"Things" That Divide

from the book A Witness and a Testimony by T.A. Sparks

I will be very practical and come right to the point. It is a false apprehension of a heavenly position for anyone to run down Christians because they are in denominations, and to have anything in them which separates them from children of God because they are in these things.

That is a false apprehension of a heavenly and spiritual position. I want to say that with great emphasis. Such people have not yet come to the place where they can discriminate between children of God and things in which children of God may be.

You and I might come to the place where, more or less, we could not participate in the things, and might see that the things -- call them what you like, 'sects', 'denominations', such things -- are limiting things and are a contradiction to the thought of God. We may come to see that there is all the difference between a very strong feeling and conviction about that, and allowing our feeling toward the thing to touch the people who are children of God.

Dear friends, you have to keep a very wide gap between those two things, and when you meet someone who is in something, which thing you feel the Lord has delivered you from or led you out of or shown you to be not in accord with His mind, you must not allow your feeling toward that thing to touch that child of God.

Our attitude toward a child of God is to be the love of God for His children as His children wherever they are, and there are children of God in some extraordinary places and in things which may be unthinkable to us. You and I have to recognize children of God wherever they are, in whatever they are, and keep the street intact -- one street, one thoroughfare. We walk with children of God as they walk with the Lord because they are children of God.

Satan's business is to try and make that impossible and to split up this street into a thousand highways and byways and cul-de-sacs. It is true! He is fighting against this all the time, and there is nothing too sacred for him. The tragic, painful, grievous story of the Church is just this -- the story of Satan's mischief in dividing the Lord's people.