APPROPRIATING WHAT IS STORED UP
APPROPRIATING WHAT IS STORED UP
It is a great thing to have a right taste. But one may have the right taste for a long time before one is able to obtain that which suits and ministers to one’s right taste - like a bird in a nest, with a true and constant appetite for the right kind of food, but as yet unable to provide for itself.
I feel sure you would be happier if you were free and able to provide from your own hive that which would feed and cherish the new nature in you. You feel a want, and while ministry in a measure supplies it, what you have is not reproductive. It would not suit bees to have no honey stored up - to be always hunting for it when they needed it. They gather it in the summer time, in the time of favour, that they may have it in the winter in days of retirement and captivity. There is the gathering time, but it is also the storing time [p. 499] and then follows the reproduction, the time for the chewing of the cud, which is more fully and deeply appropriating all that one has stored up.
Therefore solitude is often our happiest time. It is the honest and true heart, that having heard the word of God keeps it, and brings forth fruit with patience. Food is to make you grow to a state in which you are able to provide for yourself. Then you enjoy food - ministry - all the more, but it is not so much for growth as for the ability to be down here for Christ.
Your enjoyment then is not only in taking in food, as a child does, or like a young bird - it is using the strength which you gain by the food - or ministry - to work for Him, or to fly to Him. Your own heart is in the hive, the store. Christ is the supply - you are filled every morning with enough to last for the day.
The habit of looking for a text to solace us is not to be commended. Any scripture which opens out God to me, or that explains to me something more of Christ, is blessed; but it is Himself alone, the knowledge of God in Him that can alone give me my true place or power in this evil world, where He has walked Himself.