Parables of the Christ-life | Page 6

workmanship, even as they--in discovering the
simple fact that it is exactly as impossible by our own striving to
develop the Christ-life in our hearts as to form the seed in the pod! We
have not to produce out of our higher nature a lowliness and a patience
and a purity of our own, but simply to let the pure, patient, lowly life of
Jesus have its way in us by yieldingness to it and by faith in its
indwelling might. "All that God wants from man is opportunity." The
whole of our relationship to His power, whether for sanctification or for

service, is summed up in those words.
Surrender--stillness--a ready welcoming of all stripping, all loss, all
that brings us low, low into the Lord's path of humility--a cherishing of
every whisper of the Spirit's voice, every touch of the prompting that
comes to quicken the hidden life within: that is the way God's human
seed-vessels ripen, and Christ becomes "magnified" even through the
things that seem against us.
"Mine but to be still: Thine the glorious power, Thine the mighty will."
And it is not only the siroccos that help forward His purpose for us!
The "clear heat" and the midnight dews all minister together: "the sun
to rule the day" when His light and sweetness flood our souls;--the
darkness--the cloudless darkness--of a walk by faith when "the moon
and the stars" of the promises alone are visible: "His mercy endureth
for ever" through all alike and He uses them to their utmost that Christ
may be formed in us.
For the spirit of abandonment has to be carried into our spiritual life, as
well as into the things that only touch the natural. The seed-vessel has
to go down into death as well as the leaf. Look at it as it begins to pass
into the valley of that shadow and its strength begins to ebb away. It is
only getting ready by its weakening, for the service to which it has been
called.
Long ago we imagined, it may be, an enduement of power from on
high in which we should have a conscious supply of the heavenly
energising--a conscious equipment for every service--a reservoir of
Divine might that could be drawn on at will. But watch the seed-vessel
as the hour comes near in which its ministry can be fulfilled; there is
only weakness greater than ever before. "It is sown in weakness"; only
in the raising does the power come into play.
"I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. And
my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's
wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: that your faith
should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." "The

weak things of the world hath God chosen." "We are weak with Him"
(margin)--oh! words of wonderful grace and sweetness. There is
nothing but rest in being brought low "with Him."
And not only must our service feel this weakening touch: it must go
deeper yet. Our experiences, the blessed hours of opened heavens, must
be held with a loose hand. We saw the life withdrawn before from the
leaves of the old creation into the seed-vessel of the new. Now it is
withdrawn further still, as ripeness comes, from the seed-vessel into the
seed. In the early stages of Christian path we are apt to be much taken
up, and rightly, with the spiritual processes by which God is working in
us. But in the "ripeness of maturity" (the real sense of "perfect" in Col. i.
28, and elsewhere) He has something better for us. "I live; yet not I, but
Christ liveth in me." He wants to bring us from clinging to the
emotional on one hand, and on the other from morbid introspection: for
perhaps one of the chief dangers besetting those who are following hard
after Him, lies in getting taken up with these inner experiences (it is
awfully possible for the devil to rivet the chains of self back on a soul
even in the very act of watching the death process going on within it,
getting it absorbed even with its own dying!). Let us come as fast as we
can to letting the seed-vessel go as well as the leaves, God wants to
bring us to a life of childlike simplicity, taken up with His Christ;
always lower and lower at His feet in the consciousness of shortcoming
and unworthiness as His Glory shines, but with our spiritual selves and
all their intricacies fading out of sight before Him. As we go on, we
learn to draw the supply of every need for spirit and soul and body
from the simplest, barest, most