THE PROVISION IS FOR THE END AS WELL AS FOR THE BEGINNING

^[p. 270] THE PROVISION IS FOR THE END AS WELL AS FOR THE BEGINNING

I feel that if we were truly alive to the grievous fact of the Lord’s rejection from the earth, we should see that the man here and the place where that man is must be abandoned. I have been tracing how we are drawn away step by step from everything here, until we are conscious of our union with Him where He is.... If you begin with the Lord He assures your heart that He will maintain you to the end. The preparation is not merely to undertake, but for the entire history of the work. The manna was given for the entire day. The provision of His grace is for the end of the undertaking as well as for the beginning. If one undertakes anything without the Lord, the sooner it is discontinued the better.

How little we can foresee the trials which are often at hand! ... The more our hearts are drawn to another scene, the more are we prepared to find nothing here to attract us. We are attracted first to the heavenly scene, and then the thing — or the one — that would make this world less of a desert is removed. Your life is indeed a lonely one, but surely the more lonely you are here, the less hindered you are in enjoying Him whose presence is fulness of joy: Never less alone than when alone. May you be drawn into it more and more. We know the Lord first in the place of our misery, and we can say, “My beloved is mine and I am his”. Then we know Him in the glory where all is of God, an entirely new order of things; then we are transformed into moral correspondence to His glory. Many never reach the second because they do not in faith reach to God’s side — to see that He was glorified by a Man — His own Son bearing the judgment on man, so that it is God’s satisfaction and glory by faith apprehended, and not merely the relief of one’s own conscience.

The Lord comfort you much. Death prepares us for the deep things of God.