Commitment

Once again, I find myself drawn to the words from the devotional Disciplines for an Inner Life by Bob & Michael Benson. It is a difficult book to find.

This abandonment is the very heart and essence of Christian prayer, and it has nothing in common with strategy and second-guessing. It is the pray-to-win mentality turned inside out, and yet it is not a pray-to-lose mentality. It is the prayer that has moved beyond intending, directing, steering, second-guessing God. It is the dancer moving completely in the rhythm of the partner, prayer that is utterly freeing because it is completely at one. Utterly beyond asking, beyond the anger that rattles heaven’s gate. Prayer that does not plead, wants nothing for itself but what God wants, it is the will-not-to-will, rooted in grace, that makes it possible to be abandoned, free, and then (by some further miracle) able to act with a semblance of coherence and freedom even when completely surrendered to and possessed by the loving will of God.

And it is this abandonment that is meant when we are told to drop our nets and follow him; to pause not to bury our dead fathers or tell our wives we will be traveling for a while; it is in this abandonment that we sell all.
- From Clinging – An Experience of Prayer by Emilie Griffin

Much depends upon making up your mind. The nature of the human animal, as you well know, is subject to suggestion; the feeling-nature, when left to human devices, is unprotected, easily dismayed, elated, bored, irritated. The mind is moved by noises, cold, heat, stupidities, a letter, the disloyalty of a friend. But when the mind is made up, all these challenges can be divinely met; you are not defenseless. You are only defenseless when you are spiritually asleep. Bring into focus your godhood, your divine manhood by saying, “I make up my mind to be in the light of faith always, while I talk to people, while I walk, while I eat, Wherever I go, into every house. I will use it against all alarms, I will dwell in his eternal patience, in God’s name I will be reborn!”
- From Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood, edited by Mary Strong

The battle is lost or won in the secret places of the will before God, never first in the external world. The Spirit of God apprehends me and I am obliged to get alone with God and fight the battle out before Him. Until this is done, I lose every time. The battle make take one minute or a year, that will depend on me, not on God; but it must be wrestled out alone before God, and I must resolutely go through the hell of renunciation before God. Nothing has any power over the man who has fought out the battle before God and won there.

If I say, “I will wait till I get into the circumstances and then put God to the test,” I shall find I cannot. I must get the thing settled between myself and God in the secret places of my soul where no stranger intermeddles, and then I can go forth with the certainty that the battle is won. Lose it there, and calamity and disaster and upset are sure as God’s decree. The reason the battle is not won is because I try to win it in the external world first. Get alone with God, fight it out before Him, settle the matter there once and for all.

In dealing with other people, the line to take is to push them to an issue of will. That is the way abandonment begins. Every now and again, not often, but sometimes, God brings us to a point of climax. That is the Great Divide in the life; from that point we either go towards a more and more dilatory and useless type of Christian life, or we become more and more ablaze for the glory of God.
- From My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers