SPIRITUAL SLEEP, DISCIPLINE, ETC.

SPIRITUAL SLEEP, DISCIPLINE, ETC.

It is often a great pleasure to me to recall your earliest days, at least when I was first acquainted with you. You were walking then up to the tip-top of your light. Except one does, one’s conscience is not happy, nor is the Spirit ungrieved; one is asleep, like the bride in Song of Songs 5, not lifeless, but inactive in the right direction. Sleep is self-composedness. I can notice in myself when I was asleep. There is an activity, but not the activity of progress; it is to regain the spot where divine light had set one. I think one may go on for years asleep in this spiritual sense. If the top shoot is nipped there can be no progress until a new growth surmounts the blight. His heart never changed, but He does change His manner when my condition or association obliges Him to do so.

I hope that you are better; you seem to have suffered much. It is most interesting to me to see the Father’s discipline. I do not speak of His discipline because of unfaithfulness, but the discipline to help us on; we who live are always delivered unto death. It works in this way: your heart has been occupied with Christ — attracted divinely to Him. Now corresponding to this attraction God (you could not do it, a monk thinks he can) removes something in you naturally which would impede the full vigour of this divine gain — the vigour of the new — the inner man....

The fact of there being a rejected but victorious Man in heaven, the source of everything to His own on the earth, is a wonderful reality. This comes out with Stephen, while in John’s gospel all that He is on the earth, and while He is on the earth, is recounted to us, but all from Himself; John never touches, like Paul, my home circle as in Ephesians, or my manner of life among men as in Romans; he never, as far as I see, goes outside of my divine relation to Him and to His own here.