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.
I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.
Poets talk about "spots of time", but it is really the fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone.
This was not a fairy-tale castle and there was no such thing as a fairy-tale ending, but sometimes you could threaten to kick the handsome prince in the ham-and-eggs.
To me, it really seems visible today that ethics is not something exterior to the economy, which, as technical matter, could function on its own; rather, ethics is an interior principle of the economy itself, which cannot function if it does not take account of the human values of solidarity and reciprocal responsibility.
In our rather stupid time, hunting is belittled and misunderstood, many refusing to see it for the vital vacation from the human condition that it is, or to acknowledge that the hunter does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, he kills in order to have hunted.
It is not alone that property, in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of socialism.
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