If God has called you to
be really like Jesus in all your spirit, He will draw you into a life
of crucifixion and humility, and put on you such demands of obedience,
that He will not allow you to follow other Christians, and in many ways
He will seem to let other good people do things which He will not let
you do.
Other Christians and ministers
who seem very religious and useful may push themselves, 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 may 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 money, or having a legacy left to them, or in having
luxuries. But it likely God will keep you poor, because He wants you
to have something better than gold, and this is a helpless dependence
on Him, that He may have the privilege of supplying your needs day by
day out of an unseen treasury.
The Lord will let others
be honoured, 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.
He will let others be great,
but keep you small. He will let others do a work for Him, and get the
credit for it, but He will make you work and toil on without knowing
how much you are doing: and then to make your work still more precious,
He will let others get the credit for the work you have done, and this
will make your reward ten times greater when Jesus comes. The Holy Spirit
will put a strict watch over you, with a jealous love, and will rebuke
you for little 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 God, 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 reason in His dealings with you.
He will take you at your
word; and 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 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
He does not deal with others. Now when you are so 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.