What It Will Take To Go Through The Fire - T. Austin Sparks


It is a testing way, but blessed be God, if we do endure the testing and go on patiently with Him, in His time, when that flesh has been finally laid low; when the voice of natural ambition is no longer sounding and having influence, and we are now utterly at the place where if things are not going to be of the Lord then there is not going to be anything at all, the Lord has a free way, and He is able to indicate that all the time something has been going on. He shows how He has been at work, and how that in time there will be manifested a work of God, a work that shall have such a large percentage of spiritual value and meaning in it that you are very glad, after all, that you walked with God and not with men in the work of God.

...One thing that surely concerns all the people of God very strongly, very definitely, very mightily, is the question of that which is invulnerable, indestructible; that which will stand when everything else in the universe crashes, when all else is consumed, destroyed: when in the shaking of the heavens and the earth that which can be shaken is shaken, then there shall be that which abides the shaking, abides the fire, and goes through indestructible for eternity. That concerns us in a practical way as to the results of our being here on this earth. 

If the great feature of spirituality is spiritual intelligence, which is knowing the Lord in the inner way of His thought, of His purpose, that is what God is after, because it is that which is going to outlast everything else. That is what is meant by being in the pre-eminent, the supreme activity of God in this dispensation. this world and everything related to it is not going to last, therefore we will not get our roots into it; we will not lay deep foundations into it; we will not build in union with it, with the Name of God on it, not even in a religious way. You and I must come into God's supreme activity in this dispensation, which is to get out from this world, in association with Himself, that which will abide eternally when all else has gone. This may be in a people, but the thing itself is the inner knowledge of God. That is spirituality.

...We have to settle down to the fact that if the Lord wants to do anything with us, if we are rightly adjusted, if we are at His disposal, if He has a clear way in us, He will Himself take responsibility for our usefulness to Him, whether it be little or great. It would be better for us to be tucked away in some quiet corner of the world where we were serving the Lord a hundred per cent, though within a seemingly limited sphere, than for us to be out in some great thing, where we were full of activities but only about ten per cent of it was really the Lord's work. To enter into God's rest is basic to growth.

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