UNLESS I have learned the character of the flesh in the cross of Christ, I am forever pleading for it-forever sparing it. But if that is what the flesh would do with Christ, what can God do with it but end it? He must dispose of it, and must give me a nature opposed to it if I am to be brought nigh to enjoy Himself.
Nothing humbles us like looking at what we are in the light of the cross; but we have now got a nature that delights in God, that delights in His service, that delights in His saints and in His things-a nature in which is no selfishness-and yet what a feeble manifestation of it there is in us! We too often think of the hindrances that are in us and around us, instead of what has been disposed of, and of the positive power that is given to us in order that Christ may be brought out of us. The positive side is: "We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Lord the Spirit." The other side is, "Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body."
God comes in to help us in our often failure on this side, and so " we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh." The thorn was given to Paul to keep him from being somebody, and to make him feel his nothingness and glory in it, so that he might be nothing but an earthen vessel, and that the power of Christ might rest upon him. Any acting of flesh, of self, of his own will, would prevent his being only an earthen vessel, for an earthen vessel is a weak thing that has no will of its own. Human strength and human will are only hindrances in God's way, and yet, alas! how we forget it.
Oh, to know something more of the crippling of our own energies, of the judgment and the breaking of our own will, and of the shining in and shining out of the light from the countenance of the Savior in the glory, of the manifestation of His life in these bodies here, till He who is our life shall appear, and we shall be manifested with Him in glory!
(J. S. O.)