A Believer’s Will 579
use His hand to lead them to where He desires them to be. His hand
is seen primarily in environment. God lays His hand heavily on His
people to crush, to break, or to bind—that their wills may be
hardened no more against Him.
The Lord is not satisfied until we are thoroughly united with Him
in will. To achieve that end He permits many disagreeable things to
come to us. He lets us grieve, groan, and suffer. He arranges for
many practical crosses to traverse our path that through them we may
bow our heads and capitulate. Our volition is naturally exceedingly
stubborn; it refuses to obey God until it is heavily disciplined. By
submitting ourselves under His mighty hand, willingly accepting His
discipline, our will experiences one more cut and is once again
delivered to death. And if we continue to resist Him, greater
affliction awaits us to bring us into subjection.
God purposes to strip all that is ours away. All believers, after
they are truly regenerated, conceive the notion of observing the will
of God. Some openly promise such; others secretly entertain this
idea. To prove and see whether this promise or thought is real or not,
God puts His children through various unpleasant strippings. He
causes them to lose material things: health, fame, position,
usefulness. What is more, He even causes them to be deprived of
joyous feeling, burning desire, the presence and comfort of God. He
must show them that everything except His will must be denied. If it
is God’s will, they should be willing to accept pain and suffering
upon their physical bodies. They must be ready to embrace dryness,
darkness, and coldness if He seems pleased to so treat them. Even if
He should strip them of everything, of even so-called spiritual
effectiveness, they must accept it. He wishes His own to know that
He saves them not for their enjoyment but for His Own will. In gain
or loss, joy or sorrow, consciousness of His presence or that of His
rejection, Christians must contemplate God’s will alone. Suppose it
were His will to reject us (which it never is), could we gladly accept
rejection? When a sinner first trusts in the Lord his objective is