To remove warfare from a spiritual life is to render it unspiritual. Life in the spirit is a suffering way, filled with watching and laboring, burdened by weariness and trial, punctuated by heartbreak and conflict. It is a life utterly outpoured for the kingdom of God and lived in complete disregard for one's personal happiness.
Interpretation
A spiritual life entails struggle and sacrifice, not just personal happiness.
Watchman Nee's quote emphasizes that a true spiritual life involves enduring hardships and sacrifices for a greater purpose, specifically for the kingdom of God. It articulates that one must accept the challenges, conflict, and emotional turmoil that come with a life dedicated to spiritual pursuits, redefining success not by personal happiness but by the commitment to a higher cause.
In practice
In a sermon on the importance of spiritual commitment, one might use this quote to illustrate the necessity of enduring struggles.
Outside of Christ, I am only a sinner, but in Christ, I am saved. Outside of Christ, I am empty; in Christ, I am full. Outside of Christ, I am weak; in Christ, I am strong. Outside of Christ, I cannot; in Christ, I am more than able. Outside of Christ, I have been defeated; in Christ, I am already victorious. How meaningful are the words, "in Christ."
Overcoming sin, blessed though it surely is, is but the bare minimum of a believers experience. There is nothing astonishing in it. Not to overcome sin is what ought to astonish us.
If you would test the character of anything, you only need to enquire whether that thing leads you to God or away from God.
Everything which relates to God is infinite. We must therefore, while we keep our hearts humble, keep our aims high. Our highest services are indeed but finite, imperfect. But as God is unlimited in goodness, He should have our unlimited love.
If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, arbiter of your destiny, against which you are powerless.
But it's precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this deliberate burying of yourself underground for forty years out of sheer pain, in this assiduously constructed, and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness, in all this poision of unfulfilled desires turned inward, this fever of vacillations, of resolutions adopted for eternity, and of repentances a moment later that you find the very essence of that strange, sharp pleasure.
Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
We must realize that the Reformation world view leads in the direction of government freedom. But the humanist world view with inevitable certainty leads in the direction of statism. This is so because humanists, having no god, must put something at the center, and it is inevitably society, government, or the state.
A gentleman is ashamed to let his words outrun his deeds.
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