"I DWELL AMONG MINE OWN PEOPLE"
“I DWELL AMONG MINE OWN PEOPLE”
I assure you I have no confidence in transplanting. Single trees suit the park; but isolation does not suit the saints in this world. As to their spiritual progress I am all for solid squares. I date all my sorrows and failures from transplanting, and living at a distance from the basin and the towel of my brethren. We belong to the body of [p. 167] Christ, and for happiness, usefulness and strength, the more we keep together corporately the better. “I dwell among mine own people” (2 Kings 4: 13) is my advice to every saint. I think you are too ready to go into the water, and I feel the anxiety of the hen-mother about you. As to ———— God has one way for you and quite another way for her. You must not go into the water in order to know something of her real life, and I think you have quite enough of real life to teach you all that is required for the harder scenes of real life. If people learn to swim in shallow water they can swim in the deepest, and as is well known better in the deepest!
You do not go to Egypt, but you go to the Philistines; they were strangers and stragglers who settled in Canaan, and like Isaac you never get on rightly or happily until you get free of them again. You have two troublesome things to manage, mind and conscience. When the mind rules there is “a calm” and in a calm a collision; when the conscience rules there is a storm and you are disquieted. When your mind is engaged the conscience is becalmed, the mind acts and baffles the conscience until there is a collision, then the conscience is up, and there is a storm, and you are unable to act as your conscience suggests because you have allowed your mind in the shape of taste or something to be your master, and it will not be master and servant at the same moment. You must walk with your conscience, fearing, as any good mariner does, a “calm”, a lull. Insist on your mind being servant to your conscience. Speak what you know you ought, though you speak only like a foreigner, betraying that it is not your native tongue, but practice will improve you. Peace, rest, and strength through His grace be yours.