Passion and Purity

I have been reading "Passion and Purity". Well, I seriously think its a very good book, can relate very well. And its not only sharing on how to have your love life placed under Christ's control, I realised that so much of the book is actually teaching us to surrender totally, lay prostrate at His feet and simply to wait and obey God's will. I'll like to do some typing, a chapter that though short, has left quite an impression on me.

Does God Want Everything?

God sifted men's hearts in Old Testament times.

The time came when God put Abraham to the test. "Abraham," he called, and Abraham replied, ""Here am I. " God said, "Take you son Isaac, you only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him as a sacrifice on one of the hills which I will show you." So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddle his ass... and set out...

God was still sifting hearts in New Testament times.

... A man came up and asked him, "Master, what good must I do to gain eternal life?" ... Jesus said to him, "If you wish to go the whole way, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and then you will have riches in heaven; and come, follow me."

No man is worthy of me who cares more for father of mother for me; no man is worthy of me who cares more for son or daughter; no man is worthy of me who does not take up his cross and walk in my footsteps. By gaining his life a man will lose it; by losing his life for my sake, he will gain it.

I count everything sheer loss, because all is far outweighed by the gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I did in fact lose everything. I count it so much garbage, for the sake of gaining Christ.

Great spiritual principles. Unarguable. To all of them, my intellect gave full consent. A giant of the faith like Abraham or Paul the apostle-- of course they had to be tested with great tests. I was only a college girl, trying to do well in my studies, praying for direction for my life, attracted to a very appealing man whose primary interest was in the Kingdom of God. Anything wrong with that?

"If you wish to go the whole way...." It was not to the intellect alone that the question came. My heart and my feelings were involved now, and I must give an answer. God was sifting me this time. Did I want to go the "whole way"? Yes, Lord. "Do you want to be worthy of Me? " Yes, Lord. "Do you want to know Christ Jesus as Lord?" Certainly, Lord.

In Lilias Trotter's beautifully illustrated book, Parables of the Cross, she describes the death life cycle of plants, which illustrates the spiritual processes that must go on in us if we are to die to self and live to God. In the love life, as well as in other areas:

The fair new petals must fall, and for no visible reason. No one seems enriched by the stripping.

And the first step into the realm of giving is a like surrender-- not manward but Godward: an utter yielding of our best. So long as our idea of surrender is limited to the renouncing of unlawful things, we have never grasped its true meaning: that is not worthy of the name for "no polluted thing" can be offered. (how true!)

The life boat lost on the Cross was not a sinful one-- the treasure poured forth there was God-given, God-blessed treasure, lawful and right to be kept" only that there was the life of the world at stake.

What kind of God is it who asks everything of us? The same God who "... did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all; and with this gift how can he fail to lavish upon us all he has to give?"
He gives all.
He asks all.

April 2-- I am seized with fear that my own will will be given place, and I will thus ruin my usableness for God. It would be easy to follow my feelings.. to interfere with the voice of the Lord when He says, "This is the way, walk ye in it."

I wanted to be loved. Nothing unusal about that, nothing to separate my generation from any other.

But I wanted something deeper. Down among all the foolishness in my diary, thoughts like chaff which the wind of the Spirit can drive away, there was some wheat. There was an honest-to-God longing for the "fixed heart" that the collect speaks of. A thousand question cluttered my mind, the same ones I find today in the letters I receive. I had thought some of mine were new. My correspondents think the same. They aren't . But the question to preceed all others, which finally determines the course of our lives, is What do I really want? (thats the question to ask) Was it to love what God commands, in the words of the collect, and to desire what He promises? Did I want what I wanted, or did I want what He wanted, no matter what it might cost?

Until the will and the affections anre brought under the authority of Christ, we have not begun to understand, let alone to accept, His Lordship. The Cross, as it enters the love lfie, will reveal the heart's truth. My heart, I knew, would be forever a lonely hunter unless settled "where true joys are found."

One morning I was reading the story of Jesus' feeding of the five thousand. The disciples could find only five loaves of bread and two fishes. "Let me have them, " said Jesus. He asked for all. He took them, said the blessing, and broke them before He gave them out. I remembered what a chapel speaker, Ruth Stull of Peru had said: "If my life is broken when given to Jesus, it is because pieces will feed a multitude, while a loaf will satisfy only a little lad." (Amen! )