- Section One

Contrary to what professing Christians like to think, many of God's people are not willing to walk in perfect agreement with Him, and this may explain why so many believers do not have the power of the Spirit, the peace of the Spirit and many of the other qualities, gifts and benefits which the Spirit of God brings.
The question is: Are we willing to walk with Him in love and obedience?
The answer is that we cannot walk with Him unless we are agreed and if we are not agreed, we will not walk with Him in harmony and fruitfulness and blessing.
Many people in the churches who profess that they have an interest in the subject, "How to cultivate the Spirit's companionship," are not really willing to give up all to obtain all. They are not willing to turn completely toward God and walk with Him.
You may remember that John Bunyan, in his great allegorical writings, often mentioned Mr. Facing Bothways, and we ought to know as well as he did that there are a great many Christians who try to accomplish the difficult task of facing in both directions at the same time. They do want Christ but they also want some of the world. They allow the Lord to disturb their way, but they also disturb the Lord's way, and there is no use talking about being filled with the Spirit and walking in the Spirit unless we are willing to give up all to obtain all!
Now, this old question in the text, "Can two walk together except they be agreed?" is a rhetorical question, equivalent to a positive declaration that two cannot walk together except they be agreed, and the affirmation that if the two walk together, they must in some sense be one.
These two, in order to walk together, must agree that they want to walk together, and they must agree that it is to their advantage to have this companionship together. I think you will see that it all adds up to this: for two to walk together voluntarily, they must in some sense be one. They must be unified on the important issues of their walk and companionship and direction if they are going to be committed to traveling together.
I have discovered that some people are just not ready for this teaching of commitment and consecration and devotion to the highest will of God for their lives. They are still facing both ways.
Let me name some of the types of professing Christians who are not ready to give up all to obtain all.
There are those who are most interested in Christianity for its "insurance" value.
Believe it or not, they want the care and protection that God gives them now, and they want avoidance of hell in time of death. They want the guarantee of heaven at last. To get these things, they seem willing to support the church, give to missions and show a financial interest in other church projects.
Amazing, but true! Some people keep on supporting the church, and they even abstain from some gross pleasures because they want protection - they are interested in the insurance value of Christianity. They want what it has to offer. They are not interested in modernism and liberal Christianity - there isn't any insurance value there.
Are you happy that Jesus Christ died for you on the cross because it means that you will not be brought into judgment, having passed from death into life?
Are you willing to live reasonably well, giving up some gross pleasures as a premium you are paying for the guarantee that God will bless you while you live and take you home to heaven when you die?
Some Christians do not like to have this proposition stated in this manner - for it sort of lets the truth leak out that sets up another question: If this is the basis for our Christian life, are we any better than some of the not-professing sinners?
Not every sinner is dirty, you know. Not every sinner is a rascal. There are honorable men and good men and honest men - men that will tell the truth even if it hurts. They have no hope of eternal life or of heaven to come. They are not followers of our Lord. I have known fine, ethical, honest men who were not Christians.
Actually, I know a man who is so fine and good that everyone wants to make a Christian out of him. He steadfastly refuses and is positive in his statement, "I am not a Christian." He doesn't claim he is winning his way to heaven - he knows he is lost, but he is so good in his life and his ways and his habits that he puts a lot of Christians to shame.
Then there are those who are not willing because their concept of religion is social and not spiritual.
This includes the people who have watered down the religion of the New Testament until it has no strength, no life, no vitality in it. They water it down with their easygoing opinions. They are very broad-minded - in fact, they are so broad-minded that they cannot walk on the narrow way.
They are socially-minded. This is as far as religion goes with them. I am not prepared to say dogmatically that they are not saved, but I am prepared to say that they are not ready for what I am talking about. There is no argument with the fact that the gospel of Christ is essentially spiritual, and Christian truth working upon human souls by the Holy Spirit makes Christian men and women spiritual.
In a similar sense, there are those who are more influenced by the world than by the New Testament, and they are not ready for the Holy Spirit.
Of these people, we have to say that they are influenced far more by Hollywood than they are by Jerusalem. Their spirit and mode of life are more like Hollywood than it is like Jerusalem. If you were to suddenly set them down in the New Jerusalem, they would not feel at home because their mode, the texture of their mind, has been created for them by twentieth century entertainment and not by the things of God!
I am positive that much that passes for the gospel in our day is very little more than a mild case of orthodox religion grafted onto a heart that is sold out to the world in its pleasures and tastes and ambitions.
Now another group that talks about the Holy Spirit but is not prepared for His companionship are those who would like to be filled with the Spirit just for the thrill of it.
I think it is plain that some people want to be thrilled so badly that they would pay any price - except that they will not die to themselves, nor to the world, nor to the flesh.
For these, what I am about to say now will have no sympathetic meaning whatsoever. It is this: You have never come over into the region where God can get to you! The kind of teaching I have been giving has disturbed some people. If you have been traveling along thinking you are all right, and a man of God begins to insist there is yet much land to be possessed, you will probably be disturbed. That is the preliminary twinge that comes to the soul who wants to know God. Whenever the Word of God reaches us and convicts us, it disturbs us. But this is normal - for God has to jar us loose, even if it takes a disturbance.
When we speak of conviction by the Spirit, we must differentiate between knowing Christian doctrine intellectually and knowing it sympathetically. Anyone can learn creeds and catechisms and recite Christian doctrines from memory, but it is quite another thing to let the Word of God reach us sympathetically. I am talking about the human heart that goes out sympathetically to the Word of God.
I hope that there are many more people hungry for God than I know. God keeps many of His mysteries and secrets from me, so I have no idea how many persons have been helped by my ministry and my preaching. I do thank God for those I know about - some of those who have told me of their "sympathetic" reception of the Word. Form somewhere came the deep longing, a blessed aspiration, a yearning after God that is so real and so wonderful and so pain-filled that they know what I am talking about - sympathetically.