Aksel Smith (Excerpt From a Message)

After you have been baptized with the Holy Spirit, He will lead you into the fellowship of the sufferings of Christ, so that you can be conformed to His death. The self-life will be increasingly surrendered into the death of Christ in the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, so that the life of Christ can be revealed in your body to the same extent. However, many people in these days declare that the entire self-life is gone after you have received the baptism of the Spirit. Many people are deceived by these false teachers, living in an imaginary holiness in which they have no use for either the cross, exhortations, or the blood as a way of cleansing (only as a preserving power), for they say the self-life is completely gone! Yet they do not manage to live according to this lofty confession, which can hardly be loftier, with the result that “they fall in their spirit,” as they call it. But then all they have to do is seek a new fullness, a new portion. We see many souls around who have fallen prey to this deception; they have a lofty confession together with a seared conscience. They have excluded all acknowledgment with the doctrine that all self-life is gone. In reality, they themselves, and others see that life and doctrine are in complete disagreement, and the whole thing can only be hypocrisy. However, they have sold themselves to modern views and don’t have the courage to break with them. Therefore they seek a new fullness of the Spirit on top of a bad life. This doctrine is an opening for all kinds of spiritual errors and satanic deceptions. The end will be destruction, as Paul says about the enemies of the cross of Christ. Phil. 3:18-19. The doctrine is from Satan, and the fact that many preachers wrap it up in beguiling words makes it so much more dangerous.

A humble soul acknowledges that he is what he is. When God reveals something in his life that is not right, he attributes it to the old self-life (it cannot possibly be part of the new life) and through the cross he dies to all these things. This death process is the fellowship in the sufferings of Christ. We have been baptized with the Spirit in order to lay our life down.