The Believer's Part In Becoming Spirit-filled # 9

Life On The Highest Plane

Life Yielded - What?

Cleansing

Let it be understood also that we cannot bring just the troublesome, unmanageable parts of our lives to God asking Him for spiritual repairs while we withhold the will, the heart, the mind. How much we are like the man who took the hands of his clock to the jeweler and asked him to regulate them as they did not keep time. "Bring me the whole clock," said the jeweler, "the cause of the inaccuracy is not in the hands." "No!" said the owner, "you will take it all to pieces and it will cost me a lot! It is the hands that go wrong!" The measure of our yielding is the measure of our life; the refusal to yield any part of it, however small or insignificant it may seem to us, is an act of rebellion and will make impossible  the fullness of the Holy Spirit in our lives. These lines we would do well to repeat frequently:

"Have Thine own way, Lord,

Have Thine own way;

Thou art the Potter,

I am the clay.

Make me and mold me

After Thy will,

While I am waiting

Silent and still."

The Life Yielded - How?

Perhaps some reader has been brought to say "Lord, I will yield to Thee. I see why I should yield, and what but now tell me how." Because salvation from beginning to end is through God's pure grace, He always takes the initiative in bringing us into a fuller experience of our inheritance in Christ. So the Lord Jesus stands outside every unyielded part of your life and knocks and waits for your response. He wishes to come in and fellowship with you in every part of your spiritual life but in between the knocking and the entering something must take place, for Christ never forces entrance. If He enters, the door must be opened.

Revelation 3:20, "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me."

Yielding to Christ is a definite act. It is not a mere expression of a pious desire but it is the declaration of a purposeful determination. It is not an oft-repeated wish but it is a decisive act of the will. To yield is to acknowledge Christ's claim to the perfect possession, complete control and unhindered use of one's whole being and then to act upon such an acknowledgment by a definite surrender of it to Him. Desire becomes decision and decision crystallizes into action.

In "A Memorial of a True Life" by Dr. R. E. Speer is recorded such a definite act of surrender by Hugh Beaver, a young man of rare spirituality whose life was very marvelously used among college students in a few brief years of service before God called him Home.

"Just as I am, - Thy love unknown

Has broken every barrier down;

Now to be Thine, yea, Thine alone

O Lamb of God, I come, I come."

This 16th day of November 1895, I, Hugh Beaver, do of my own free will give myself, all that I am and have, entirely, unreservedly, unqualifiedly to Him, whom having not seen I love, on whom, though now i see Him not, I believe. Bought with a price, I give myself to Him who at the cost of His own blood purchased me. Now committing myself to Him who is able to guard me from stumbling and to set me before the presence of His glory without blemish in exceeding joy, I trust myself to Him for all things, to be used as He shall see fit where He shall see fit. Sealed by the Holy Spirit, filled with the peace of God that passeth understanding, to Him be all glory, world without end. Amen."

Have you by such a definite decisive act of the will yielded yourself, all that you are, and all that you have, to the Lord Jesus? If not, will you not close this article for a moment and do it now?

Yielding to Christ is a voluntary act. We do not yield because we have to but because we want to. It  is not a matter of coercion but of consecration. The Lord Jesus stands outside the door of that unyielded portion of your life and knocks but He will not force an entrance. It would mean very little indeed to be allowed to enter if He did not find fellowship and comradeship with the one within. It is Love that desires to enter but unless Love is met by love the entrance would bring heartache rather than joy. "What fragrance is to the rose, color to the sunset sky, spotlessness to the falling snow, voluntariness is to the surrender of the life." Of His own free will He joyously, gladly lay down His life for us. With a smile and a song He wants us to open the door to Him.

~Ruth Paxson~

(continued with # 10)