The High Calling by Gordon Lindsay

If God has called you to be really like Jesus in all your spirit, He will draw you into a life of crucifixion and humility. He will put on you such demands of obedience that He will not allow you to follow other Christians, and in many ways He will seem to let other good people do things which He will not let you do.

Other Christians and ministers who seem very religious and useful may push themselves, pull wires and work schemes to carry out their plans, but you cannot do it. If you attempt it, you will meet with such failure and rebuke from the Lord as to make you sorely penitent.

Others can brag about themselves, their work, their success, or their writings, but the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing. If you begin it, He will lead you into such deep mortification that will make you despise yourself and all your good works.

Others will be allowed to succeed in making great sums of money or having a legacy left to them or in having luxuries. But God may supply you daily because He wants you to have something far better than gold and that is a helpless dependence on Him, that He may have the privilege of providing your needs day by day out of the unseen treasury.

The Lord may let others be honored and put forward but keep you hidden away in obscurity because He wants to produce some choice, fragrant fruit for His coming glory, which can only be produced in the shade.

God will let others be great, but keep you small. He will let others do a work for Him and get the credit for it, but He will make you work and toil on without knowing how much you are doing. Then to make your work still more precious, He will let others get the credit for the work which you have done, and this will make your reward ten times greater when Jesus comes.

The Holy Spirit will put a strict watch on you, with a jealous love, and will rebuke you for little words and feelings or for wasting your time, which other Christians never seem distressed over.

So make up your mind that God is an infinite Sovereign, and has a right to do as He pleases with His own. He will not explain to you a thousand things which may puzzle your reason in His dealings with you. God will take you at your word; and if you absolutely will yourself to be His slave, He will wrap you up in a jealous love and let other people say and do many things that you cannot do or say. Settle it forever, that you are to deal directly with the Holy Spirit. Also that He is to have the privilege of tying your tongue or chaining your hand or closing your eyes, in ways that others are not dealt with.

Now when you are so possessed with the loving God that you are, in your secret heart, pleased and delighted over this peculiar personal, private, jealous guardianship and management of the Holy Spirit over your life, you will have found the vestibule of heaven.