DESIRE IS NOT POWER
DESIRE IS NOT POWER
It is not in a moment, after a period of no restraint, that one can, however great and true one’s desires and conviction, attain to habitual self-restraint. You must not think that because you are enlightened, and have tasted of what is of God, that you can act according to it, except as you are dependent on His Spirit. Taste is not power, though it makes one desire the power and the privilege of maintaining and enjoying it. I am glad your taste has been awakened and deepened, but you must now avoid what will be unsuited to it, and you must walk in dependence on the Lord, or the old influences will have their way. We often suppose that because we have a true desire, we express the nature of it in our ways; the very desiring a good thing deceives one, as if that were enough. I am not objecting to good desires, but the sluggard desireth and hath nothing. There must be known power from the Lord to give effect and expression to the desires.
[p. 232] It is not enough that you have secured a piece of land where there is a gold mine; you secure it because you like the gold and desire it; but now, in order to make the gold fit for use, you must get rid of the soil and the rock in yourself which prevents the gold becoming current coin. Now that you know what gold is, you refuse and put away everything that is not gold; and the more really you desire it, the more carefully and earnestly do you set yourself to remove everything that is not gold. You have thought that because you had a taste for what is divine that there was no more soil or rock to encumber it; but, on the contrary, your work must now be to clear away that which you have spared heretofore, and to cultivate in your heart the vein of light and truth which the Lord has caused to be there; and as you do, you will be enabled to meet all demands in pure grace, and not in the mere tinsel of educated civility.
The Lord teach you to depend on Him, cleaving to Him with purpose of heart, and you will find, what the rich man of this world never knows, that the more true gold you use, the more you will possess.