My Utmost for His Highest

Instantaneous and Insistent Sanctification

1 Thessalonians 5

23 May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

When we pray to be sanctified, are we prepared to face the standard of these verses? We take the term sanctification much too lightly. Are we prepared for what sanctification will cost? It will cost an intense narrowing of all our interests on earth, and an immense boadening of all our interests in God. Sanctification means intense concentration on God's point of view. It means every power of body, soul and spirit chained and kept for God's purpose only. Are we prepared for God to do in us all that He separated us for? And then after His work is done in us, are we prepared to separate ourselves to God even as Jesus did? "For their sakes I sanctify Myself." The reason some of us have not entered into the experience of sanctification is that we have not realized the meaning of sanctification from God's standpoint. Sanctification means being made one with Jesus so that the disposition that ruled Him will rule us. Are we prepared for what that will cost? It will cost everything that is not of God in us.

Are we prepared to be caught up into the swing of this prayer of the apostle Paul's? Are we prepared to say -- "Lord, make me as holy as You can make a sinner saved by grace?" Jesus has prayed that we might be one with Him as He is one with the Father. The one and only characteristic of the Holy Ghost in a man is a strong family likeness to Jesus Christ, and freedom from everything that is unlike Him. Are we prepared to set ourselves apart for the Holy Spirit's ministrations in us?

Are You Exhausted Spiritually?

Isaiah 40

28Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
The everlasting God, the LORD,
The Creator of the ends of the earth,
Neither faints nor is weary.
His understanding is unsearchable.

Exhaustion means that the vital forces are worn right out. Spiritual exhaustion never comes through sin but only through service and whether or not you are exhasted will depend upon where your get your supplies. Jesus said to Peter -- "Feed My sheep," but He gave him nothing to feed them with. The process of being made broken bread and poured-out wine means that you have to be the nourishment for other souls until they learn to feed on God. They must drain you to the dregs. Be careful that you get your supply or before long you will be utterly exhausted. Before other souls learn to draw on the life of the Lord Jesus directly, they have to draw on it through you: You have to be literally "sucked," until they learn to take their nourishment from God. We owe it to God to be our best for His lambs and His sheep as well as for Himself.

Has the way in which you have been serving God betrayed you into exhaustion? If so, then rally your affections. Where did you start the service from? From your own sympathy or from the basis of the Redemption of Jesus Christ? Continually go back to the foundation of your affections and recollect where the source of power is. You have no right to say -- "O Lord, I am so exhausted." He saved and sanctified you in order to exhaust you. Be eshausted for God, but remember that your supply comes from Him. "All my fresh springs shall be in Thee."

Is Your Imagination Of God Starved?

Isaiah 40

26 Lift your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these things? He who brings out the starry host one by one, and calls them each by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.

The people of God in Isaiah's day had starved their imagination by looking on the face of idols, and Isaiah made them look up at the heavens, that is, he made them begin to use their imagination aright. Nature to a saint is sacramental. If we are children of God, we have a tremendous treasure in Nature. In every wind that blows, in every night and day of the year, in every withering of the earth, there is a real coming of God to us if we will simply use our starved imagination to realize it.

The test of spiritual concentration is bringing the imagination into captivity. Is your imagination looking on the face of an idol? Is the idol yourself? Your world? Your conception of what a worker should be? Your experience of salvation and sanctification? Then your imagination of God is starved and when you are up against difficulties you have no power, you can only endure in darkness. If your imagination is starved, do not look back to your own experience, it is God Whom you need. Go right out of yourself, away from the face of your idols, away from everything that has been starving your imagination. Rouse yourself, take the gibe that Isaiah gave the people, and deliberately turn your imagination to God.

One of the reasons of stultification in prayer is that there is no imagination, no power of putting ourselves deliberately before God. We have to learn how to be broken bread and poured-out
wine on the line of intercession more than on the line of personal contact. Imagination is the power God gives a saint to posit himself out of himself into relationships he never was in.

Is Your Hope in God Faint and Dying?

Isaiah 26
3 You will keep him in perfect peace,
Whose mind is stayed on You,
Because he trusts in You.

Is your imagination stayed on God or is it starved? The starvation of the imagination is one of the most fruitful sources of exhaustion and sapping in a worker's life. If you have never used your imagination to put yourself before God, begin to do it now. It is no use waiting for God to come; you must put yor imagination away from the face of idols and look unto Him and be saved. Imagination is the greatest gift God has given us and it ought to be devoted entirely to Him. If you have been bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, it will be one of the greatest assets to faith when the time of trial comes, because your faith and the Spirit of God will work together. Learn to associate ideas worthy of God with all that happens in Nature -- the sunrises and the susets, the sun and the stars, the changing seasons, and your imagination will never be at the mercy of your impulses, but will always be at the service of God.

"We have sinned with our fathers;.......and have forgotten" -- then put a stiletto in the place where you have gone to sleep. "God is not talking to me just now," but He ought to be. Remember ; " Whose you are and Whom you serve. Provoke yourself by recollection, and your affection for God will increase tenfold; your imagination will not be starved any longer, but will be quick and enthusiastic, and your hope will be inexpressibly bright.

Must I Listen?

Exodus 20

19 Then they said to Moses, "You speak with us, and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die."

We do not consciously disobey God, we simply do not heed Him. God has given us His commands; there they are, but we do not pay any attention to them, not because of wilful disobedience, but because we do not love and respect him. "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments." When once we realize that we have been "disrespecting" God all the time, we are covered with shame and humiliation because we have not heeded Him.

"Speak with us.......but let not God speak with us." We show how little we love God by preferring to listen to His servants only. We like to listen to personal testimonies, but we do not desire that God Himself should speak to us. Why are we so terrified lest God should speak to us? Because we know that if God does speak, either the thing must be done or we must tell God we we will not obey Him. If it is only the servant's voice we hear, we feel it is not imperative, we can say, "Well, that is simply your own idea, though I don't deny it is probably God's truth."

Am I putting God in the humiliating position of having treated me as a child of His while all the time I have been ignoring Him? When I do hear Him, the humiliation I have put on Him comes back on me -- "Lord, why was I so dull and so obstinate?" This is always the result when once we do hear God. The real delight of hearing Him is tempered with shame in having been so long in not hearing Him.

The Devotion of Hearing

1 Samuel 3

10 Now the LORD came and stood and called as at other times, "Samuel! Samuel!"
And Samuel answered, "Speak, for Your servant hears."

Because I have listened definitely to one thing from God, it does not follow that I will listen to everything He says. The way in which I show God that I neither love nor respect Him is by the obtuseness of my heart and mind towards what He says. If I love my friend, I intuitively detect what he wants , and Jesus says, "You are My friends." Have I disobeyed some command of my Lord's this week? If I had realized that it was a command of Jesus, I would not consciously have disobeyed it. But most of us show such desrespect to God, that we do not even hear what He says. He might never have spoken.

The destiny of my spiritual life is such identification with Jesus Christ that I always hear God, and I know that God always hears me.(John 11:41) If I am united with Jesus Christ, I hear God, by the devotion of hearing all the time. A lily, or a tree, or a sevant of God, may convey God's message to me. What hinders me from hearing is that I am taken up with other things. It is not that I will not hear God, but I am not devoted in the right place. I am devoted to things, to service, to convictons, and God may say what he likes but I do not hear Him. The child attitude is always, "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." If I have not cultivated this devotion of hearing, I can only hear God's voice at certain times at other times I am taken up with things -- things which I say I must do, and I become deaf to Him. I am not living the life of a child. Have I heard God's voice today?

The Discipline of Heeding


Matthew 10

Jesus Teaches the Fear of God
27 "Whatever I tell you in the dark, speak in the light; and what you hear in the ear, preach on the housetops.

At times God puts us through the discipline of darkness to teach us to heed him. Song birds are taught to sing in the dark, and we are put into the shadow of God's hand until we learn to hear Him. "Whatever I tell you in the dark" -- watch where God puts you into darkness, and when you are there keep your mouth shut. Are you in the dark just now in your circumstances, or in your life with God? Then remain quiet . If you open your mouth in the dark, you will talk in the wrong mood: darkness is the time to listen. Don't talk to other people about it , don't read books to find out the reason of the darkness, but listen and heed. If you talk to other people, you cannot hear what God is saying. when you are in the dark, listen, and God wil give you a very precious message for someone else when you get into the light.

After every time of darkness there comes a mixture of delight and humiliation (if there is delight only, I question whether we have heard God at all,) delight in hearing God speak, but chiefly humiliation -- What a long time I was in hearing that! How slow I have been in understandiing that! And yet God has been saying it all these days and weeks. Now He gives you the gift of humiliation which brings the softness of heart that will always listen to God now.

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

Romans 14

7 For none of us lives to himself , and no one dies to himself.

Has it ever dawned on you that you are responsible for other souls spiritually before God? For instance, if I allow any private deflection from God in my life, everyone about me suffers. We "sit together in heavenly places ." "Whether one member suffers, all the members suffer with it ." When once you allow physical selfishness, mental slovenlliness, moral obtuseness, spiritual density, everyone belonging to your crowd will suffer. "But," you say, "who is sufficient for these things if you erect a standard like that?" Our sufficiency is of God," and of Him alone.

"You shall be My witnesses." How many of us are willing to spend every ounce of nervous energy, of mental, moral, and spiritual energy we have for Jesus Christ? That is the meaning of a witness in God's sense of the word. It takes time, be patient with yourself. God has left us on the earth -- what for? to be saved and sanctified? No, to be at it for Him. Am I willing to be broken bread and poured-out wine for Him? To be spoilt for this age, for this life, to be spoilt from every standpoint but one -- saving as i can disciple men and women to the Lord Jesus Christ. My life as a worker is the way I say "thank you " to God for His unspeakable salvation. Remember, it is quite possible for any one of us to be flung out as reprobate silver -- "... lest that by any means when I have preached to others. I myself should be a castaway."

[SHADOW=crimson]The Inspiration Of Spiritual Initiative [/SHADOW]

Ephesians 5

14 Therefore He says:
"Awake, you who sleep,
Arise from the dead,
And Christ will give you light."

All initiative is not inspired. A man may say to you -- "Buck up, take your disinclination by the throat, throw it overboard, and walk out into the thing!" That is ordinary human initiative. But when the Spirit of God comes in and says, in effect, "Buck up." we find that the initiative is inspired.

We all have any number of visions and ideals when we are young, but sooner or later we find that we have no power to make them real. We cannot do the things we long to do, and God has to come and say -- "Arise from the dead." When the inspiration of God does come, it comes with such miraculous power that we are able to arise from the dead and do the impossible thing. The remarkable thing about spiritual initiative is that the life comes after we do the "bucking up." God does not give us overcoming life. He gives us life as we overcome. When the inspiration of God comes, and He says -- "Arise for the dead," we have to get up. God does not lift us up. Our Lord said to the man with the withered hand -- "Stretch forth thy hand,"
and as soon as the man did so, his hand was healed, but he had to take the initiative. If we will do the overcoming we shall find we are inspired of God because he gives life immediately.

[SHADOW=skyblue]The Initiative Against Depression [/SHADOW]

1 Kings 19

5 Then as he lay and slept under a broom tree, suddenly an angel touched him, and said to him, "Arise and eat."

The angel did not give Elijah a vision, or explain the Scriptures to him, or do anything remarkable; he told Elijah to do the most ordinary thing, viz., to get up and eat. If we were never depressed we should not be alive; it is the nature of a crystal never to be depressed. A human being is capable of depression, otherwise there would be no capacity for exaltation. There are things that are calculated to depress; things that are of the nature of death; and in taking an estimate of yourself, always take into account the capacity for depression.

When the Spirit of God comes, He does not give us visions, He tells us to do the most ordinary things concievable. Depression is apt to turn us away from the ordinary commonplace things of God's creation, but whenever God comes, the inspiration is to do the most natural simple things -- the things we would never have imagined God was in and as we do them we find He is there. The inspiration which comes to us in this way is an initiative against depression; we have to do the next thing and do it in the inspiration of God . If we do a thing in order to overcome depression, we deepen the depression; but if the Spirit of God makes us feel intuitively that we must do the thing and we do it, the depression is gone. Immediately we arise and obey, we enter on a higher plane of life.

[SHADOW=teal]The Initiative Against Despair [/SHADOW]

Matthew 26
46 Rise, let us be going . See, My betrayer is at hand."

The disciples went to sleep when they should have kept awake, and when they realized what they had done it produced despair.
The sense of the irrepairable is apt to make us depair, and we say -- "It is all up now, it is no use trying any more." If we imagine that this kind of depair is exceptional, we are mistaken, it is a very ordinary human experience. Whenever we realize that we have not done that which we had magnificent opportunity of doing, then we are apt to sink into despair and Jesus Christ comes and says -- "Sleep on now, that opportunity is lost forever, you cannot alter it, but arise and go to the next thing." Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ and go out into the irresistable future with Him.

There are experiences like this in each of our lives. We are in despair, the despair that comes form actualities and we cannot lift ourselves out of it. The disciples, in this instance had done a downright unforgivable thing; they had gone to sleep instead of watching with Jesus, but He came with a spiritual initiative against their despair and said -- "Arise and dot the next thing." If we are inspired of God, what is the next thing? To trust Him absolutely and to pray on the ground of His Redemption.

Never let the sense of failure corrupt your new action.

[SHADOW=burlywood]The Initiative Against Drudgery [/SHADOW]


Isaiah 60
1 Arise, shine;
For your light has come!
And the glory of the LORD is risen upon you.

We have to take the first step as though there is no God. It is no use to wait for God to help us. He will not but immediately we arise we find he is there. Whenever God inspires, the initiative is a moral one. We must do the thing and not lie like a log. If we will arise , and shine , drudgery becomes divinely transfigured.

Drudgery is one of the finest touchstones of character there
is. Drudgery is work that is very far removed from anything to do with the ideal -- the utterly mean grubby thing; and when we come in contact with them we know instantly whether or not we are spiritually real. Read John 13. We see there the Incarnate God doing the most desperate piece of drudgery, washing fishermen's feet, and He says -- "If I then, your Lord and Master, has washed your feet, Ye also ought to wash one anothers feet." It requires the inspiration of God to go through drudgery with the light of God upon it. Some people do a certain thing, and the way in which they do it hallows that thing forever afterwards. It may be the most commonplace thing, but after we have seen them do it, it becomes different. When the Lord does a thing through us, He always transfigures it. Our Lord took on him our human flesh and transfigured it, and it has become for every saint the temple of the Holy Spirit.

[SHADOW=purple]The Initiative Against Dreaming [/SHADOW]

John 14
31 But that the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father gave Me commandment, so I do. Arise,
let us go from here.

Dreaming about a thing in order to do it properly is right, but dreaming about it when we should be doing it is wrong. After Our Lord had said those wounderful things to his disciples, we might have expected that He would tell them to go away and meditate over them all; but Our Lord never allowed "mooning." When we are getting into contact with God in order to find out what He wants, dreaming is right, but when we are inclined to spend our time in dreaming over what we have been told to do, it is a bad thing and God's blessing is never on it. God's initiative is always in the nature of a stab against this kind of dreaming, the stab that bids us "neither sit nor stand but go."

If we are quietly waiting before God and he has said --"come ye yourselves apart," then that is meditation before God in order to get at the line He wants, but always beware of giving over to mere dreaming when once God hs spoken.
Leave him to be the source of all your dreams and joys and delights, and go out and obey what He has said. If you are in love, you do not sit down and dream about the one you love all the time, you go and do something for him and that is what Jesus Christ expects us to do. Dreaming after God has spoken is an indication that we do not trust Him.

[SHADOW=silver]The Way of Abraham in Faith [/SHADOW]

Hebrews 11

Faithful Abraham
8 By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.

In the Old Testament personal relationship with God showed itself in separation, and this is symbolized in the life of Abraham by his seperation from his country and from his kith and kin. Today the separation is more of a mental and moral separtion from the way that those who are dearest to us look at things, that is, if they have not a personal relationship with God. Jesus Christ emphasized this (see Luke 14:26).

Faith never knows where it is being led , but it loves and knows the One Who is leading. It is a life of faith, not of intellect and reason , but a life of knowing Who makes us "go." The root of faith is the knowledge of a Person, and one of the biggest snares is the idea that God is sure to lead us to success .

The final stage in the life of faith is attainment of character. There are many passing transfigurations of
character; when we pray we feel the blessing of God enwrapping us and for the time being we are changed, then we get back to the ordinary days and ways and the glory vanishes . The life of faith is not a life of mounting up with wings, but a life of walking and not fainting. It is not a question of sanctification; but of something infinitely further on than sanctification, of faith that has been tried and proved and has stood the test. Abraham is not a type of sancitification, but a type of the life of faith, a tried faith built on a real God. "Abraham believed God."

[SHADOW=orangered]Friendship With God [/SHADOW]

Genesis 18

17 And the LORD said, "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am doing,

Its Delights. This chapter brings out the delight of real friendship with God as compared with occasional feelings of His presence in prayer. To be so much in contact with God that you never need to ask Him to show you His will, is to be nearing the final stage of your discipline in the life of faith. When you are rightly related to God, it is a life of freedom and liberty and delight, you are God's will and all your common sense decisions are his will for you unless He checks. You decide things in perfect delightful friendship with God, knowing that if your decisions are wrong He will always check; when He checks, stop at once.

In Difficulties. Why did Abraham stop praying when he did? He was not intimate enough yet to go boldly on until God granted his desire, there was something yet to be desired in his relationship to God. Whenever we stop short in prayer and say -- "Well, I don't know; perhaps it is not God's will," there is still another stage to go. We are not so intimately aquainted with God as Jesus was, and as He wants us to be -- "That they may be one even as we are one." think of the last thing you prayed about --were you devoted to your desire or to God? "Your Heavenly Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him." The point of asking is that you may get to know God better. "Delight thyself also in the Lord; and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart." Keep praying in order to get a perfect understanding of God Himself.