and at His call to eat His flesh and drink His blood, His disciples were asked what they would do if they saw the Son of man ascend up where He was before. The question affirms that He was in heaven before, came down as the living bread clothing divinity with humanity, and would return by ascension to the place where He had been. Eating His flesh and drinking His blood is receiving Him as personal Saviour by believing His Word, appropriating it and obeying it in daily life, for it is the Spirit that quickens and His words are spirit and life and not to be taken in a carnal literal sense. The saying laid bare the spiritual nature of His kingdom and put faith to the test, so that many who had followed Him stumbled and walked no more with Him while the twelve remained. Those who thus feed upon Him have His life in them and eternal life now, dwelling in Him and He in them, transformed into His likeness and to be raised at the last day.
Setting and Wording
The saying was given in the synagogue at Capernaum as part of the bread-of-life discourse. It followed the feeding of the hungry multitude by creative power from five barley loaves and two small fishes, with direction that the fragments be gathered so nothing would be lost. In that same setting He refused to be made king and taught that He is the Bread of Life, the true bread from heaven come down to give life to the world, so that whoever comes to Him never hungers and whoever believes on Him never thirsts. The work of God in that discourse is to believe on Him whom the Father sealed and sent, and the spiritual food He provides is of far more consequence than food for bodily necessities, though His hand of benevolence still provides for those necessities in various ways. Eating His flesh and drinking His blood in that discourse gives eternal life, resurrection at the last day, and mutual indwelling, He in the believer and the believer in Him, as the living bread come down from heaven.
He knew in Himself that His disciples murmured at this teaching, calling eating His flesh and drinking His blood a hard saying and being offended at it. To that murmuring He answered with the questions, Doth this offend you, and what if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where He was before. The question belongs to His explanation that the teaching is spiritual and not about literal flesh, for it is the Spirit that quickens, the flesh profits nothing, and His words are spirit and life. He thus exposed that some did not believe, and from that time many went back and walked no more with Him, while the twelve remained, Peter confessing He has the words of eternal life and Jesus naming Judas Iscariot as betrayer.
The question answers those offended by His claim to have come down from heaven: if they could not accept His heavenly origin, seeing Him ascend there would be harder still. If His words about eating His flesh troubled them, they must also face His ascent to the place and heaven where He had been before. His human flesh itself as physical food was not the source of eternal life; life came through faith in His words and in the saving power of His coming sacrifice, with the next verse directing away from a merely physical reading toward Spirit-given life. His words in this place reveal truths about His person and office.
Heavenly Origin and Ascension
The question affirms that the Son of man was before in heaven and came down from heaven as the living bread. He clothed His divinity with humanity to reveal Himself as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and to represent God in humanity, so that humanity might touch humanity while divinity laid hold of the throne of divinity to bring moral power to man. His reference to ascending to where He was before points both to His heavenly origin and to His return there. Eating His flesh and drinking His blood is being doers of the Word of God, making the Bible the great educating Book above all other books, for first comes believing and next comes working. The work of God is to believe on Him whom God has sent, the price of heaven is the only begotten Son of God, and the way to heaven is by faith in Jesus, which must be understood or heaven will be missed.
His words are spirit and life and can be received only by those who serve Him from pure, loving hearts, not judged by fleshly, carnal, literal understanding. The Spirit gives life while the flesh by itself profits nothing, so His teaching about eating His flesh is a spiritual figure and not a call to eat His literal body or to find eternal life in His human flesh as physical food. The life He gives is received through believing His words, and in giving His flesh and His blood for the life of the world He gives eternal life to all who will receive it in faith, for Christ's life sustains those who receive Him. His teaching, example, life, and death are the spiritual food that gives life and strength through faith in His words and in the saving power of His sacrifice.
The verse points to His return by ascension to the heaven and place where He had been before, spoken when His disciples were perplexed and offended by His words about His flesh and blood. His constant and true disciples were granted this privilege, seeing Him as He blessed them taken from earth and escorted with songs of triumph and victory to the heavenly courts as the Prince. There He would receive greater honor than He then claimed as the bread of life. That coming ascent would confirm His claim to have come down from heaven, prove He was sent of God, and show that His words were spiritual and life-giving rather than literal flesh.
It would also show that His mission was not to establish an earthly kingdom, for the teaching followed the feeding of the five thousand when He rejected the people's attempt to make Him king and taught that He is the Bread of Life. The teaching belongs to disclosures about His humiliation, rejection, crucifixion, and return to where He was before. The disciples did not understand these disclosures at first, and the difficulty of understanding their spiritual meaning exposed a hidden temptation that weakened faith. After He rose and the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost they understood that He was glorified and was their advocate in the heavenly courts, His repeated and decisive teaching having been intended to reveal their true relation to Him, and His words about eating His flesh and drinking His blood became to them spirit and life.
Eating as Believing Obeying
To eat His flesh and drink His blood is to receive Him as a personal Saviour, to believe His Word, to appropriate it and take it into the practical life and obey it. It is to look constantly to Him and to receive His words as spiritual food and drink for the soul, united to Him by daily, hourly faith that works by love and purifies the soul. Receiving and doing His word in this way brings light, peace, hope, joy and strength to the soul, as food nourishes the body, and keeps from Satan's power through faith in the Son of God and the efficacy of His blood.
It is the Spirit that quickens and the flesh by itself profits nothing, for His words are spirit and life. The teaching is therefore a spiritual figure, a parable under the similitude of heavenly bread, not to be judged by fleshly, carnal, literal understanding. His human flesh itself as physical food is not the source of eternal life, and those who tasted that the Lord is gracious learn as newborn babes to desire the sincere milk of the word that growth may follow. Feeding on Christ means keeping the Word and truth before the mind, studying and practicing its teachings, and living by faith rather than by sight through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit.
To eat the Word is to study it with prayer, to keep its precepts, to bring its truths into daily life, and to make Christ's words part of oneself. God has revealed what is necessary for salvation, and His revealed Word, not human suppositions or human ideas, is the guide for life, to be taken in and assimilated rather than set aside or replaced. It is to depend on God and not on human beings, each one realizing dependence on Him by creation and by redemption, looking to Jesus Christ the true Light instead of looking to human beings for wisdom and strength. The bread of life must be received into the mind, understood and practiced so that the whole life is shaped by it, with continual growth in grace through prayer, truth brought into daily experience, and daily schooling in Christ, its divine principles made part of character.
The living oracles are the flesh and blood of the Son of God even though He had not then been crucified, because His work as substitute for all sin was the only hope of ancient Israel. The directions given by Christ as the invisible Leader of Israel in the Old Testament Scriptures are full of nourishment, and no soul who takes those words and eats them will remain in spiritual hunger. After God's plan was fulfilled in Christ's death the New Testament was written by holy men moved by the Spirit, not to cast aside the Old but to reflect light back into past ages giving significance to the whole Jewish economy. So the plain directions for practical holiness and obedience given to ancient Israel must enter the life of everyone who claims to be Christian, a value in reading the Word and appropriating it as living bread come down from heaven that not one in a hundred knows.
The lesson is the same as that taught under the symbol of the vine and its branches in John 15, that all who are truly converted draw spiritual vitality from Christ as a branch draws nourishment from the vine. Receiving life and nourishment from Christ means feeding upon Him with contrition of heart because of sin and putting away the leaven of sin. As the Passover lamb was eaten with bitter herbs pointing back to the bitterness of bondage in Egypt, and as no leaven was to be found in houses during the feast, so the feast is kept with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth because Christ the Passover is sacrificed. All believers feed from the same source and are joined as members of one body, and should live in unity.
Testing and Turning Away
The discourse drew the truth about himself in clear and decided lines, defining his kingdom as spiritual and setting aside the hope of a temporal reign and of national reception as a people, and by challenging hopes for an earthly kingdom and worldly rewards it brought a closer test of whether men would follow in self-surrender without miracles or political deliverance. Those who received him were to share his nature and become like him, giving up cherished ambitions and walking the self-sacrificing path to life and heaven, while many who had wanted him for his miracles or for freedom from Roman rule rejected him when they saw he offered no earthly reward. His popularity began to wane after he refused to be made king, and he gave himself to instructing the disciples in the mysteries and truths of his work, presenting himself as the bread of life in teaching so significant and mysterious and so opposed to prevailing prejudice that the worldly-minded among the people and even among professed disciples turned from him.
The question pressed hearers to decide for or against him, exposing whether faith was genuine and revealing true feelings, even exposing those not wholly with him who would oppose him at his trial. Many who had been regarded as his followers listened but never partook with him nor ate the truth as bread from heaven, having no greater depth of faith and spiritual perception than those whose limited comprehension could not discern his words, and they stumbled, went back, and walked no more with him because they believed not. The same sifting leaves the twelve to choose, with Peter confessing that he has the words of eternal life and is the Christ, the Son of the living God, while Jesus names Judas Iscariot as betrayer. Superficial followers may thus leave when plain truth displeases them, and the criticism and murmuring once met in his own work will be met again by his servants in theirs.
They turned away because earthliness of mind misconstrued symbolic language in a carnal, literal way, and because they resisted truth that exposed faults, reproof, self-denial and the cross. When a statement from the Word needed for purification of soul met them, pride was offended, and many turned away rather than accept reproof and reform, making their departure an excuse to avoid the truth rather than a lack of evidence. Though convicted, they chose not to yield the will to God or come to him for life, and their difficulty in understanding did not excuse rejection; some never truly believed, and exceptional cases became his bitterest persecutors.
Their murmuring, displeasure and departure stand as the pattern of apostasy whenever test and trial comes to every soul, showing that outward church belonging does not save, since salvation comes through personal faith bringing spiritual union with him. Heady, highminded and self-sufficient men who did not dig deep and were not riveted to the Eternal Rock think the way made too strait, murmur at his words and at the words of the Lord brought through his chosen messengers, make shipwreck of faith, and turn away from the one who would have been their light of life. He spoke the truth about his work and coming ascension to prove them beforehand, so that their apostasy would not surprise true disciples, the trial would not be too severe, and his future work would be kept safe from being swayed into wrong paths. The instruction expressing God's will is able to meet dissension and lead to unity with him and with one another.
Eternal Life and Transformation
Those who so receive Him have His life in them and have eternal life now, and though they may die their life is kept with Christ in God. They dwell in Christ and Christ dwells in them, living by Christ as Christ lives by the Father, and are made one with Him now and throughout eternity. Grasping through His resurrection the pledge of their own resurrection, they will be raised at the last day and enter through the gates into the city of God.
Study and obedience of this chapter set out the conditions of eternal life, leading to a life that measures with the life of God. It defines His righteousness, which must be accepted in order to have on the wedding garment and to reach the standard of character required to be counted a fit guest at the wedding. That wedding is the marriage of humanity with divinity. Receiving it requires taking a firm stand for Christ and surrendering to God what is already His, with faith in the Son of God and in the efficacy of His blood that keeps from Satan's power, instead of measuring character by human ideas, presuming upon eternal interests, or continuing in sin that hinders the fulfillment of God's promise.
Feeding upon the divine Word gives sanctified strength, wisdom, integrity and moral power for the healthy development of all the spiritual powers, with forgiveness and sanctification unto eternal life. It brings growth up into the full stature of men and women in Christ, partaking of the divine nature and oneness in spiritual life with Christ in the same way the body is built up from the food that is eaten. No one can be nourished by food another eats, so each must for himself eat Christ's words, receive them, live by them, obey them, and assimilate the principles of truth, for His words are spirit and life to the receiver. This preserves Christlikeness of character by sanctified obedience to all the words of Holy Writ through the Holy Spirit, as every Christian as a wise steward is to do. It breathes a holy atmosphere, works a moral change into Christ's likeness with assurance of holy principles and an earnest of immortality, and is seen in fruit in heart, lips and character, some thirty, some sixty and some a hundredfold. The truth here is of momentous importance for the last days, deep and pure and unadulterated, and men of superficial understanding cannot comprehend it, for spiritual senses corrupted by worldly ideas and maxims make pure truth seem strange, so that those without faith object to it with disgust shown in looks and words. To the believing soul this truth is as eating from the tree of life, but unless men voluntarily appropriate it until it becomes the very life of the soul, they have no spiritual life.
Its aim is the heart rather than the understanding alone. It addresses the moral nature and takes possession of the will, casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. Taken into the life, truth shapes influence, conversation and character, giving spiritual strength instead of weakness, with exceeding great reward, light, peace, hope, joy and strength as food nourishes the body. Teachers need this personal experience before communicating it, and children, youth, and men and women need this education to become workers together with God.
Offended at His claim to have come down from heaven and at His call to eat His flesh and drink His blood, His disciples were asked what they would do if they saw the Son of man ascend up where He was before.
The question affirms that He was in heaven before, came down as the living bread clothing divinity with humanity, and would return by ascension to the place where He had been.
Eating His flesh and drinking His blood is receiving Him as personal Saviour by believing His Word, appropriating it and obeying it in daily life, for it is the Spirit that quickens and His words are spirit and life and not to be taken in a carnal literal sense.
The saying laid bare the spiritual nature of His kingdom and put faith to the test, so that many who had followed Him stumbled and walked no more with Him while the twelve remained.
Those who thus feed upon Him have His life in them and eternal life now, dwelling in Him and He in them, transformed into His likeness and to be raised at the last day.
Setting and Wording
The saying was given in the synagogue at Capernaum as part of the bread-of-life discourse. It followed the feeding of the hungry multitude by creative power from five barley loaves and two small fishes, with direction that the fragments be gathered so nothing would be lost. In that same setting He refused to be made king and taught that He is the Bread of Life, the true bread from heaven come down to give life to the world, so that whoever comes to Him never hungers and whoever believes on Him never thirsts. The work of God in that discourse is to believe on Him whom the Father sealed and sent, and the spiritual food He provides is of far more consequence than food for bodily necessities, though His hand of benevolence still provides for those necessities in various ways. Eating His flesh and drinking His blood in that discourse gives eternal life, resurrection at the last day, and mutual indwelling, He in the believer and the believer in Him, as the living bread come down from heaven.
He knew in Himself that His disciples murmured at this teaching, calling eating His flesh and drinking His blood a hard saying and being offended at it. To that murmuring He answered with the questions, Doth this offend you, and what if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where He was before. The question belongs to His explanation that the teaching is spiritual and not about literal flesh, for it is the Spirit that quickens, the flesh profits nothing, and His words are spirit and life. He thus exposed that some did not believe, and from that time many went back and walked no more with Him, while the twelve remained, Peter confessing He has the words of eternal life and Jesus naming Judas Iscariot as betrayer.
The question answers those offended by His claim to have come down from heaven: if they could not accept His heavenly origin, seeing Him ascend there would be harder still. If His words about eating His flesh troubled them, they must also face His ascent to the place and heaven where He had been before. His human flesh itself as physical food was not the source of eternal life; life came through faith in His words and in the saving power of His coming sacrifice, with the next verse directing away from a merely physical reading toward Spirit-given life. His words in this place reveal truths about His person and office.
Heavenly Origin and Ascension
The question affirms that the Son of man was before in heaven and came down from heaven as the living bread. He clothed His divinity with humanity to reveal Himself as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and to represent God in humanity, so that humanity might touch humanity while divinity laid hold of the throne of divinity to bring moral power to man. His reference to ascending to where He was before points both to His heavenly origin and to His return there. Eating His flesh and drinking His blood is being doers of the Word of God, making the Bible the great educating Book above all other books, for first comes believing and next comes working. The work of God is to believe on Him whom God has sent, the price of heaven is the only begotten Son of God, and the way to heaven is by faith in Jesus, which must be understood or heaven will be missed.
His words are spirit and life and can be received only by those who serve Him from pure, loving hearts, not judged by fleshly, carnal, literal understanding. The Spirit gives life while the flesh by itself profits nothing, so His teaching about eating His flesh is a spiritual figure and not a call to eat His literal body or to find eternal life in His human flesh as physical food. The life He gives is received through believing His words, and in giving His flesh and His blood for the life of the world He gives eternal life to all who will receive it in faith, for Christ's life sustains those who receive Him. His teaching, example, life, and death are the spiritual food that gives life and strength through faith in His words and in the saving power of His sacrifice.
The verse points to His return by ascension to the heaven and place where He had been before, spoken when His disciples were perplexed and offended by His words about His flesh and blood. His constant and true disciples were granted this privilege, seeing Him as He blessed them taken from earth and escorted with songs of triumph and victory to the heavenly courts as the Prince. There He would receive greater honor than He then claimed as the bread of life. That coming ascent would confirm His claim to have come down from heaven, prove He was sent of God, and show that His words were spiritual and life-giving rather than literal flesh.
It would also show that His mission was not to establish an earthly kingdom, for the teaching followed the feeding of the five thousand when He rejected the people's attempt to make Him king and taught that He is the Bread of Life. The teaching belongs to disclosures about His humiliation, rejection, crucifixion, and return to where He was before. The disciples did not understand these disclosures at first, and the difficulty of understanding their spiritual meaning exposed a hidden temptation that weakened faith. After He rose and the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost they understood that He was glorified and was their advocate in the heavenly courts, His repeated and decisive teaching having been intended to reveal their true relation to Him, and His words about eating His flesh and drinking His blood became to them spirit and life.
Eating as Believing Obeying
To eat His flesh and drink His blood is to receive Him as a personal Saviour, to believe His Word, to appropriate it and take it into the practical life and obey it. It is to look constantly to Him and to receive His words as spiritual food and drink for the soul, united to Him by daily, hourly faith that works by love and purifies the soul. Receiving and doing His word in this way brings light, peace, hope, joy and strength to the soul, as food nourishes the body, and keeps from Satan's power through faith in the Son of God and the efficacy of His blood.
It is the Spirit that quickens and the flesh by itself profits nothing, for His words are spirit and life. The teaching is therefore a spiritual figure, a parable under the similitude of heavenly bread, not to be judged by fleshly, carnal, literal understanding. His human flesh itself as physical food is not the source of eternal life, and those who tasted that the Lord is gracious learn as newborn babes to desire the sincere milk of the word that growth may follow. Feeding on Christ means keeping the Word and truth before the mind, studying and practicing its teachings, and living by faith rather than by sight through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit.
To eat the Word is to study it with prayer, to keep its precepts, to bring its truths into daily life, and to make Christ's words part of oneself. God has revealed what is necessary for salvation, and His revealed Word, not human suppositions or human ideas, is the guide for life, to be taken in and assimilated rather than set aside or replaced. It is to depend on God and not on human beings, each one realizing dependence on Him by creation and by redemption, looking to Jesus Christ the true Light instead of looking to human beings for wisdom and strength. The bread of life must be received into the mind, understood and practiced so that the whole life is shaped by it, with continual growth in grace through prayer, truth brought into daily experience, and daily schooling in Christ, its divine principles made part of character.
The living oracles are the flesh and blood of the Son of God even though He had not then been crucified, because His work as substitute for all sin was the only hope of ancient Israel. The directions given by Christ as the invisible Leader of Israel in the Old Testament Scriptures are full of nourishment, and no soul who takes those words and eats them will remain in spiritual hunger. After God's plan was fulfilled in Christ's death the New Testament was written by holy men moved by the Spirit, not to cast aside the Old but to reflect light back into past ages giving significance to the whole Jewish economy. So the plain directions for practical holiness and obedience given to ancient Israel must enter the life of everyone who claims to be Christian, a value in reading the Word and appropriating it as living bread come down from heaven that not one in a hundred knows.
The lesson is the same as that taught under the symbol of the vine and its branches in John 15, that all who are truly converted draw spiritual vitality from Christ as a branch draws nourishment from the vine. Receiving life and nourishment from Christ means feeding upon Him with contrition of heart because of sin and putting away the leaven of sin. As the Passover lamb was eaten with bitter herbs pointing back to the bitterness of bondage in Egypt, and as no leaven was to be found in houses during the feast, so the feast is kept with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth because Christ the Passover is sacrificed. All believers feed from the same source and are joined as members of one body, and should live in unity.
Testing and Turning Away
The discourse drew the truth about himself in clear and decided lines, defining his kingdom as spiritual and setting aside the hope of a temporal reign and of national reception as a people, and by challenging hopes for an earthly kingdom and worldly rewards it brought a closer test of whether men would follow in self-surrender without miracles or political deliverance. Those who received him were to share his nature and become like him, giving up cherished ambitions and walking the self-sacrificing path to life and heaven, while many who had wanted him for his miracles or for freedom from Roman rule rejected him when they saw he offered no earthly reward. His popularity began to wane after he refused to be made king, and he gave himself to instructing the disciples in the mysteries and truths of his work, presenting himself as the bread of life in teaching so significant and mysterious and so opposed to prevailing prejudice that the worldly-minded among the people and even among professed disciples turned from him.
The question pressed hearers to decide for or against him, exposing whether faith was genuine and revealing true feelings, even exposing those not wholly with him who would oppose him at his trial. Many who had been regarded as his followers listened but never partook with him nor ate the truth as bread from heaven, having no greater depth of faith and spiritual perception than those whose limited comprehension could not discern his words, and they stumbled, went back, and walked no more with him because they believed not. The same sifting leaves the twelve to choose, with Peter confessing that he has the words of eternal life and is the Christ, the Son of the living God, while Jesus names Judas Iscariot as betrayer. Superficial followers may thus leave when plain truth displeases them, and the criticism and murmuring once met in his own work will be met again by his servants in theirs.
They turned away because earthliness of mind misconstrued symbolic language in a carnal, literal way, and because they resisted truth that exposed faults, reproof, self-denial and the cross. When a statement from the Word needed for purification of soul met them, pride was offended, and many turned away rather than accept reproof and reform, making their departure an excuse to avoid the truth rather than a lack of evidence. Though convicted, they chose not to yield the will to God or come to him for life, and their difficulty in understanding did not excuse rejection; some never truly believed, and exceptional cases became his bitterest persecutors.
Their murmuring, displeasure and departure stand as the pattern of apostasy whenever test and trial comes to every soul, showing that outward church belonging does not save, since salvation comes through personal faith bringing spiritual union with him. Heady, highminded and self-sufficient men who did not dig deep and were not riveted to the Eternal Rock think the way made too strait, murmur at his words and at the words of the Lord brought through his chosen messengers, make shipwreck of faith, and turn away from the one who would have been their light of life. He spoke the truth about his work and coming ascension to prove them beforehand, so that their apostasy would not surprise true disciples, the trial would not be too severe, and his future work would be kept safe from being swayed into wrong paths. The instruction expressing God's will is able to meet dissension and lead to unity with him and with one another.
Eternal Life and Transformation
Those who so receive Him have His life in them and have eternal life now, and though they may die their life is kept with Christ in God. They dwell in Christ and Christ dwells in them, living by Christ as Christ lives by the Father, and are made one with Him now and throughout eternity. Grasping through His resurrection the pledge of their own resurrection, they will be raised at the last day and enter through the gates into the city of God.
Study and obedience of this chapter set out the conditions of eternal life, leading to a life that measures with the life of God. It defines His righteousness, which must be accepted in order to have on the wedding garment and to reach the standard of character required to be counted a fit guest at the wedding. That wedding is the marriage of humanity with divinity. Receiving it requires taking a firm stand for Christ and surrendering to God what is already His, with faith in the Son of God and in the efficacy of His blood that keeps from Satan's power, instead of measuring character by human ideas, presuming upon eternal interests, or continuing in sin that hinders the fulfillment of God's promise.
Feeding upon the divine Word gives sanctified strength, wisdom, integrity and moral power for the healthy development of all the spiritual powers, with forgiveness and sanctification unto eternal life. It brings growth up into the full stature of men and women in Christ, partaking of the divine nature and oneness in spiritual life with Christ in the same way the body is built up from the food that is eaten. No one can be nourished by food another eats, so each must for himself eat Christ's words, receive them, live by them, obey them, and assimilate the principles of truth, for His words are spirit and life to the receiver. This preserves Christlikeness of character by sanctified obedience to all the words of Holy Writ through the Holy Spirit, as every Christian as a wise steward is to do. It breathes a holy atmosphere, works a moral change into Christ's likeness with assurance of holy principles and an earnest of immortality, and is seen in fruit in heart, lips and character, some thirty, some sixty and some a hundredfold. The truth here is of momentous importance for the last days, deep and pure and unadulterated, and men of superficial understanding cannot comprehend it, for spiritual senses corrupted by worldly ideas and maxims make pure truth seem strange, so that those without faith object to it with disgust shown in looks and words. To the believing soul this truth is as eating from the tree of life, but unless men voluntarily appropriate it until it becomes the very life of the soul, they have no spiritual life.
Its aim is the heart rather than the understanding alone. It addresses the moral nature and takes possession of the will, casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. Taken into the life, truth shapes influence, conversation and character, giving spiritual strength instead of weakness, with exceeding great reward, light, peace, hope, joy and strength as food nourishes the body. Teachers need this personal experience before communicating it, and children, youth, and men and women need this education to become workers together with God.