II. TAKING CARE OF OUR CONSCIENCE
A. A Good Conscience
In order to be able to exercise our spirit it is vital to take care of our conscience. [The conscience is the leading part of our spirit. If our conscience is wrong, we can never have a proper spirit. Moreover, we can never even exercise our spirit. In fact, if our conscience is wrong, our spirit is dead! Therefore, before we can properly exercise our spirit, we must first have a good conscience.]
[If you become contaminated by looking at certain kinds of pictures, your spirit will be defiled, contaminated, and deadened. As a result, you will not be able to pray unless you first ask the Lord to cleanse you from all defilement. I offer this as an illustration of our need to cooperate with the sanctifying Triune God to have our spirit preserved from deadness and contamination.]
B. The Need of the Cleansing Blood
[Therefore, whenever we exercise our spirit to contact the Lord, we need the blood. If we do not know how to apply the blood, we really do not know how to exercise the spirit. Every time we exercise our spirit, we will sense that we need the blood. The cleansing blood is a must; it is absolutely vital and necessary. As soon as we exercise our spirit to contact the Lord, who is righteous and holy, we will sense the need of the blood to cleanse our conscience. He is in the glory, but we are sinful, evil, dirty, worldly and carnal, falling short of His glory! Therefore, the blood must fill the gap between us and the Lord. We must learn to apply the blood constantly.]
III. EXERCISING BY PRAYING
[We have to start to exercise our spirit by praying, because to pray, in principle, is something in the spirit (Eph. 6:18). If you are going to exercise your eyes, you have to see. If you are going to exercise your feet, you have to walk. The more you walk, the more you exercise your feet. In like manner, the best way for you to exercise your spirit is to learn to pray.] However, in your experience it may not seem so easy to pray.
[One reason why we cannot pray is that our spirit has not been used for a long, long time. It is out of function, because it has not been exercised. Once a doctor told me that if we covered our eyes for three months, we would not be able to see. Even though we open our eyes, our sight will be lost, because we have not used our eyes for quite a long time. If we do not use them, our eyes will fail to function. Likewise, many brothers and sisters simply fail to use their spirit. They are constantly using their mind, emotion, will, or their physical body, but not their spirit. Therefore, the spirit fails to function and is consequently lost.]
[The unique way to exercise our spirit is to pray. As we exercise our spirit in prayer, our aim should be to contact the Lord, not first to pray for certain people or things. Simply contact the Lord and allow Him to burden you to pray for certain ones. Do not go to the Lord with your mind filled with things to pray for. If you try to contact the Lord in this way, you will close your spirit. We should come to the Lord with a spirit fully open, worshipping Him, praising Him, and thanking Him. Then we shall know what to pray for, and we shall have much to utter to the Lord in prayer.]
(Lesson Book, Level 3: Two Spirits—Two Spirits - the Divine Spirit and the Human Spirit, Chapter 19, by Witness Lee)
