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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About the Tempter (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 043. The Immense Power of Experience
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The Immense Power of Experience
Yet—yet, let it be very plainly underscored that he is far more than a match for you and me. That will be a bit humiliating to its, but it is as true as it is humiliating.
Will you please notice why we are no match for him here? First of all, because of his long experience. Will you mark that experience counts for more in the practical action of life than anything else. For instance, a man with a second-grade mind, or third-grade, but with a long matured experience, will completely outclass the man of first-rate mental powers who has no experience. Neither unusual matured talent nor unusual advantages of University schooling, unaccompanied by experience, can hold its own for a moment in the action of life against matured experience wisely applied.
Experience outclasses every other sort of qualification, standing alone without the experience. When you have been actually through a difficult situation you have a grip and confidence for a similar situation that can be gotten in no other way. You are afraid of a strange thing. Ignorance breeds fear. You have confidence about the thing you have done a thousand or a hundred times. Experience brings boldness. It knows.
Satan has a very long experience. It has been maturing for thousands of years. He knows us men like we know the thing we know best. And in comparison with him in the matter of experience we men are the merest babes, just drawing our first gasping breath. He-has been at this thing for millenniums; we are just starting in. We are no match for this tempter, even though his mentality is second-rate.
And then there is a second reason why we are no match for him here. It is a humiliating reason too, but again as true as it is humiliating. It is this: our mentality is not first-class either, except as the Spirit of God sways our mental powers. The keenest, wisest brain is not first-class except as it lives in its own atmosphere, that is the breath of God. And as a matter of fact we, too, have cut ourselves off from our true atmosphere by sin. And even where we have come back into our native air, through the redeeming work of our Saviour and Lord, in so far as He is not allowed to dominate our mental powers we fall to second place. We have not the mental powers with which we were endowed. Now I think we would agree to the sad fact that compromise with evil and selfishness have become a law among those of us classed as Christian people. By common consent the Church of Christ is not swayed in the life of its members by that Jesus-Spirit of which we talked a while ago.