It is not wrong to depend upon Elijah as long as God gives him to you, but remember the time will come when he will hae to go; when he stands no more to you asyour guide and leader, because God does not intend he should. You say – “I cannot go on without Elijah.” God says you must.

Alone at your Jordan. v. 14. Jordan is the type of separation where there is no fellowship with anyone else, and where no one can take the responsibilty for you. You have to put to the test now what you learned when you were with your Elijah. You have been to Jordan oever and over again with Elijah, but now you are up against it alone. It is no use saying you cannot go; this experience has come, and you must go. If you want to know whether God is the God you have faith to believe Him to be, then go through your Jordan alone.

Alone at your Jericho. v. 15. Jericho is the place where you have seen your Elijah do great things. When you come to your Jericho you have a strong disinclination to take the initiative and trust in God, you want someone else to take it for you. If you remain true to what you learned with Elijah, you will get the sign that God is with you.

Alone at your Bethel .v. 23. At your Bethel you will find youself at your wits’ end and at the beginning of God’s wisdom. When you get to your wits’ end and feel inclined to succumb to panic, don’t; stand true to God and He will bring His truth out in a way that will make your life a sacrament. Put into practice what you learned with your Elijah, use his cloak and pray. Determine to trust in God and do not look for Elijah any more.

To choose to suffer means tat there is something wrong; to choose God’s will even if it means suffering is a very different thing. No healthy saint ever choose suffering; he chooses God’s will, as Jesus did, whether it means suffering or not. No saint dare interfere with the discipline of suffering in another saint.

The saint who satisfies the heart of Jesus will make other saint strong and mature for God. The people who do us good are never those who symphathize with us, they always hinder, because sympathy enervates. No one understands a saint but the saint who is nearest to the Saviour. If we accept the sympathy of a saint, the reflex feeling is – Well, God is dealing hardly with me. That is why Jesus said self-pity was of the devil. Be merciful to God’s reputation. It is easy to blacken God’s character because God never answers back, He never vindicates Himself. Beware of the thought that Jesus needed sympathy in His earthly life; He refused sympathy from man because He knew far too wisely that no one on earth understood what He was after. He took sympathy from His Father only, and from the angels in heaven.

Notice God’s unutterable waste of saints, according to the judgement of the world. God plants His sants in the  most useless places. We say- God intends me to be here because i am So sueful. Jesus never estimated His life along the line of the greatest use. God puts His saints where they will glorify Him, and we are no judges at all of where that is.

When the Son of God prays, He has only one consciousness, and that consciousness is of His Father. God always hears the prayers of His Son, and if the Song of God is formed in me the Father will always hear my prayers. I have to see that the Son of God is manifested in my mortal flesh. “Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost,” i.e., the Bethlehem of the Son of God. Is the Son of God getting His chance in me? Is the direct simplicity of the life of God’s Son being worked out exactly as it was worked out in His historic life? When I come in contact with the occurencesof life as an ordinary human being, is the prayer of God’s Eternal Son to His Father being prayed in me? “In that day ye shall ask in My name…” What day? The day when the Holy Ghost has come to me and made me effectually one with my Lord.

Is the Lord Jesus Christ being abundantly satisfied in your life or have you got a spiritual strut on? Never let common sense obtrude and push the Son of God on one side. Common sense is a figt which God gace to human nature; but common sense is not the gist of His Son. Supernatural sense is the gift of His Son; never enthrone common sense. The Son detects the Father; common sense never yet detected the Father and never will. Our ordinary wits never worship God unless they are transfigured by the indwelling Son of God. We have to see that this mortal flesh is kept in perfect subjection to Him and that He works through it moment by moment. Are we living in such human dependence upon Jesus Christ that His life is being manifested moment by moment?

If the Son of God is bron into my moral flesh, is His holy innocent and simplicity and oneness with the Father getting a chance to manifest itself in me? What was true of the Virgin mary in the historic introduction of God’s Son into this earth is true in every saint. The Son of God is born into me by the direct act of God; then I as a child of God have no excercise the right of a child, the right of being always face to face with my Father.

Am I continually saying with amazement to my common-sense life – why do you want to turn me off here? Don’t you know that I must be about my Father’s business? Whatever the circumstance may be, that Holy Innocent Eternal Child must be in contact with His Father. Am I simple enough to identify myself with my Lord in this way? Is He getting His wonderful way in me? Is God realizing that His Son is formed in me, or have I carefully put Him on one side? Oh, the clamor of these days! Everyone is clamouring – for what ? For the Son of God to be put to death. There is no room here for the Son of God just now, no room for quite holy communion with the Father. Is the Son of God praying inme or am I dictating to Him? Is He ministering in me as He did in the days of His flesh?

Is the Son og God in me going through  His passion for His own purposes? The more one knows of the inner life of God’s ripest sants, the more one sees what God’s purpose is – “filling up that which is behind of the affliction of Christ.” There is always something to be done in the sense of “filling up”.

Our Lord’s childhood was not immature manhood; our Lord’s childhood is an eternal fact. Am I a holy innocent child of God by identification with my Lord and Saviour? Do I look upon life as being in my Father’s house? Is the Son of God living in His Father’s house in me?

The abiding Reality is God, and His order comes through the moments. Am I always in contact with Reality, or do I only pray when things have gone wrong, when there is a disturbance in the moments of my life? I have to learn to identify myself with my Lord in holy communion in ways some of us have not begun to learn as yet. “I must be about My Father’s business” – live the moments in My Father’s house.

narrow it down to your individual circumstances – are you so identified with the Lord’s life that you are simply a child of God, continually talking to Him and realizing that all things come from His hands? Is the Eternal Child in you living in the Father’s house? Are the graces of His ministering life working our through you in your home, in your business, in your domestic circle? Have you been wondering why you are going through the things you are? It is not that you have to go through them, it is because of the relation into which the Son of God has come in His Father’s providence inyour particular sainthood. Let Him have His way, keep in perfect union with Him. The vicarious life of your Lord is to become your vital simple life; the way He worked and lived among men must be the way He lives in you.

We are too much given to thinking of the Cross as something we have to get through; we get through it only in order to get into. The Cross stands for one thing only for us- a comeplete and entire and absolute identification with the Lord Jesus Christ, and there is nothing in which this ientification is realized more than in prayer.

“Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him.” Then why ask? The idea of prayer is not in order to get answers from God; prayer is perfect and complete oneness with God. If we pray because we want ansers, we will get huffled with God. The answers come every time, but not always in the way we expect, and our spiritual huff shows a refusal to identify ourselves with our Lord in prayer; we are here to be living monuments of God’s grace.

“I say not that I will pray the Father for you: for the Father Himself loveth you.” Have you reached such an intimacy with God that the Lord jesus Christ’s life of prayer is the only explanation of your life of prayer? Has our Lord’s vicarious life become your vital life? “At that day” you will be so identified with Jesus that there will be no distinction.

When prayer seems to be unanswered, beware of trying to fix the blame on someone else. That is always a snare of Satan. You will find there is a reason which is a deep instruction to you, not to anyone else.

God called jesus Christ to what seemed unmitigated disaster. Jesus Christ called His disciples to see Him put to death; He led everyone of them to the place where their hearts were broken. Jesus Christ’s life was an absolute failure from every standpoint but God’s. But what seemed failure from man’s standpoint was a tremendous triumph from God’s, because God’s purpose is never man’s purpose.

There comes the baffling call of God in our lives also. The call of God can never be stated explicitly; it is implicit. The call of God is like the call of the sea, no one hears it but the one who has the nature of the sea in him. It cannot be stated definitely what the call of God is to, because His call is to be in comradeship with Himself for His own purposes, and the test is to believe that God knows what He is after. The things that happen do not happen by chance, they happen entirely in the decree of God. God is working out his purpose.

If we are in communion with God and recognize that He is taking us into His purpose, we shall no longer try to find out what His purpose are. As we go on in the Christian life it gets simpler, because we are less  inclined to say – Now why did God allow this and that? Behind the whole thing lies the compelling of God. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.” A Christian is one who trusts the sits and the wisdom of God, and not his own wits. If we have a purpose of our own, it destroy the simplicity and the leisureliness which ought to characterize the children of God.

The bravery of God in trusting us! You say-”But He has been unwise to choose me, because there is nothing in me; I am not of any value.” That is why He chose you. As long as you think there is something in you, He cannot choose you because you have ends of your own to serve; but if you have let Him bring you to the end of your self-sufficiency then he can choose you to go with Him to Jerusalem, and that will mean the fulfillment of purposes which He does not discuss with you.

We are apt to say that because a man has natural ability, therefore he will make a good Christian. it is not a question of our equipment but of our poverty, not of what we bring with us, but of what God puts into us; not a question of natural virtues of strength of character, knowledge, and experience – all that is of no avail in this matter. The only thing that avails is that we are taken up into the big compelling of God and made His comrades(cf. 1 Cor. 1:26-30). The comradeship of God is made up out of men who know their poverty. He can do nothing with the man who thinks that he is of use to God. As Christians we are not out for our own cause at all, we are out for the cause of God, which can never be our cause. We do not knwo what God is after, but we have to maintain our relationship with Him whateer happens. We must never allow anything to injure our relationship with God; if it does get injured we must take time and get it put right. The main thing about Christianity is not the work we do, but the relationship we maintain and the atmosphere produced by that relationship. That is all God asks us to look after, and it is the one thing that is being contunually assailed.

Jerusalem stands in the life of our Lord as the place where He reached the climax of His Father’s will. “I seek not Mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent Me.” That was the one dominating interest all through our Lord’s life, and the things He met with on the way, joy or sorrow, success or failure, never deterred Him from His purpose. “He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem.”

The great thing to remember is that we go up to Jerusalem to fulfill God’s purpose, not our own. Naturally, our ambitions are our own; in the Christian life we have no aim of our own. There is so much said today about our decisions for Christ, our determination to be Christians, our decisions for this and that, but in the New Testament it is the aspect of God’ compelling that is brought out. “Ye have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you.”

We are not taken up into conscious agreement with God’s purpose, we are taken up into God’s purpose without any consciousness at all. We have no conception of what God is aiming at, and as we go on it gets more and more vague. God’s aim looks like missing the mark because we are too short-sighted to see what He is aiming at. At the beginning of the Christian life we have our own ideas as to what God’s purpose is – Ï am meant to go here or there,”"God has called me to do this special work”; and we go and do the thing, and still the big compelling of God remains. The work we do is of no account, it is so much scaffolding compared with the big compelling of God. “He took unto Him the twelve,”He takes us all the time. There is more than we have got at as yet.