June 9th
The next best thing to do
Ask if you have not Received. For [everybody] that asketh receiveth. Luke 11:10.
There is nothing [harder than] to ask. We will long and desire and crave and suffer, but not until we are at the extreme limit will we ask. A sense of unreality makes us [a]question. Have you ever asked out of the depths of moral poverty? “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God …” but be sure that you do lack wisdom. You cannot bring yourself up [to] Reality when you like. The next best thing to do if you are not spiritually real is to ask God for the Holy Spirit on the word of Jesus Christ (see Luke 11:13). The Holy Spirit is the One Who makes real in you all that Jesus did for you.
“For every one that asketh receiveth.” This [does] not mean you will not get if you do not ask (cf. Mat. 5:45), but until [thou] get to the point of asking you won’t receive from God. To receive means you have come into the relationship of a child of God, and now you perceive with intelligent and moral appreciation and spiritual understanding that these things come from God.
“If any of you lack wisdom …” If you realize you are [in need], it is because you have [grown] in contact with spiritual reality; do not put your reasonable blinkers on again. People say—Preach us the [unadulterated] gospel: don’t tell us we have to be holy, because that produces a sense of abject poverty, and it is not nice to feel abjectly poor. “Ask” means beg. Some people are [unfortunate] enough to be interested in their poverty, and some of us are like that spiritually. We will never receive if we ask with an end in view; if we ask, not out of our poverty but out of our lust. A [beggar] does not ask [for] any other reason than the abject [proverty]condition of his poverty, he is not ashamed to beg. Blessed are the paupers in spirit.
Chambers, Oswald. My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for the Year. Grand Rapids, MI: Oswald Chambers Publications; Marshall Pickering, 1986. Print.
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