The voice of the Spirit is as gentle as a zephyr, so gentle that unless
you are living in perfect communion with God, you never hear it. The checks of
the Spirit come in the most extraordinarily gentle ways, and if you are not
sensitive enough to detect His voice you will quench it, and your personal
spiritual life will be impaired. His checks always come as a still small voice,
so small that no one but the saint notices them.
Beware if in personal testimony you have to hark back and say – “Once,
so many years ago, I was saved.” If you are walking in the light, there is no
harking back, the past is transfused into the present wonder of communion with
God. If you get out of the light you become a sentimental Christian and live on
memories, your testimony has a hard, metallic note. Beware of trying to patch
up a present refusal to walk in the light by recalling past experiences when
you did walk in the light. Whenever the Spirit checks, call a halt and get the
thing right, or you will go on grieving Him without knowing it.
Suppose God has brought you up to a crisis and you nearly go through but
not quite, He will engineer the crisis again, but it will not be so keen as it
was before. There will be less discernment of God and more humiliation at not
having obeyed; and if you go on grieving the Spirit, there will come a time
when that crisis cannot be repeated, you have grieved Him away. But if you go
through the crisis, there will be the pæan of praise to God. Never sympathize
with the thing that is stabbing God all the time. God has to hurt the thing
that must go.
8月13日 竭誠為主
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