Committed. Surrendered. Abandoned.
And when we say that, of course,
the idea may catch on with us and we may agree, we might even desire it
to be so in our case...
But I say to you, my dear friends, there is
nothing more searching, more trying, and more exacting than this matter
of being committed to the Holy Spirit.
You look at Ezekiel's life and
see what it meant to be committed to the Spirit.
We shall see much of it
if the Lord continues to lead us this way...
But just to remind you,
Ezekiel, by being committed to the Spirit, had to do a great many things
that the flesh completely revolts against, the natural man
shrinks from doing.
You're not going to make a fool of yourself if you
can help it, and he was called upon to do that.
People laugh at him,
what he's doing; jeer and sneer.
He's doing such ridiculous things from
the standpoint of this world's common sense, but he had to do them.
Enough for the moment, but it's all very well to say, "I'm
surrendered, I want to be surrendered.
I'm going to be a surrendered
man, a surrendered woman, surrender myself wholly to God.
Well, let's
be quite frank and faithful about this.
If you are, the whole, the whole thing
is going to be taken out of your hands.
You're going where you would
never go naturally.
You're going by ways that you would never choose,
from which you would turn back or away with all the shrinking of your
natural life.
Other aspects, of course, are perhaps happier and better.
But there it is.
Now, Ezekiel was a committed man, not in word alone, but day
by day...
Day by day faced with some fresh challenge of the Spirit having
laid upon him some fresh demand contrary to nature.
His committal found
him ready, so ready that the Spirit could just do as He liked with
Ezekiel.
Do as He liked with him! I say that's searching- that will
find us out.
But the realization of the full Divine purpose demands that there are men and women and companies of men and women who are committed
in that way to the Holy Spirit.
You may have a battle over some things,
but you'll fight it through.
You'll fight it through.
You'll face it
and realize what it implies, what it means, and you may shrink and you
may hesitate.
You may feel you cannot, but you'll fight it through; at
least you'll not surrender on the spot, but face this thing and get
through with it, however long it takes.
Committed! Our minds committed, our wills committed, our hearts
committed, our bodies committed.
Everything committed.
It came, in
Ezekiel's case, to his wife.
And he had there to allow God to have His
way even in taking his wife.
Well, you see how he behaved.
He was a
committed man.
That's the point.
And we're talking about God's great
purpose- everything being governed by purpose.
It's the Spirit
who is the custodian of the eternal purpose.
It's the Spirit who has
this in charge, but He must have vessels that are committed in this way.
There are, of course, counterparts in the New Testament.
The book of
the Acts is in one sense the counterpart of the prophecies of Ezekiel.
Here you have the Spirit undoubtedly like the fiery chariot of God in
Ezekiel, the wheels and the living ones moving with the Spirit in them,
"withersoever the Spirit would go they went," it says.
And Acts
is undoubtedly the New Testament counterpart of Ezekiel in that sense.
But here you sometimes come up against a hitch, even in an apostle,
where he's challenged about something that naturally and religiously,
and - as he thought scripturally - he would never do.
He would
never do!
Peter had the Scripture on his side when he said, "No unclean
thing has ever passed my lips.
Not so, Lord, I've got Scripture for my
position!"
The eleventh chapter of the book of Leviticus supports him in
that position apparently, but the Spirit thought otherwise.
The Cross had come in between Leviticus and Peter's time, to deal
with all unclean things so that the Spirit could say now, because the
Cross had accomplished what God had cleansed, "Call that not unclean",
and Peter had to adjust.
But there was a battle, there was a hitch.
The
Spirit came up against something in the clay.
And it was a very
desperate situation: his apostleship was at stake.
The purpose of God
through such a man was in the balances of that, "Peter, are you going to
be committed to the Spirit and let the Spirit have His way, or are you
going to stand on your traditional ground, your mental ground?
What's it
going to be?"
Well, thank God Peter got through that battle and proved his
committal and the Spirit went on.
I just put that in as an illustration
of what I mean.
The book of the Acts is like that, the Spirit has got
the purpose in hand, but He must have committed instruments.
Now, I said
there were two things; that's one.
We can enlarge much upon that, but
what we have to say later is but the breaking up of that.
~T. Austin Sparks
