DEATH IS MOST FELT WHERE IT IS HARDEST TO DIE

^[p. 211] DEATH IS MOST FELT WHERE IT IS HARDEST TO DIE

I see so many nowadays, who are not entering the harbour fully freighted, and all because they are not cultivating the activities of life while in this death period; and the ruling passion is strong in death. If one has not died, death is before one, and the greatest death would necessarily be where one would most like to live, and where that is, the ruling passion is. No one is really dead while the ruling passion is yet alive, because it is there that death must first be felt and where there is the greatest buoyancy and tenacity of life. Whatever of yourself you try most to spare, is that which is your strongest hold on life, and hence you will find that in all God’s ways with us, He cuts at the root of that particular passion or pre-possession which we especially desire to spare. One is mortified, another disappointed, a third is in sorrow. Why? Because the working of the natural life was most active in the quarter in which it is checked, and there death is most felt. It is often admitted that we have died with Christ by those who are not at all willing to be so dead as to be only a mere vessel for Christ’s use - to accept death to everything of nature’s life. This is carrying about in our body the dying of Jesus.

If any one will study and review the history and manner of God’s ways with him from the first, he will see that God has always been subjecting him to blisters where they most rise, because there they are most wanted. There must be inflammation or the blister would not rise, and the blister is really to draw the inflammation to the surface. If there were no inflammation the blister would be harmless and painless. What a life of mortification Jacob had! At last he worships, leaning on the top of his staff, having nothing at all here, and he a worshipper, and thus he has an abundant entrance. If he had studied the ways of the ^[p. 212] Lord with him, he could not but have noticed the vexed feelings which he had when things were so ordered for him. Wherever I am vexed - mortified, there there is quick flesh. I may have sorrows besides, which is a very different thing. If I am vexed, my self-love is touched. When I have sorrow, it is because I lost something dear to me. In the one case I am made little of, in the other I am bereaved. In the one, I consider I do not get my due, and in the other I have lost what was really mine. The discipline or the mode of dying with respect to each is therefore widely different and the effect different too. In the one case it is what I am to myself that I feel, and in the other what others are to me. The discipline in the first case is always to reduce the sense of my self-importance, and the irritation, like that of a blister, though it does not of itself remove the malady, yet shews the seat of it, and one who is walking with the Lord in the light, must see that his vexation proceeds from wounded pride; whereas in the other case, it is not vexation because of my self-importance, but sorrow because of the importance of others to me, and in the discipline of losing them, I learn that Christ has not been enough for me, and I learn too where death is necessary for me, in order that I may be simply a vessel for Christ. The end of the discipline in either case is that we may so accept death as not to give way to either vexation or sorrow, but be wholly for Christ.