As you listen to a person talking, his word will show whether his
has cut himself off from fellowship. He has not learned any lesson of the Body and knows nothing of what fellowship is. Someone may have been a Christian for eight or ten years, and yet you could never touch his spirit through his speech. Such is a closed spirit. We must try to touch that person's inner man, for the spirit of him who is beyond touch constitutes a big problem in the Church. It is deemed in the world that the more unfathomable you are the better. This is not to be so with Christians. The spirit of a Christian needs to be open so that he can fellowship with others.
4. Is the person abnormal? As you listen to a person talking, his word will show whether his emotion is strong, his mind the dominant characteristic, or that he is very subjective. Although such a person may be particularly strong in some area, he is nonetheless a normal person. However, there are people with a strong mind or a rich emotion who are so aggressive that they become what can only be termed abnormal. The thought of such a person is crooked. He is abnormal, strange, extreme. Indeed, he is a devious person. His psychological constitution differs from that of ordinary people. Yet such people are not that rare to find. Among a hundred people, there will always be a few abnormal ones. Their thought and action are quite different from that of ordinary folk. They will always be against others.
Now their problem is so great that the ordinary way of contacting them will be of no avail in helping them. They need a special way of being dealt with. As a matter of fact, they must be dealt with very strictly because their constitution is so devious. If the ordinary way is used, you may exhort such a person twenty times and each time you will be disappointed, for his character has already become so deeply set and entrenched in him. Hence you must have your eyes especially wide open to judge if he is such a devious person indeed.
5. Is there any pretension? In discerning, you need to discover if that person is pretentious. A sanctimonious person can hardly make any progress before God for it appears he needs to be doubly dealt with by God. In an ordinary person, there is only the corrupted flesh present. But a hypocritical person adds a shell of falsehood to the corruption of his flesh. Now an ordinary person need only have his flesh dealt with. But a pretentious person must have not only his flesh dealt with; there must also be a dealing with that shell of falsehood he has: such as a false