After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.
(1 Peter 5:10 ESV)
Something has got to be done in
us as well as for us. We want to proceed on the line of having things
done for us, heaven intervening for us, our difficulties
removed for us, having a straight path made for us. Heaven may be
ready to come in, the Lord may be prepared to work for us, but it is not
sufficient for Him - and it would not prove good enough for us - if that were
all.
The very principle of spiritual growth and maturity demands that He keeps
the objective and the subjective balanced; that is, that something is done
in us as well as for us. It is the principle of the Cross again. He
died for us - that is the objective. We died in Him - that is the subjective.
Here are two sides in spiritual experience. He keeps the balance of things. We
have to have this balance wrought in us, and to be delivered from this tendency
of allowing our problems to obscure the Lord, this inveterate habit of ours of
viewing the position merely objectively instead of saying, "What does the Lord
want to teach us about this? What does He want to do in us in this matter? There
is something He is after in us." He has something to do in us
before He can do it for us. How often we have found that when we have
come to a new position with the Lord, when the thing has been done in us, then
there has been outward movement. So the mention of the subjective exercise
suggests that we have to take this matter to our own hearts as something which
requires a change in us.