nder to the will of God, eventuating
in an activity in continuing in the will of God. Therefore complete
surrender of the heart and life to God's will as revealed in the Word,
trusting the outcome to Him, is where faith begins.

And so let no man imagine that he has any real faith either in God or His
Word who has not begun by willing to do, that he may enter upon the doing
of, the will of God. Indeed, this is not simply the place where faith
begins, it is also the only place where the presence of faith can be
demonstrated. For this is the only possible way of distinguishing that
intellectual attitude which simply assents to the truthfulness of the Word,
from that genuine heart faith which actively reckons the Word to be true by
surrendering the life to its requirements. This formula of Christ's,
therefore, not only requires that the spiritual and natural faculties be
distinguished, but it is the one scientific test by which they =can= be
distinguished.

Then there is Paul's classification of these faculties just referred to. It
is passing strange that so many even in our denominational schools have
missed it. He devotes a whole section of First Corinthians, from 1:17 to
2:16, as noted above, to a scientific statement of the natural and total
incapacity of the intellect to discern spiritual truth. Consider it a
little more in detail. He says that natural human wisdom, "_sophia_," which
Aristotle defines as "mental excellence in its highest and fullest sense,"
is utterly incapable of operating in the realm of spiritual investigation.
For after "the world by mental excellence knew not God, it pleased God by
the foolishness (to the natural mental capacities) of the thing preached to
save those that =believe=." Not those that =understand=, for "the natural
man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God (that is, spiritual
things), for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know (or
understand) them, for they are =spiritually= discerned (or understood)."
The essential difference between natural and spiritual faculties, as well
as the utter incapacity of the natural faculties in the spiritual realm,
are so clearly brought out in this passage that it is impossible to miss
it.

By this it is not at all meant, however, that mental training and
intellectual capacity have no place in certain branches of Bible study.
Every believer in the Book welcomes the keenest minds and the most expert
scholarship in that branch of