We try too much, too long, and too hard to do the work that only the Holy Spirit can do in us—this truth so well put in Lilias Trotter’s little volume, Parables of the Christ-Life:

“How long we are in grasping that we are His workmanship, [just as the wondrous, unique seed vessels of plants are. How slow] in discovering… that it is as exactly impossible by our own striving to develop the Christ-life in our hearts as to form the seed in the pod! We have not to produce out of our… nature a lowliness and a patience and a purity of our own, but simply to let the pure, patient, lowly life of Jesus have its way in us by yieldingness to it and faith in its indwelling might.

“‘All that God wants from man is opportunity.’*

“Surrender—stillness—a ready welcoming of all stripping, all loss, all that brings us low, low into the Lord’s path of humility—a cherishing of every whisper of the Spirit’s voice, every touch of the prompting that comes to quicken the hidden life within: that is the way God’s human seed-vessels ripen, and Christ becomes “magnified” even through the things that seem against us.

“‘Mine but to be still:    

Thine the glorious power,

Thine the mighty will.’”*

-I. Lilias Trotter, Parables of the Christ-life

On the other hand, how slow we also are in loosing ourselves, as we so often could, from the thorns and brambles of earth-life that impede the way of His Spirit, that crowd and choke out the Christ-life and promote in us spiritually fruitless, worthless earth-lives! (Luke 8:4-8,11-15)

“Some fell among thorns… Now the ones that fell among thorns are those who, when they have heard, go out and are choked with cares, riches, and pleasures of life, and bring no fruit to maturity.”

My Sabbath “task,” my Christmas “to-do”:

To still today,

to come aside from the thorny tangles of earth’s fretful issues and frenetic rush,

to surrender,

to “cherish every whisper of the Spirit’s voice,”

to reach toward “every touch of the prompting that comes to      quicken the hidden life within.”

-Philip Brooks, “O Little Town of Bethlehem”

~

*Quoted passages within the text of Parables of the Christ-life. Author(s) unknown.

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Still Saturday

Recommendation Saturday

Sunday Stillness

They don’t “come home for Christmas” any more, any of them. They all have their own families now, and homes and a hundred other things to prepare for the season’s celebration. But if they were coming here, I would be preparing a place for them.

He, the Father, prepared a place for Christ to come to, to enter into the human race as a human infant. Prepared a womb to nurture, a manger to hold, a perfectly symbolic feeding place of sheep, in Bethlehem, “the House of Bread.”

He is preparing a place for me even now, in His own Heavenly Home, that I may be where He is in forever-unbroken, unmarred fellowship.

In turn, how do I prepare for Him, for celebration of His first Advent, for His return at His second? If He were coming to my earthly house to stay, what would I have to do to the guest room? How would I prepare?

I don’t know about you, but for lots of us, guest rooms can lose their sense of purpose, of being what they were intended for. They can take on entirely different focus, and its accompanying clutter. So when that surprise call comes announcing, “I’d like to come and stay awhile,” near panic arises with the awareness of that embarrassing clutter accumulation that must be cleared out, pronto, to restore the room to its original purpose.

His guest room, my heart, gets into the same predicament. An astonishing amount of earth-junk can mysteriously make its way in there, as clutter adds to clutter, till it obscures any resting place, even a spot for Him to seat Himself for a few moments, let alone take up residence.

It’s time to renew the preparations of my heart, first of all by making sure there’s room for Him in my “in,” that central room of my heart. A lot of clutter needs to go. A clean, clear space for the King of my life.

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I light the “Hope” or “Prophecy” Candle, and he reads from Isaiah 9.

And we come to darkness. People groping their way through it. People dwelling under a great death shadow. Already in verse 2.

And yet…

Light flashes into the shadowlands.

Later, gathered for worship, we’re looking at Psalm 112.

Darkness sweeps in again—in verse 4. The “upright” are enduring it here.

But again the light dawns:

The upright can see it, stark against black.

~

I think of Ebenezer. That round rock I wrote about last week that reminds us of how “the LORD has helped us this far.”

We’d moved that rock into the house for Thanksgiving Day, first to the cellar stairs to thaw and remove the clinging dirt and wash the thing clean, then to the dining room, to place on that old mat amid fake grass. After dinner he read 1 Samuel 7, and we talked about remembering the times of God’s help and a rock of remembrance as memory booster. And those who made it to dinner through stormy weather chose Ebenezer stones to take home and be reminded, too (although the youngest named hers “Erik.”)

~

Then I think how, before that Thanks day, reading this year’s journals to ferret out my personal  remembrances of His help, what I’d discovered was…

Darkness. Tears. Perplexity. Sorrowful disappointment. Here. There. Short and passing black nights of it, and long stretches requiring brave walking through.

And it was in those dark places that the working of God glowed obvious.

It occurred to me this has been the pattern through my life. It was in times of sadness or hardness, of uncertainty or (especially) utter helplessness, that I saw “the light,” saw the God of all good gifts clearly at work.

~

When I lit that candle of Hope, he asked me to turn down the other, the artificial, lights. The candle’s glow just didn’t show in all that incandescence. But with all the other light dimmed down, its flicker flamed dramatic.

So. Here’s cause for thanking God not only for His gift of light, but also for the times of darkness that make us notice it, when otherwise we might pass by, entirely unaware.

 ~~~

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