From Watchman Nee's "The Spiritual Man" describing the soulish Christian:
Unlike spiritual Christians, who seek not so much the explanation as the experience of being one with God, these believers look diligently for an understanding in their mind. They like to argue and to reason. Failure of their life experience to catch up with their ideal is not what worries them; it is their inability to understand this lack of spiritual experience which troubles them! They conjecture that knowing mentally is possessing experientially. This is a tremendous deception.
And the number of such Christians today is legion. And I myself used to be extremely zealous for all things doctrinal without really knowing how to experience a life of union with Christ. I will go further and note how such soulish Christians even take pains to discourage others of even seeking experience of the inner life because "we don't want to elevate experience above Scripture". And so they live in the realm of intellect mostly. How sad.
But let's not suggest that the problem is the teaching or doctrine itself. God forbid! No, the problem lay in our blindness to how to enter into a transformed heart. We are tempted to think that the Christian life is just a matter of knowing the Christian thing to do and then just do it. Hence, WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) bracelets to remind us of this. I will say that a person could do a whole lot worse than WWJD. It's not awful but it isn't the Christian life. It's apeing the Christian life. And so many Christians never enter into living by the Spirit.
Andrew Murray in his book, Dying to Self: A Golden Dialogue, gives commentary on a William Law book on the Spirit of Love and talks about how deceptive it is to have clear understanding and agreement with good scriptural truth and think that one is "in the good of it". The book uses a method of teaching where dialogue between two people is given and then Murray gives commentary on what was said. The two persons are named Eusebius and Theogenes:
Eusebius. Now, proceed as you please to lay open all my defects, in the Spirit of Love; for I am earnestly desirous of being set right in so important a matter.
Theogenes. Let me first observe to Theophilus, that I am afraid the matter is much worse with me than it is with you. For though this doctrine seems to have got all my heart, as it is a doctrine; yet I am continually thrown out of it in practice, and find myself as daily under the power of my old tempers and passions as I was before I was so full of this doctrine.
Eusebius cannot understand what Theogenes means. He has accepted the teaching so heartily, and feels so ready to live it out, that he cannot imagine what is lacking. He has never learnt that one may be full of the doctrine of love, and yet without its spirit. He does not know that all teaching about spiritual truth is only a finger-post pointing the way to something that has to be purchased at a great price, and that all the pleasure the teaching gives is only to lure us on to pay the price needed to secure the treasure.
Murray goes further in elucidating the other means of having truth engraved upon the heart. By the Living Word:
In all education there are two ways of leading men in the path of truth and virtue. The one is by outward instruction and authority, seeking to inculcate self-control, to foster habits, and to waken desires. The other is by inspiration, when the teacher is able to breathe into his pupil the very disposition that animates himself. God deals no otherwise in the education of His people or the individual Christian. First came the law to prepare the way; then came grace and truth, the power and reality of the Divine life in Christ Jesus. In the individual believer the process is the same. The new birth brings him as a child into a state of grace in which he is shown what the stature of the perfect man in Christ is, is taught to desire and to strive after it, and is led on to expect and receive it. The deadly mistake in the life of most Christians is, that they rest content with the preparatory stage, and either do not believe in the prospect of spiritual maturity that is held out, or are not willing to pay the price needed to obtain it.
Law makes very clear how we are to regard this preparatory stage. On the one hand, it is imperfect and not to be rested in, however delightful its glimpses and foretastes of the better state; on the other, it is necessary, even indispensable to perfection. He points out how the Scriptures have their great value from this double point of view. While they teach and discipline and strengthen and influence us, they always point away from themselves to a salvation which they cannot give, but is only to be had from God Himself. Their teaching only serves to direct us to what they cannot give us, to lead us to Him who gives the true spiritual teaching. "They direct us to what is better than themselves, that can be the true life, light, spirit, and power of holiness in us.”
In answer to the scruple that this appears to derogate from Scripture, we are reminded of the difference between Christ, the living Word, and the letter of Scripture. We are told that this is the very way to exalt Scripture, when we own it, to be the faithful and only direction to Him who is the true Light of men. Just as the highest honor a disciple of John the Baptist could confer on his teacher was to leave him and go to Christ, so the Scriptures, the more we study and rejoice in them, will only have their full effect upon us, as they daily point us away to Christ. They can awaken us to desire and obedience and diligence and faith; it is Christ Himself whom faith receives, who becomes within us the Life and the Light of our souls.
Blessed is the man who uses diligently the means of grace and submits faithfully to all the teaching of the word, and gratefully accepts all the refreshings of his minority as a training for the life and the work of his spiritual manhood. Let us use all outward instruction as the guide to that which it ever points to””the birth of the Spirit of Love within us.
There is a solemn and very urgent need of applying all this to our daily Bible-reading, and to all the preaching we hear. It is possible to be most diligent, and even successful in our Bible study, and yet to miss the real blessing it is meant to bring. Scripture ever points us away from itself to the Living Word, Christ Jesus, who waits to be formed within us, and to the Blessed Spirit who is within us, and is alone able to make what we read or hear "truth in the inward part.” The Holy Spirit, by whose inspiration the Word was written, and by whose inspiration alone the Word can become life within us, who, as the Spirit of Truth, is Himself the Truth, the Power, the Life of all that is in the word, dwells within you. Turn with each thought of Divine things, with each word of God you would fain spiritually apprehend, turn inward and wait quietly, in the faith that the true Divine Teacher can make it true to you, can make it live in you. Let your heart open to Him in the quiet confession of the insufficiency of your understanding, in the quiet faith of His hidden but sure and almighty teaching. So will you find truth and grace, and all goodness, not by human thought and feeling, but by the birth and power of a Divine life within you, giving you the very things, the actual realities of what the word speaks of.
-Daniel