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NATURE WOOS AN IDEAL. THE SPIRIT SATISFIES THE HEART WITH CHRIST

Your conscience is never happy but as you act up to the faith of your soul. Your faith is assured that there is nothing like the presence and company of Christ for full, unbounded heart satisfaction. Your conscience is disturbed when you waver from this faith, and make trial of other things to fill your cup - the “wild gourds”, which only bring death into the pot (see 2 Kings 4). Why, with such an assured conviction of the fulness that is in Christ, do you turn to other things, as if you could derive from them any of that rest which you know is in Christ, and this though you are aware you have suffered in your spirit in consequence? I believe that it arises from your not distinguishing clearly between your natural and spiritual affections. The things of the Spirit of God are spiritually discerned; you are not sufficiently convinced that you must retire from the spiritual, by which you can only discern what is of Christ or have communion with Him, when the natural absorbs your attention. You do not fear the natural enough. The natural may not be wrong, but it diverts you from that line in which only you can enjoy the Lord. You love Him, and you have an admiration for Him; but what is the fact, as any disquietude or attraction will disclose to you? You know you have lost the comfort and support of His presence. Your conscience, as well as the void that is in your heart, tells you so. Now if you had no confidence in nature, two things would be the result: one, that you would fear and deprecate the natural, which diverts from the spiritual; and, secondly, you would not be exposed to the defeats from which you now suffer because you trust yourself too much. Natural affection seems harmless enough until it encounters an order of things which suits it, but does not suit what is heavenly. Many a one loved Jesus with a true child’s love, until his nature found out that there were other things which would suit his nature far better. What makes natural attachments so binding and unchangeable, is simply because one has only to do with nature, and one does not find in nature any one else so answering to one’s own ideal. Now with the Lord, though the natural may own admiration of Him, yet when that which is nature simply, with power to engage or attract it, offers, it strengthens nature in itself, and in that line which suits ^[p. 51] it; and, as this is the case, the Lord is felt as more unsuited, and in a little time oppressive, so that the conscience becomes troubled because of the forgetfulness of Him and the eager promotion of that which has displaced Him. The Lord has taught you very distinctly that you must place no confidence in your natural ideal; and He bars and checks it on every side, while He has given you to taste of the true in Himself; and His dealings with you are therefore to promote in you enlarged acquaintance with Himself - the only One for the new man, because the perfect One. Nature cannot reach this perfect One; it seeks its ideal, and cannot go beyond it. He checks this, as I have said, and gives you that which checks your nature, in order that you may in spirit enjoy Himself, and find that He can fill your heart and soul. When once you learn that this can be only in the Spirit, you will have reached a great gain; for then you will fear nature, not only because it is the flesh, but because it would divert you from the deep, overflowing blessedness known to your soul in Christ Jesus. The more your natural affections are denied, the “manifold more” will be given to you in Himself, even in the present time.

May the Lord lead you into His own joy, so that from Himself your cup may run over.

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