Becoming Just Right

Becoming Just Right

You may say that you do not have great revelation from the Lord, but you cannot say that in so many years you have never experienced the discipline of the Holy Spirit. The purpose of His discipline is to make you a broken person. One day as you receive mercy from God, you may say, Now I understand what is meant to be a broken man. At that very time you will see how easy it is for your spirit to be released, once you have been severely dealt with and broken. The undisciplined believer provides the Lord with no outlet.

All spiritual things are given to the person who has become just right. The too diligent or the too lazy seeker will not find them. In our asking, we must ask just right, neither asking too much or too little. Here we need God’s mercy. Growth will not come to him who runs nor to him who stands still. Only by God’s mercy will you run or stand still in just the right way. For this reason, each one must commit himself to the God of all mercies (Rom 9.16).

Today, in fact, all we can say is that we have received God’s mercy. Spiritual growth is beyond the ability of human energy. God will place us in a position of utter powerlessness and impossibleness so that He may have His way with us. If the Lord shows His mercies to me, I will be carried through. But if He does not show His mercies, there is nothing I can do. Some are frequently thrashed in God’s dealing of them, yet their outer man seems never to be broken. For us to be a minister, we can only appeal to God to show His mercy.
We come to know the Lord through being stricken and dealt with by Him. It is in the process of being smitten that we learn to know Him. And as our daily knowledge of the Lord is increased by the daily blows upon our outward man, we are able to see how the life of the Lord substitutes our life. Yet this is not the increase of life but the increase of knowledge. For this life we already have; only through the Lord’s dealings do we come to have a deeper understanding of this life.

The spiritual life all believers possess is very rich indeed, but we are ignorant of just how rich this life actually is. Only at the time when our natural shell is being broken do we realize how rich the life of the Lord is: how it enables us to do the impossible!