Every spiritual battle is lost or won before God, in the secret places of the will, never first out in the world. Whenever I am faced with a moral dilemma, God’s Spirit apprehends me and obliges me to get alone with God and fight it out. If I don’t do this before I try to fight the battle in the external world, I’ll lose every time. The battle may take one minute or one year—how long depends on me, not on God. But it must be wrestled out first before him. Alone in his presence, I must go through the hell of a renunciation.
Nothing has power over the person who has fought and won a battle before God. If I say, “I’ll wait till I get out into the world, then put God to the test,” I’ll find that I can’t. I must settle the matter between myself and God first, in the secret places of my soul where no stranger intermeddles. Afterward, I can go forth with the certainty that the battle is won. But if I lose the battle in my will, calamity and disaster are sure to follow.
Abandonment to God always begins as an issue of will. Every now and then—not often, but sometimes—God brings us to a milestone, a point that marks a great divide in our lives. Either we go on from that point toward a more and more useless type of Christian life, or we become more and more ablaze for the glory of God, more and more our utmost for his highest.
