A man does not get converted without having conviction of sin.  When that conviction of sin comes, and his eyes are opened, he learns to be afraid of his sin, and to flee from it to Christ, and to accept Christ as a mighty deliverer.  But a man needs a second conviction of sin; a believer must be convicted of his peculiar sin.  The sins of an unconverted man are different from the sins of a believer.  An unconverted man, for instance, is not ordinarily convicted of the corruption of his nature; he thinks principally about external sins,—­“I have sworn, been a liar, and I am on the way to hell.”  He is then convicted for conversion.  But the believer is in quite a different condition.  His sins are far more blamable, for he has had the light and the love and the Spirit of God given to him.  His sins are far deeper.  He has striven to conquer them and he has grown to see that his nature is utterly corrupt, that the carnal mind, the flesh, within him, is making his whole state utterly wretched.  When a believer is thus convicted by the Holy Spirit, it is specially his life of unbelief that condemns him, because he sees that the great guilt connected with this has kept him from receiving the full gift of God’s Holy Spirit.  He is brought down in shame 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.