DISCIPLINE IS TO REMOVE HINDRANCES

DISCIPLINE IS TO REMOVE HINDRANCES

I see many nowadays who are not entering the harbour fully freighted, and all because they are not walking in spiritual activities while in this death-period, for the ruling passion is strong in death. If you have not died with Christ, death is before you, and the greatest death must necessarily be where you most like to live, and there the ruling passion is. No one has really died with Christ where the ruling passion is fostered, because it is there that death must begin, for there the tenacity of life is greatest. Whatever of yourself you try most to spare, that is the stronghold of your natural will, and hence you will find in all God’s ways with you that He cuts at the root of that particular taste or prepossession, and you can say, ‘What I feared greatly has come upon me’. One is mortified, disappointed, or bereaved. Why? Because the working of the natural will was most active in the quarter in which it was checked, and there death is most felt. It is often admitted as a doctrine that we have died with Christ by those who are not at all willing to be so dead as to be only a vessel for Christ’s use — to accept death to everything of the natural will. This is bearing about in our body the dying of Jesus. If any one studies and reviews the history and manner of God’s ways with him from the first, he will see that God has always been subjecting him to checks. Blisters rise most where they ^[p. 82] are most needed, and the blister is to draw the inflammation to the surface. What a life of disappointment Jacob had! But at last he worships God, leaning on the top of his staff, loosened in heart from all here, and thus he had an abundant entrance. If he had studied the ways of the Lord with him, he would have recalled the irritated feelings which he had indulged in when he was disappointed. Whenever you are vexed — mortified, there your will is active. You may have sorrow at the same time, which is a very different exercise. If you are vexed, your self-love is touched. When you have sorrow, it is because you have lost what was dear to you. In the one case you are made little of, in the other you are bereaved. In the one, you are disappointed; in the other, you are in grief. The discipline or mode of dying in each is widely different, as well as its effect. The discipline in the first exercise is to reduce your self-importance, and thus the blister was necessary, it removes the inflammation. The vexation or disappointment arises from wounded pride; you thought you were entitled to favour. In the other case, it is sorrow, because you have lost what your heart valued. In this discipline you learn that Christ has not been enough for you, and hence is disclosed the obstacle to your progress, the stone before the wheel, in order that you may be more fully a vessel for Christ here. The end of the discipline in both is, that you may so accept death that every hindrance may be removed, and that you should be here wholly for Christ.