Daily Devotional

Living Words

Rather than write a fresh devotional, I want to share with you something I read many years ago that quite literally changed my way of thinking. It still does:

If God has called you to be really like Jesus Christ, He will draw you into a life of crucifixion and humility and put on you such demands of obedience that you will not be able to follow other people or measure yourself by other Christians. And in many ways He will seem to let other people do things that He will not let you do.

• Other Christians 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 boast of themselves, of their work, of their success, of 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 may be allowed to succeed in making money or may have money left to them, but it is likely that God will keep you poor because He wants you to have something far better than money, namely, a helpless dependence on Him that He may have the privilege of supplying your needs day by day out of His unseen treasury.

• The Lord may let others be honored and put forward and keep you in hidden obscurity because He wants to produce some choice fragrant fruit for His coming glory which can only be produced in the shade. He may let others be great but keep you small. He may 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 may let others get the credit for the work which you have done and thus make your reward ten times greater when Jesus comes. The Holy Spirit will put a strict watch over you with jealous love and will rebuke you for the little words and feelings or for wasting time which other Christians never seem to be 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. He may not explain to you a thousand things which puzzle your reason in His dealings with you. But if you absolutely sell yourself to be His slave, He will wrap you up in a jealous love and bestow upon you many blessings which come only to those who walk close to Him. Settle it forever then 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 seem to use with others.

• Now when you are so possessed with the living God that you are, in your secret heart, pleased and delighted over His peculiar, personal, private, jealous guardianship and management of your life, you will have found the very vestibule of Heaven (G.D. Watson, Living Words)
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