The greatest and most essential influence in a Christian’s life is that of the Holy Spirit. He is the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of God, the Spirit breathed forth within God’s infinite life by Father and Son together as One. . . The Holy Spirit must make anyone who really responds to what He offers God-like. . . On the other hand, we do not seem to be very much like God. We do all kinds of things that God would not do even as a man. We do things Jesus would not dream of doing, things He flatly refused to do when He was on earth. We commit sin. We do less good than we could. We sometimes lose our trust in God to some extent. We give way to moods and let our moods affect other people too. We are selfish and self-indulgent. We have obvious, and long-standing faults. . . The Spirit of God has not entirely penetrated us; we are not completely under His influence. . .
There are various reasons why we are not as perfect as we should be if we were to let the Holy Spirit rule over us, or rather let Jesus rule over us by the power of His Holy Spirit. We suffer from the effects of original sin. We suffer from the after-effects of our actual sins. And we are exposed by God’s own will to limited attacks from the devil tempting us. In other words, we are at present living in a state of conflict. Christian life is a battle, and the battle is not finally won until the end of our life. As long as we live we have to fight for God and fight against the devil . . . and against our lower self. These are the fights to which the Holy Spirit, Who enables us to believe in God’s truth, leads us, just as He led Our Lord into the desert to be tempted. It follows that although we should regret our failures in God’s service, we should not regret the fact that we have to fight with temptation. . .
The Holy Spirit is all Love. This not only means that He loves us more than we can possibly conceive, but that when we are under His influence, we love too. If we grow in love, we grow in the possession of the Holy Spirit, or rather His possession of us grows more complete. The more we open ourselves to the action of the Holy Spirit, the more do we love God and men. On the other hand, the more we fail in charity to God and to men, the more do we oppose and grieve the Spirit of God. . .
Since the Holy Spirit is love, and we want to be filled with the Holy Spirit, we might take the view that it would be a good thing to make life simple by striving to keep one commandment only, the commandment to love. If we keep that commandment perfectly, we do in fact keep all the other commandments, but it is probably not a good idea to concentrate only on the commandment of love. This is certainly the most important commandment of all, and if we do not keep it, nothing else will in any way make up for it, but if we only think of loving God and other people, we may forget the battle that this involves against ourselves and against the devil.
If we want to sum up the whole Christian battle in the fewest commandments possible, in such a way that we have a practical rule of life, then I think we could reduce the ten commandments to two, one positive and the other negative: The first is “Thou shalt love,” the second “Thou shalt not covet.” The positive thing we have to do is to love. The negative thing we have to do is to get rid of desire for things on earth, for personal possession and enjoyment of them as exclusively our own. The reason why we need not only to love, but also to oppose desire for the things of this world, is that these desires do in fact prevent us from loving. Desire for personal possessions or influence, for our own sake, is directly opposed to love. Love is away from oneself, desire towards oneself. . .
We grow in holiness by making the right choices, and the fact that we do not advance in the spiritual life is due to making choices wrongly. When we are faced with any choice at all, we make our choice for some reason. There is some reason why we choose this thing rather than that, or why we do this thing rather than that, or why we stop doing something rather than going on with it. If we really want to be united to Our Lord, we must let the Holy Spirit move us to the right choice, to the one God wants us to make, although He will not force us. I suggest that we shall always allow the Holy Spirit to guide our choices if we make them all under the two commandments I mentioned just now. In other words, when you are faced with deciding to do or not to do something, make your decision with the determination to love and not to covet. . .
The devil gets at us in two ways, and when he gets his way with us, we turn away from the Holy Spirit. . . He gets at us by means of our desires . . . [i.e.] selfish desires, not the desire for God or for our neighbor’s welfare, of course. . . He also infiltrates our choices and decisions by means of fear. We often make our choices under the influence of desire, which inclines us to choose for our personal pleasure, but we also often fall under his influence by not choosing what we ought because of fear. . .
Use your free will to choose day by day in all the matters that involve choice or decision. Make these choices and these decisions by asking yourself two questions: What choice or decision would be in accordance with love? What choice or decision would be against my desires and fears? Ignore your desires deliberately, and ignore your fears deliberately, and face the thing love dictates with confidence in God alone and not in yourself. Let the Holy Spirit lead you as a free human being and as a child of God. Love opens the door to God; personal desires and fears open the door to Satan. If you want to be perfect, be led by love and resist desires and fears. How many things we do would be done differently if we followed this plan!
