I'm totally crushed in my spirit. I murmured "I can't go on" to the Lord. Physically I feel so weak.
The following writing from Jessie Penn Lewis has helped me understand God's process.
She writes..........
I remember once hearing it put so clearly
by one of God’s messengers. He drew a small circle to represent the heart, and
this lay in the centre of a large circle representing the whole man. God first
lays hold of the centre of the man, cleanses the heart, and takes the throne;
then when the Holy Spirit is in possession of the heart He applies the death of
Christ to the whole of the man, and makes room for His life from centre to
circumference. If you go on yielding to His blessed working, saying ‘Yes’ to God
in all the daily circumstances, your whole spirit, soul and body, will become
God-possessed and under the control of the Holy Spirit dwelling in your spirit.
No hindrance now to stop the flow of His life, and the fragrance of His
presence ever reaching to all around, in love and peace and joy.
We are glad to have the grosser forms of
self nailed to the Cross, but the Lord desires to get us where the whole of our
personality is possessed of Him. We can know immediate deliverance from the
power of sin, but it is only as we yield continuously to the Holy Spirit day by
day that He can bring us into full conformity to Christ in His death and
resurrection.
The last thing that we contend for is our spiritually-religious-self. We fight desperately hard to keep an experience, but to die means to let everything go, for in death we can hold on to nothing. It is then that we become pliable as Ezekiel was pliable, with no desires outside the will of God. We have nothing left to fight for. We die to our religious views, our old ways, and habits of thought, our certain methods of action, and even all the conscious experiences of the Presence of God, so that we possess God Himself rather than gifts from God. We surrender the ‘gift’ for the Giver.
But when we have surrendered all, He
returns all purified and held in Himself for Himself. As long as we wanted to
keep even a ‘blessed experience’, there was a mist between the soul and God. If
we surrender even the manifested presence of God, we become rooted and fixed in
GOD. Not that He wants to take all away, but He wants the surrender, that He
might reveal Himself as an abiding reality. All is now stilled, all tossing
over, and the soul calm in God. May He teach us what this means, and reveal
Himself to the stilled soul! Yes, even the Bible may seem to be a sealed book
for a time, and prayer becomes difficult, until we learn to sit silent at His
feet and wait for Him to speak.
If God is taking any of us through this
“valley of deep darkness” (Psa. 23 v4), let us trust Him in the dark (Isa. 1
v10). Do not try to understand, but say, “Lord, I trust Thee to reveal Thyself,
to open the Scriptures to me, to teach me to pray”. Let everything pass from
you that does not touch your personal need. Do not make any effort to grasp ‘truth’,
and to take through your mind, but let God reveal to you all He wants you to
know, and leave the rest.
Let us see, in the picture lesson, how God
can meet the ‘dried-up’ souls that He Himself has been getting ready by
bringing them into this condition.
The messenger, carried in the Spirit,
prophesies, “O ye dry (souls) hear the word of the Lord”. Look over the valley,
what a picture of helplessness, silence and death. Then there comes a “noise”,
a shaking (v7), the living Word causes the movement. Ezekiel looked on and
beheld “the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them”.
He only gave the message, God did the work. This is a picture of real
Spirit-service when God uses us; not we trying to ‘use’ God! When we know we
have His message, we can stand and dare to give it, knowing that the Lord will
confirm with ‘signs following’.
The Spirit-sent messenger at His inner
command, now calls upon the Spirit. “Come from the four winds, O breath, and
breathe upon these slain, that they may live” (v9). Behold the wondrous scene,
the blessed outcome. A resurrection army of souls brought out of death into
life through union with the Risen Lord.
Now let us see the divine interpretation.
We are not left to decide what this means. “Son of Man, these bones are the
whole house of Israel” (v11). “Dried”, “lost”, “cut off”. Primarily true of
Israel after the flesh, how true about the spiritual Israel, the Christian
Church; how true of individuals. God brings you to the place where you can say,
“I cannot pray, I cannot take that class, I used to be such an active worker,
but now I feel useless, stupid, helpless, with all my strength gone”. Do you
get a glimpse of what God is doing with you? He has brought to nought the
‘creaturely activity’, that the energy of God may come into you in resurrection
power and abundant life.
As God thus deals with you, you must take
heed that you rely upon the blood sprinkled upon the Mercy Seat, to guard you
from the oppression of the enemy; and that you do not give Satan any advantage
by failing in your practical duties, and in the service of God. Maybe you are
bewildered at what is happening to you. But see what Daniel was told of the
promised Messiah. He was to be “cut off, but not for Himself” (Dan. 9 v26). God
wants you to see yourself “cut off” with Christ in His death, “cut off” from
the old life, the old strength and power (Ezek. 37 v1). Has He brought you to
see the deep mystery of the Cross, that you have died in Him? “Cut off” in
Christ’s death, “cut off” with Christ, from your friends, from your old work,
“cut off” from that blessed experience even of the ‘Garden of Eden’; all the
fruitfulness apparently gone, the beauty, and the power. He is leading you on
to know the Lord.
When the Lord Jesus died on the Cross the
Father hid His face from Him; it seemed as if He were “cut off” from God. Yes!
it seemed so, and He cried, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” One of
the last and keenest things to surrender to God is His conscious presence. We
are ready to go through fire and water with the manifestation of His presence;
but when this is surrendered all seems dark.
“Bones dried”, “hope lost”, “cut off”, this
is the scene before us! Remember how the disciples left all to follow Him, but
they recoiled when He spoke of the path way of the Cross. They could let the
Lord go to Calvary; they could not consent to lose the visible presence of
their Friend. They could not understand His words, “I will see you again”. Do
you not understand that when the soul reaches this point, there comes the Walk
of Bare Faith? Cut off from yourself, from the old strength, from the old life,
from old feelings, old companions, from dwelling in experiences, to dwell in
God, this is God’s purpose for you (Col. 3 v3).
Israel had come to despair. How blessed the word of the Lord, “I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves” (37 v12-14). Turn to a few other passages to illustrate this. See Job 10 v6-21. See how David cried that he was ‘cut off’ in Psalm 88 v5-16. Then Jonah in Jonah 2 v1-6, and Isaiah also in Isaiah 6 v5, “I am cut off”.
- Roger
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