The High Calling

If God has called you to be really like Jesus in all your spirit, He would draw you unto a life of crucifixion and humility, and put you on such demands of obedience, that He will not allow you to follow other Christians, and in many ways He will seem to let other people do things which He will not let you do.

Other Christians and ministers who seem very religious and useful may push themselves and pull wires, and work schemes to carry out their plans, but you cannot do it, and if you attempt it, you will meet with such failure and rebuke from the Lord as to make you sorely penitent.

Others can brag on themselves, on their work, on their success, on their writings but the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing, and if you begin it, He will lead you into some deep mortification that will make you despise yourself and all your good works.

Others will be allowed to succeed in making great sums of money, or have a legacy left to them, or in having luxuries, but God may supply you daily because He wants you to have something far better than gold, and that is a helpless dependence on Him, and that He may have the privilege of providing for your needs day by day out of the unseen treasury.

The Lord may let others be honored, and put forward, and keep you hid away in obscurity, because He wants to produce some choice, fragrant fruit for His coming glory, which can only be produced in the shade.

God will let others be great, but keep you small, He will let others do the work for Him and get the credit for it, but He will make you work and toil without knowing how much you are doing, and then to make your work still more precious He will let others take the credit for the work which you have done. And this work will make your reward ten times greater when Jesus comes.

The Holy Spirit will put a strict watch on you, with a jealous love, and rebuke you for little words or feelings or for wasting your time, which other Christians never seem distressed over.

So make up your mind that God is an infinite Sovereign, and has a right to do as He pleases with His own, and He will not explain to you a thousand things which may puzzle your reasons in His dealing with you.

God will take you at your word, and if you absolutely sell yourself to be His slave, He will wrap you up in His jealous love and let other people say and do many things that you cannot do or say.

Settle it forever, that you are to deal directly with the Holy Spirit, and that He is to have the privilege of tying your tongue or chaining your hand or closing your eyes in ways that others are not dealt with.

Now when you are so possessed with the living God that you are, in your secret heart pleased and delighted over this peculiar, private jealous guardianship and management of the Holy Spirit over your life, you will have found the entrance to Heaven.
-Author Unknown-

"And follow hard toward the mark, for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." Philippians 3:14