Others May, You Cannot
If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. (Matthew 16:24-25)
If God has called you to be truly like Jesus in all your spirit, He will draw you into a life of crucifixion and humility. He will put on you such demands of obedience that you will not be allowed to follow other Christians. In many ways, He seems to let other good people do things which He will not let you do.
Others who seem to be very religious and useful may push themselves, pull wires, and scheme to carry out their plans, but you cannot. If you attempt it, you will meet with such failure and rebuke from the Lord as to make you sorely penitent.
Others can brag about themselves, their work, their successes, their writings, but the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing. If you begin to do so, 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 having a legacy left to them, or in having luxuries, but God may supply you only on a day-to-day basis, because He wants you to have something far better than gold, a helpless dependence on Him and His unseen treasury.
The Lord may let others be honored and put forward while keeping you hidden in obscurity because He wants to produce some choice, fragrant fruit for His coming glory, which can only be produced in the shade.
God may let others be great, but keep you small. He will let others do a work for Him and get the credit, but He will make you work and toil without knowing how much you are doing. Then, to make your work still more precious, He will let others get the credit for the work which you have done; this to teach you the message of the Cross, humility, and something of the value of being cloaked with His nature.
The Holy Spirit will put a strict watch on you, and with a jealous love rebuke you for careless words and 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 that He may not explain to you a thousand things which may puzzle your reason in His dealings with you.
God will take you at your word. If you absolutely sell yourself to be His slave, He will wrap you up in a jealous love and let other people say and do many things that you cannot. Settle it forever; you are to deal directly with the Holy Spirit, He is to have the privilege of tying your tongue or chaining your hand or closing your eyes in ways which others are not dealt with. However, know this great secret of the Kingdom: When you are so completely possessed with the Living God that you are, in your secret heart, pleased and delighted over this peculiar, personal, private, jealous guardianship and management of the Holy Spirit over your life, you will have found the vestibule of heaven, the high calling of God.
The Bride’s Desire
“Catch us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines, for our vines have tender grapes.” (Song 2:15).
This is the Bride’s prayer that all the defects and faults connected with her life may be utterly removed, that she may have not only a personal fitness to meet her Lord, but also be found full of good fruit, unspoiled by blight from any earthly creature. Great, destructive savage beasts and serpents represent Satan and demons, but the fox is not such a savage beast, and especially little foxes, which are more like puppies and kittens, and full of play, for these represent not the vices of sin, but little shortcomings, little silly thoughts, or words, little negligences of prayer, of obedience, of right manners, of not doing good, little blemishes that spoil the bloom on the perfect ripe fruit.
The true saint cannot bear these little foxes that seem to other Christians so harmless, and yet they are sufficiently of the flesh to hinder the perfection of devotion, and that deep, constant communion of the heart with Christ, that marks the perfect ripening of all the graces. Though her Bridegroom is hid in those high clefts in the steep places, yet she knows He has power, through the Holy Spirit, to destroy those little foxes that hinder the full growth of the tender grapes.
“My beloved is mine, and I am His.” This verse opens to us another rich thought in this Love Song, and that is the mutual ownership between Christ and His saints. This intense passion of proprietorship is universal, and belongs to God and all His creatures, even to the lower animals, who will fight for the ownership of a grain of corn. Now, when Adam fell every normal instinct in the human soul was perverted and exaggerated, hence sin has been utterly filled with the passion for ownership, and made it the unspeakable curse of the world in covetousness. When we are regenerated and thoroughly purified from inward sin, this instinct of proprietorship is restored back to God, and then under the full baptism of the Spirit, and by a life of prayer, we are brought to that blessed place where we see and feel that God is our own, and especially He is our own in Christ, for it is only through the blessed Jesus that we can seize upon the living God, and appropriate Him as altogether ours. On the other hand, we belong to Christ by creation, and by redemption, and when He transforms us and fills us with Himself, we become still more His own, not only as a piece of property, but as joined with Him in His very life and graces and destiny. This expression occurs three times in this divine Song, and each time it is on a rising scale, containing a wonderful suggestion of the steps in this proprietorship, and showing that we are to sink out of the thought of our ownership, and be lost in that great ocean of the ownership which our Lord has in us, and all things.
Now, just notice how the three expressions are used: The first is “My beloved is mine and I am His,” in which you notice that the Bride puts her ownership first, and her Bridegroom’s ownership in her comes next. Again, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” (Song 6:3). Here you notice she puts the Bridegroom’s ownership first, and her ownership in Him comes last, for you see the ownership which Christ has in us is far beyond any ownership we can have in Him, for we are His absolutely and beyond our thoughts. The third time, the words are “I am my beloved’s, and His desire is toward me.” (Song 7:10). Here you see the Bride sees nothing except her Lord’s ownership in her, and that all His love and desire is toward her, and she forgets to mention her own proprietorship, or else the very thought of her ownership is lost in that sea of love where everything is sunk into Christ, and His blessed ownership swallows all things in its vastness and sacred keeping. Thus the “me”, and the “my”, gradually, or by distinct steps, sink away into being lost in a loving gaze upon our God, and that we do not mention our rights, or our possession, but only see that Christ is all and in all.
Alone With God
We have to be alone with God in finding personal salvation. Others may be used as instruments in bringing conviction, light, help in various ways; but there comes a crisis, both in the work of regeneration and of sanctification, in which the soul must be detached from others, and deal only with God. How utterly impertinent are human words in such a crisis!
We must meet our Jesus singly; we must apprehend Him for ourselves; He must speak to us with His own voice. In such an hour we gaze on the salvation promises, such as, “Thy sins will be forgiven thee,” or, “I will, be thou clean”; but the words on paper need to be imparted into our consciousness, and to do this, they must be re-spoken into us by the Holy Ghost. No true soul will be satisfied with an inference of salvation, or a dead legal imputation of holiness, or the opinions of others as to our state; nothing less than God alone pouring His assurance into our spirits will answer.
The dear Redeemer Who loved us from eternity, and “formed us for Himself,” will not leave the pining soul to the second-hand tinkering of others; He will closet us with Himself, and re-speak into us those living words out of His Book that have been spoken to seeking souls in every generation of the world. God longs to give each of us a perfect personal assurance of His perfect salvation. But we must be alone with God.