The Self-Will Dies Hard

Have you ever had the Lord on your case in such a way that you know He's trying to break you and sometimes you try hard to be broken (yes, a contradiction there I know) but then you come back just as rebellious as ever and He clamps down again on you and you pray pray pray for the ability to yield and die to yourself and love your enemies, but then again it happens and again you are fighting it and asking Him to let up on you but once more He shows you that to be useful to Him you have to give in, so you try again to give in and He provides the spiritual support for a while, you even learn that He CAN provide the spiritual perspective you are looking for, a moment of loving your enemies, a moment of choosing against yourself, but the self dies hard and again you find yourself objecting and objecting and objecting and have to go through the same thing again. Don't you just wish the Lord would do it once and for all and get it over with? If it's up to me I can't do it, what can my will possibly do but oppose His until HE changes things? Do I have the most adamant self-will ever created? I must have.

Later: I realized -- also again -- that He loads such crosses on me when I most persistently ask for power, for personal revival, for usefulness. Makes perfect sense. No pain no gain works in the spiritual as well as the natural. No meekness no power, etc.

=====

Can understand this in the abstract just fine sometimes, can preach it too at those times. DOING it is what is hard.

Bunch of thoughts crowding in on it. How entirely the opposite this is from the advice of the Spirit Channelers I wrote about on the End Times blog yesterday. FOLLOW YOUR WILL (what you WANT to do) is THEIR advice. Of course, because your will is fallen and it will ultimately destroy you. If you are a Christian it will interfere with whatever God wants to do with you.

Also reminded me of Christian teachings I've heard to a similar effect. You know, "Don't ever ask the Lord for patience (or love or any other Christian virtue)" because He'll give you circumstances that provoke impatience in you until you learn to be patient (or give you people you can't stand or who hate and abuse you or drive you crazy until you learn to be loving toward them etc.) Well, yes, He will, that's what it's all about. Do you want patience or not? Do you want a loving spirit or not? Perhaps we should learn a formula here -- whatever Christian virtue you ask for EXPECT to first encounter nothing but obstacles that seem designed to thwart that desire, though they are really the WAY to its fulfillment if you yield to them.

And there's also the way some Christian groups are likely to interpret this kind of thing as the devil's interference. If they ask to be useful and find themselves thwarted by circumstances, persecutions, difficulties of any kind, they interpret them as the devil's work against their mission for God and don't even consider yielding to them, just start blasting them with rebukes and so on. Of course sometimes interferences ARE the devil trying to defeat you, at least I've heard that is so. I guess the question is then how do you tell the difference? I know I spent way too much time confused about that sort of thing back in Charismania-land. I'm coming to suspect that the most usual way the devil interferes is to make you think you have to rebuke such things as his work instead of recognizing that it's really the Lord's work of conforming you to His image.

Not that any of this rumination helps me with my own current task of submitting to a painful and odious situation.