I urge you... to offer your bodies as living
sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship.
(Romans 12:1 NIV)
You have a life, and that life is a great trust, a great responsibility. It
can stay in its own ambitions, its own interests, its own worldly concerns and
considerations, it can stay by itself. Will you give your life to God, will you
let it go to Him, will you put it on the altar and let the knife be taken that
God may have it utterly? If you will, God will multiply your life, God will
extend your life, God will make much more of it than ever it would have been if
you had kept it in your own hands. Have you got something in your life that you
are holding on to as a Christian; you are not letting that go to the Lord? You
know what it is. I should miss it if I tried to catalog the things it might
be. You know you have something where you are not letting go to the Lord. The
Lord has put His finger on something, and you are holding on. You have an
argument which you think is a very good argument. You have a reason you think
perfectly good, so you are holding on. Deep down the truth is you are not
prepared to let that go....
There are times when, in recognition that a
certain course is the Lord’s way, we have to wait for the Lord’s time and see to
it that our strength of will coming into alliance with some purpose of God is
not jeopardizing the fruitfulness of that thing, and doing other people harm and
making other people suffer. There are times when we have to come back to the
Lord and say, "Lord, You have shown me that is Your way for me, but I can see
that it is going to involve others in a great deal of suffering. I do want to be
sure of Your time in this, and that I am not taking hold of it; it is not my
strength of will to do Your will. I want to do this thing in self-sacrificing
love, so that the least loss shall be suffered by others." We have seen people
who are right as to their objective, right as to what the Lord wants, but the
way in which they do it often spoils the whole thing. They take hold of Divine
things, and while the thing is right, they are spoiling it by bringing their own
strength of will into alliance with it. This applies in many ways. We must be
circumcised in heart to do the will of God, ready to let go and let God
determine the way to accomplish it. May the Lord interpret His Word and make it
fruitful. I know it is challenging. It searches us all; we shall all come up
against it. But oh, see what happened in heaven, and see that He desires that as
it is in heaven, so it shall be on earth.