by T. Austin-Sparks
From conference messages given in January 1934. Italics by Austin-Sparks.net. Edited and supplied by the Golden Candlestick Trust.
God takes pains to see to it that you and I, in every part of our spiritual lives are proved beyond the reach of what is mortal, earthly, human. Every fragment of His material is to be living, and that explains all His dealings with us. And this fact ought to be the very strength of our lives. What is it that makes for the reality, the foundational reality of the spiritual life? Well, it is not a lot of things mentally accepted, or externally entered into; it is that we do know the Holy Spirit resident within us telling us things. There is a living reality about that. It is an experience. We can go back upon a lot of perhaps merely traditional, formal, external things, but we can never go back upon that. We have heard the Spirit's voice; we do know the Spirit's touch; we know the Spirit is there in order to conform us to the truth and to make us genuine through and through.