Others May––But You Cannot

My mentor gave me this on a little piece of paper a long while ago.

I wanted to share it with you in case you are one who cannot...

If God has called you to be really like Jesus in all your spirit, He will draw you into a life
of crucifixion and humility, and put on you such demands of obedience that He will not
allow you to follow other Christians, and in many ways He will seem to let other good
people do things which He will not let you do.

Other Christians and ministers who seem very religious and useful may push
themselves, pull wires, and work schemes to carry out their plans, but you cannot do it;
and if you attempt it, you will meet with such failure and rebuke from the Lord as to
make you sorely penitent.

Others can brag on themselves, on their work, on their success, on their writings, but
the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing, and if you begin it He will lead
you into some deep mortification that will make you despise yourself and all your good
works.

Others will be allowed to succeed in making money, or having a legacy left to them, or
in having luxuries, but it is likely that God will keep you poor, because He wants you to
have something better than gold, and that is a helpless dependence on Him, that He
may have the privilege of supplying your needs day by day out of an unseen treasury.
The Lord will let others be honored and put forward, and keep you hid away in
obscurity, because He wants to produce some choice, fragrant fruit for His coming
glory, which can only be produced in the shade.

He will let others be great, but keep you small. He will let others do a work for Him,
and get the credit for it, but He will make you work and toil on without knowing how
much you are doing; and then to make your work still more precious, He will let others
get the credit for the work which you have done, and this will make your reward ten
times greater when Jesus comes. The Holy Spirit will put a strict watch over you, with a
jealous love, and will rebuke you for little words and feeling or for wasting your time,
which other Christians never seem distressed over. So make up your mind that God is
an infinite Sovereign, and has a right to do as He pleases with His own, and He will not
explain to you a thousand things which may puzzle your reason in His dealings with
you.

He will take you at your word, and if you absolutely sell yourself to be His slave, He
will wrap you up in a jealous love and let other people say and do many things that you
cannot do or say. Settle it forever, that you are to deal directly with the Holy Spirit and
that He is to have the privilege of tying your tongue, or chaining your hand, or closing
your eyes in ways that He does not deal with others. Now when you are so possessed
with the living God that you are, in your secret heart, pleased and delighted over this
peculiar, personal, private, jealous guardianship and management of the Holy Spirit
over your life, you will have found the vestibule of heaven.

––The Biblical Evangelist