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Wednesday October 21, 2026

Vessels of wrath or vessels of mercy

“It came as a revelation to me when I saw what I knew well already of the redeemed–that the Holy Spirit lives in us; but then I also read in 1 John 4:4 that if the Holy Spirit is in the redeemed, there is also a spirit in the unredeemed. ‘Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.’ And then when two verses later, John plainly names them: ‘Hereby know we the Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of error.’ So the Spirit of error, the Satanic person, is in us before we are Christ’s. That was new light to me, and a new orientation. Most of us think of ourselves as just our unredeemed selves until Christ comes in and takes over. We do not realize that we have working in us that ‘prince of the power of the air, the Spirit that worketh in the children of disobedience’ which Paul says is true of all of us (Ephesians 2:2). He has so concealed and disguised himself in us as unbelievers, though it says that it is the god of this world in us who has blinded our minds, that we just think we are our independent selves. But the Truth is that all humanity are vessels. We are containers, and it depends which God is in the vessel. In Romans it says we are either ‘vessels of wrath’ or ‘vessels of mercy’: those who either contain the god through whom wrath is our portion, or those who contain the Savior-God through whom mercy comes to us. This greatly simplifies salvation, for it is merely change of Gods, not change of the vessels which contain Him. Or to use that other great illustration, we are either branches of the false vine or of the true. ‘I am the true vine,’ said Jesus, therefore there must be a false one.”

–Taken from Who Am I?

Pages 47-48