"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 may 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 likely God will keep you poor,
because He wants you to have something better than gold,
and this 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 honoured,
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 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 feelings
or for wasting your time,
which other Christians never seem distressed over.
So make up your mind that God is an infinite Sovereign God,
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."
I thank God I found this early in my life with God, or else I would not have survived all that came to me from God. He allowed the privilege of the fellowship of His suffering, as well as the knowledge of the tenderness of his Father in Heaven. There is not much I do not sympathize with others about, but I hold to a jealous love I can never let go of.
It is God I adore and lived my life for. In best of times and worst, in obscurity and observation, whether I failed or won, it was all done in the name of The Son.
