gives Himself. Not as you look
at self, and seek to know whether now you are contrite and humble
enough--no, but when no longer looking at self, because you have given
up all hope of seeing anything in it but sin, you look up to the Holy
One, you will see how His promise is your only hope. It is in faith
that the Holy One is revealed to the contrite soul. Faith is ever the
opposite of what we see and feel; it looks to God alone. And it believes
that in its deepest consciousness of unholiness, and its fear that it
never can be holy, God, the Holy One, who makes holy, is near as
Redeemer and Saviour. And it is content to be low, in the consciousness
of unworthiness and emptiness, and yet to rejoice in the assurance that
God Himself does take possession and revive the heart of the contrite
one. Happy the soul who is willing at once to learn the lesson that, all
along, it is going to be the simultaneous experience of weakness and
power, of emptiness and filling, of deep, real humiliation, and the as
real and most wonderful indwelling of the Holy One.

This is indeed the deep mystery of the Divine life. To human reason it
is a paradox. When Paul says of himself, 'as dying, and behold we live;
as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as having nothing, yet possessing
all things,' he only gives expression to the law of the kingdom, that as
self is displaced and man becomes nothing, God will become all. Side by
side with deepest sense of nothingness and weakness, the sense of
infinite riches and the joy unspeakable can fill the heart. However deep
and blessed the experience becomes of the nearness, the blessing, the
love, the actual indwelling of the Holy One, it is never an indwelling
in the old self; it is ever a Divine Presence humbling self to make
place for God alone to be exalted. The power of Christ's death, the
fellowship of His cross, works each moment side by side with the power
and the joy of His resurrection. 'He that humbleth himself shall be
exalted;' in the blessed life of faith the humiliation and the
exaltation are simultaneous, each dependent on the other.

The humble find the Holy One; and when they have found, the possession
only humbles all the more. Not that there is no danger or temptation of
the flesh exalting itself in the possession, but, once knowing the
danger, the humble soul seeks for grace to fear continually, with a fear
that only clings more firmly to God alone. Never for a moment imagine
that you a