Scripture: "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."--Genesis 2:7
" Divine inspiration was essential to man's first created state. The Spirit of the Triune God, breathed into him, was that alone which made him a holy creature in the image and likeness of God. Had he not been thus at the first, God in him, and he in God, a true offspring of the Holy Spirit, no dispensation of God to fallen man would have directed him to the Holy Spirit, or ever made mention of His inspiration in man.
"Hence it plainly appears, that the Gospel state could not be God's last dispensation, or the finishing of man's redemption, unless its whole work was a work of the Spirit of God in man, so as to bring the thing itself, or the substance of all former types and shadows, into real enjoyment. Now the thing itself, and for the sake of which all God's dispensations have been, is that first life of God, which was essentially born in the soul of the first man, Adam, and to which he died. This makes it plain that the work of this dispensation must be solely and immediately the work of the Holy Spirit. Therefore immediate inspiration is as necessary to make fallen man alive again unto God, as it was to make man at first a living soul after the image of God.
"And continual inspiration is as necessary as man's continuance in his redeemed state. That alone which begins, or gives life, must of all necessity be the only continuance or preservation of life. No life can continue in the goodness of its first created or redeemed state, but by its continuing under the influence of and working with that powerful Root or Spirit which at first created or redeemed it. Because without Christ we can do nothing, therefore we ought to believe, expect, wait for, and depend upon His continual immediate operation in everything that we do, through His Spirit dwelling in us."
Let us pause to consider how little this immediate continual inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the heart of God's child is believed or accepted. And let us, from the very beginning of our readings, make this the one object of our desire and prayer—the full experience of what the Holy Spirit is meant to be to us.
