December 27th
Where the battle’s lost and won
If thou wilt return, O Israel, saith the Lord.… Jeremiah 4:1.
The battle is lost or won in the secret places of the will before God, never first in the external world. The Spirit of God apprehends me, and I am obliged to get alone with God and fight the battle out before Him. Until this is done, I lose every time. The action may take one minute, or a year, that will depend on me, not on God, but it must be wrestled out alone before God, and I must resolutely go through the hell of a renunciation before Him. Nothing has any power over the man who had fought out the battle before God and won there. If I say—I will wait till I get into the circumstances and then put God to the test,’ I shall find I cannot. I must get the thing settled between myself and God in the secret places of my soul where no stranger intermeddles, and then I can go forth with the certainty that the battle is won. Lose it there, and calamity, disaster, and upset are as sure as God’s decree. The competition is not won because I try to win it in the external world first. Get alone with God, fight it out before Him, settle the matter there once and for all.
In dealing with other people, the line to push them to an issue of will. That is the way abandonment begins. Every now and again, not often, but sometimes, God brings us to the point of climax. That is the Great Divide in life; from that point, we either go towards a more and more dilatory and useless type of Christian life, or we become more and more ablaze for the glory of God—“My Utmost for His Highest.”
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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