After finished reading The Mark of a Man - wrote the excerpt, and posted it on my fb note, I wondered "Why I never posted Passion and Purity?" *for those of you who read my notes, you might notice that I quoted that book pretty often*
Then, I realized, I am ashamed because almost all things written in there are really things I've been struggling! *it's like she wrote the book on behalf of me:$*
I am struggling to be a woman after His own heart, to put Him as my top priority, to wait quietly and be still when I feel like "I can handle this, I can hold it no more!", to trust Him wholeheartedly when everything seems so blurry, to say "Thy will be done!", to be patient for His perfect time and also, to love my man purely. I am struggling to put my favorite part of this book into practice: "Is it possible to love him as intensely as I do and to be pure enough to desire nothing more in the world than his holiness and happiness?"
But He is a faithful God, He knows the desire of my heart, He gives, as I leave everything to Him"Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desire of your heart" He shows me each path I have to take to be a woman He wants me to be! Yes, I struggle! Sometimes, it requires pain - tears, I am tempted and fail hundred times *we are sinners, and we still live in this world*, but really all by His grace - we will be back on the right track!
So.....here they are, be blessed! Be passionate purely! ... then again, you may read the book yourself ~eyn~ :)
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“I charge you, o daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up, nor awake love until it please.” No one, man or woman, should be agitated about the choice of a mate, should be “asleep” as it were, in the will of God, until it should please Him to “awake” Him.
If my life is broken when given to Jesus, it is because pieces will feed a multitude, while a loaf will satisfy a little lad.
– Ruth Stull-
A road may seem straightforward to a man
Yet may end as the way to death
Even in laughter the heart may grieve
And mirth may end in sorrow
There is another way: to love what God commands and desire what He promises. It can’t be found except through prayer and obedience. It cuts quite across the other way, takes us where things are not at the mercy of changing fashions and opinions. It is a place where a man’s heart may safely rest – and a woman’s heart too.
A settled commitment to the Lord Christ and a longed-for commitment to Jim Elliot seemed to be in conflict. Discipleship usually brings us into the necessity of choice between duty and desire. They are not always mutually exclusive, however. When our hearts are set on obedience, we can be sure of the needed wisdom to tell the difference between a conflict and a harmony. It may be a slow and painful process.
Better to stick with what God was saying to me than what my heart was saying. It seemed to safer course. I do not repudiate (reject) it now. The only way to build a house on the rock is to hear the Word (I couldn’t have heard it if all I listened to was my feelings) and then to try to do it. The collection of verses in the above journal entry represents warnings and aspirations that shaped my thinking. …. The Holy Spirit was given to guide us into all truth, but He doesn’t do it all at once.
I do know that waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts. It is easy to talk oneself into a decision that has no permanence – easier sometimes than to wait patiently.
But the things that we feel most deeply we ought to learn to be silent about, at least until we have talked them over thoroughly with God.
Never pass up an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.
Tomorrow is not our business, it is His. Letting it rest with Him is the discipline for the day, and it is enough.
S.D Gordon, in his Quite Talks on Prayer, describes waiting.
It means:
Steadfastness, that is holding on;
Patience, that is holding back;
Expectancy, that is holding the face up;
Obedience, that is holding one’s self in readiness to go or do;
Listening, that is holding quite and still so as to hear.
Give the loneliness to Jesus. The loneliness itself is a material for sacrifice. The very longings themselves can be offered to Him who understands perfectly. The transformation into something He can use for the food of others takes place only when the offering is put into His hands.
The greater the potential for good, the greater the potential for evil. A good and perfect gift, these natural desires. But so much the more necessary that they be restrained, controlled, corrected, even crucified, that they may be reborn in power and purity for God.
For us, this was the way we had to walk, and we walked it, Jim seeing it his duty to protect me, I seeing it mine to wait quietly, not to attempt to woo or entice.
When the will of God crosses the will of man, somebody has to die.
– Addison Leitch-
Life requires countless “little” deaths – occasions when we are given the chance to say no to self and yes to God.
The Lord has brought about growth in me through knowing him, something I cannot regret, though there have been times when I wished I’d never met him. I have to give him to the Lord regularly. I live “present tense” more than ever before and have managed to overcome the plaguing desire to know if “we” will eventually “work out. I’ve told the Lord I want to be an obedient servant, and He shot back, “And are you willing to face grief and pain or whatever it takes for Me to make you that?’. Even though I felt unable, I said “What choice do I have? I know too much to drop the ball now. There’s no turning back.” I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid. But He has brought me this far and already my joy is unspeakable.
Teach me to feel that Thou art always nigh;
Teach me the struggles of the soul to bear-
To check the rising doubt, the rebel sigh;
Teach me the patience of unanswered prayer.
-GEORGE CROLY- “spirit of God, descend upon my heart”
The hope was always there that God’s will would bring us together. It might not be that, I knew, and I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able honestly to pray what His disciples to pray : Thy will be done. Acceptance of whatever means is the great victory of faith that overcomes the world.
Was it possible to love him as intensely as I did and to be pure enough to desire nothing more in the world than his holiness and happiness?
Women are always tempted to be initiators. We like to get things done. We want to talk about situations and feelings, get it all out in the open, deal with it. It appears to us that men often ignore and evade issues, sweep things under the rug, forget about them, get on with projects, business, pleasures, sports, eat a big steak, turn on the tv, roll over and go to sleep. women respond to this tendency by insisting on confrontation, communication, showdown. If we can’t dragoon our men into that, we nag, we plead, we get attention by tears, silence or withholding warmth and intimacy. We have large bag of tricks.
CS Lewis’s vision of purgatory was a place where milk was always boiling over, crockery smashing, and toast burning. The lesson assigned to men was to do something about it. The lesson for the women was to do nothing. That would be purgatory for most of us. Women, especially when it comes to the love life, can hardly stand to do nothing.
If he had loved her, he would have pursued her. He did not want to hurt her, but she would not let go.
Women expect too much of men. Wait on God. Keep your mouth shut. Don’t expect anything until the declaration is clear and forthright. A woman ought to be honest with a man who shows an interest in her.
Let them do the chasing and keep them at arm’s length.
When do men look for?
Femininity, affirmation, encouragement, tenderness, sensitivity, vulnerability, challenging, secure in the Lord, content, can handle adversity, quietly courageous, maternal, not trying to please everybody-but free to pay a compliment now and then, mystery!
A man likes to think there is more in a woman that he can fathom. They don’t want to be told everything the women are thinking, they want to be left to wonder about it and to find out for themselves. A woman’s beauty should reside!
By the grace of God we have not been left to ourselves in the master who is to do the initiating. Adam needed a helper. God fashioned one to the specifications of his need and brought her to him. It was Adam’s job to husband her, that is, he was responsible – to care for, protect, provide for and cherish her. Males, as the physical design alone would show, are made to be initiators. Female are made to be receptors, responders. It was not arbitrarily that God called Himself Israel’s Bridegroom and Israel His Bride, nor Christ the Head and the Church the Body and the Bride. He woos us, calls us, wins us, gives us His name, shares with us His destiny, takes responsibility for us, loves u with a love stronger than death.
You have chosen the roughest road, but it goes straight to the hilltops.
–John Buchan-
It (men and women should hunger for each other) is natural indeed. However it’s not the only things God has in mind for u. We are not meant to live merely by what is natural. We need to learn to live by the supernatural. Ordinary fare will not fill the emptiness in our hearts. My heart was saying, “ Lord, take away this longing, or give me that for which I long,” the Lord was answering, “I must teach you to long for something better”.
It was learning to eat that Living Bread *manna* , sufficient always for one day at a time (not in advance for the five years I feared) that I was taught and disciplined and prepared for later things.
Anyone can carry his burden, however heavy, until nightfall.
Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day.
Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down.
And this is all that life really means.
–Robert Louis Stevenson-
I became acutely conscious of it through loving and missing and desperately needing Jim. It was a kind of weakness that surprised and humiliated me. Why should I need him? “Got along without him before I meet him, gonna get along without him now. I wasn’t doing very well without him, and here was another lesson. When there is real weakness, especially of the kind that surprises and humiliates us, it is our opportunity to learn what Pau had to learn …”power comes to its full strength in weakness..”
If your goal is purity of heart, be prepared to be thought very odd.
It is possible for two young people, full of all the juices that youth is endowed with by the Creator, to resist temptation.
I asked the heaven of stars
What should I give my love-
It answered me with silence
Silence above.
I asked the darkened sea
Down where the fishes go –
It answered me with silence
Silence below
Oh, I could give him weeping
Or I could give him a song –
But how can I give silence
My whole life long?
There is pleasure in doing things in the proper order. Certain things properly belong to intimate love which do not properly belong to friendship’s love. Certain things belong to marriage that do not belong to courtship. For everything there is a season.
T.C Upham’s Inward Divine Guidance: “The disposition …. To leave the dearest objects of our hearts in the sublime keeping of the general and unspecific belief that God is now answering our prayers in His own time and way, and in the best manner, involves a present process of inward crucifixion which is obviously unfavorable to the growth and even the existence of the life of self.”
Nothing was harder for a woman in love to endure and nothing was stronger proof of the character of the man than his restraint power.
Unless a man is prepared to ask a woman to be his wife, what right has he to claim her exclusive attention? Unless she has been asked to marry him, why would a sensible woman promise any man her exclusive attention? If, when the time has come for a commitment, he is not man enough to ask her to marry him, she should give him no reason to presume that she belongs to him.
When stormy winds against us break
Stablish and reinforce our will;
O hear us for Thine own name’s sake
Hold us in strength and hold us still.
Still as the faithful mountains stand
Through the long silent years of stress,
So would we wait at Thy right hand,
In quietness and steadfastness.
But not of us this strength, O Lord,
And not of us this constancy;
Our trust is Thine Eternal Word,
Thy presence our security.
God knows it is a stay to purity, and He knows how many shakings to purity are ahead. (Jim’s letter to EE).
It’s easy to make a mistake here. “If God gave it to me,” we say, “it’s mine. I can do what I want with it.” No. the truth is that it is ours to thank Him for and ours to offer back to Him, ours to relinquish, ours to lose, ours to let go-if we want to find our true selves, if we want real Life, if our hearts are set on glory.
I suppose one of the reasons I have kept journals and diaries is the desire to gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost. I wrote things there that I could not say to people or write in letters to Jim.
The wanting itself is good, it is right, even God granted, but now God denied, and He has not let me know all the wisdom of the denial.
– Jim Elliot –
The trouble, of course, is that we must learn to love people. People are sinners. Love must be patient when it is tempted (by the delays of other people) to be impatient. Love must not be selfish, even if other people are. Love does not take offence, though people are offensive sometimes. There are wrongs, but love won’t keep score. There are things to be faced, but nothing love can’t face, things to try love’s faith, discourage its hope, and call for its endurance; but it keeps right on trusting, hoping and enduring. Love never ends.
It is impossible to be submissive and religiously patient if ye stay your thoughts down among the confused rollings and wheels of second causes, as O the place! O the time! O if this had been, this had not followed! O the linking of this accident with this time and place! Look up to the master motion and the first wheel.
–Samuel Rutherford in the Loveliness of Christ-
We are always held in the love of God. We are never wholly at the mercy of other people-they are only “second causes,” and no matter how many second or third or fiftieth causes seem to be in control of what happens to us, it is God who is in charge, He who holds the key, He who casts the lot finally into the lap. Trusting Him, then, requires that I leave some things to be decided by others. I must learn to relinquish the control I might wield over somebody else if the decision properly belongs to him. I must resist urge to manipulate him, needle and prod and pester until he capitulates. I must trust God in him, trust God to do for both of us better than I know.
While purity before marriage, consists in holding ourselves from one another in obedience to God, purity after marriage consists in giving ourselves to and for each other in obedience to God. Passion, whether that of one who is hungry for another not yet given or that of one who, by God’s gift, shares the bed of another, must be held by principle. The principle is love-not erotic or sentimental or sexual feeling, but love. It is the way of charity. Perhaps the old word is best. The newer has been corrupted by the strange phenomenon of “falling in love”.
Stop living for yourself, start living for Christ. Now!
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