and confusion of face, and he begins to cry: "Woe is me, for I am undone. I
have heard of God by the hearing of the ear; I have known a great deal of
Him and preached about Him, but now mine eye seeth Him." God comes near
him. Job, the righteous man, whom God trusted, saw in himself the deep sin
of self and its righteousness that he had never seen before. Until this
conviction of the wrongness of our carnal state as believers comes to each
one of us; until we are willing to get this conviction from God, to take
time before God to be humbled and convicted, we never can become spiritual
men.

Then comes the third mark, which is that out of the carnal state into the
spiritual is only one step. One step; oh, that is a blessed message I bring
to you--it is only one step. I know many people will refuse to admit that
it is only one step; they think it too little for such a mighty change. But
was not conversion only one step?

So it is when a man passes from carnal to spiritual. You ask if when I talk
of a spiritual man I am not thinking of a man of spiritual maturity, a
real saint, and you say: "Does that come in one day? Is there no growth in
holiness?" I reply that spiritual maturity cannot come in a day. We can not
expect it. It takes growth, until the whole beauty of the image of Christ
is formed in a man. But still I say that it needs but one step for a man
to get out of the carnal life into the spiritual life. It is when a
man utterly breaks with the flesh; when he gives up the flesh into the
crucifixion death of Christ; when he sees that everything about it is
accursed and that he can not deliver himself from it; and then claims the
slaying power of Christ's cross within him,--it is when a man does this and
says: "This spiritual life prepared for me is the free gift of my God in
Christ Jesus," that he understands how one step can bring him out of the
carnal into the spiritual state.