◄ Spiritual Balance ►

After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. (1 Peter 5:10 ESV)

Something has got to be done in us as well as for us. We want to proceed on the line of having things done for us, heaven intervening for us, our difficulties removed for us, having a straight path made for us. Heaven may be ready to come in, the Lord may be prepared to work for us, but it is not sufficient for Him and it would not prove good enough for us if that were all.

The very principle of spiritual growth and maturity demands that He keeps the objective and the subjective balanced; that is, that something is done in us as well as for us. It is the principle of the Cross again. He died for us that is the objective. We died in Him that is the subjective. Here are two sides in spiritual experience. He keeps the balance of things. We have to have this balance wrought in us, and to be delivered from this tendency of allowing our problems to obscure the Lord, this inveterate habit of ours of viewing the position merely objectively instead of saying, "What does the Lord want to teach us about this? What does He want to do in us in this matter? There is something He is after in us." He has something to do in us before He can do it for us. How often we have found that when we have come to a new position with the Lord, when the thing has been done in us, then there has been outward movement. So the mention of the subjective exercise suggests that we have to take this matter to our own hearts as something which requires a change in us.