we are in
grasping that we are His workmanship, even as they--in discovering
the simple fact that it is exactly as impossible by our own striving
to develop the Christ-life in our hearts as to form the seed in the
pod! We have not to produce out of our higher nature a lowliness and
a patience and a purity of our own, but simply to let the pure,
patient, lowly life of Jesus have its way in us by yieldingness to it
and by faith in its indwelling might. "All that God wants from man is
opportunity." The whole of our relationship to His power, whether for
sanctification or for service, is summed up in those words.

Surrender--stillness--a ready welcoming of all stripping, all loss,
all that brings us low, low into the Lord's path of humility--a
cherishing of every whisper of the Spirit's voice, every touch of the
prompting that comes to quicken the hidden life within: that is the
way God's human seed-vessels ripen, and Christ becomes "magnified"
even through the things that seem against us.

"Mine but to be still:
Thine the glorious power,
Thine the mighty will."

And it is not only the siroccos that help forward His purpose for us!
The "clear heat" and the midnight dews all minister together: "the
sun to rule the day" when His light and sweetness flood our
souls;--the darkness--the cloudless darkness--of a walk by faith when
"the moon and the stars" of the promises alone are visible: "His
mercy endureth for ever" through all alike and He uses them to their
utmost that Christ may be formed in us.

For the spirit of abandonment has to be carried into our spiritual
life, as well as into the things that only touch the natural. The
seed-vessel has to go down into death as well as the leaf. Look at it
as it begins to pass into the valley of that shadow and its strength
begins to ebb away. It is only getting ready by its weakening, for
the service to which it has been called.

Long ago we imagined, it may be, an enduement of power from on high
in which we should have a conscious supply of the heavenly
energising--a conscious equipment for every service--a reservoir of
Divine might that could be drawn on at will. But watch the
seed-vessel as the hour comes near in which its ministry can be
fulfilled; there is only weakness greater than ever before. "It is
sown in weakness"; only in the raising does the power come into play.

"I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. And my
speech and my preaching was n