Austin-Sparks Written Not With Ink

“Written Not With Ink”

by T. Austin-Sparks

These messages were given in 1957 by T. Austin-Sparks at a conference in Taiwan. Chinese believers subsequently prepared transcripts from recordings of the meetings. It would appear that the audio recordings are no longer available. The manuscript was sent to us by Mr Herald Hsu in 2011. The spoken form has been retained, however, due to English not being the transcriber’s first language, the messages have required some editing to convert them into correct English. The editor has also added a book title, chapter titles, headings and italics, as these were not in the original transcripts.

There have been some great letter writers in history, but I do not believe that any letters ever written have had a greater influence in the history of this world than the letters in the New Testament. These letters have been read by an increasing number of people for nearly two thousand years. All over the world, this very day, these letters are being read out, and many lives have been transformed by these letters. The Holy Spirit spoke out of one of them and He said, “But remember, you also are a letter. You are an epistle of Christ, you are not written with ink, you are written by the Holy Spirit; you are not a table of stone, you have a heart of flesh and it is in your heart that the Holy Spirit writes Christ so that all who read your life, read Christ.” The Holy Spirit is a great letter writer, but He is a great letter writer in another way, and what these words say is that the letter of the Holy Spirit is people. They are not written with ink on paper or stone. The Holy Spirit writes letters in human hearts.