The greatest burden we have to carry in life is self. The most difficult thing we have to manage is self. Our own daily living, our frames and feelings, our especial weaknesses and temptations, and our peculiar temperaments, – our inward affairs of every kind, – these are the things that perplex and worry us more than anything else, and that bring us oftenest into bondage and darkness. In laying off your burdens, therefore, the first one you must get rid of is yourself. You must hand yourself and all your inward experiences, your temptations, your temperament, your frames and reelings, all over into the care and keeping of your God, and leave them there. He made you and therefore He understands you, and knows how to manage you, and you must trust Him to do it.
Dying to Self
Florence Allshorn
To realize that you are safe and happy standing at God’s side, with His love encompassing you because you are forgiven; too happy to take offense any more; too much in love with life to want to be made miserable with an unforgiving heart, and knowing that now every conflict is a chance to learn more of the exceeding beauty of Love: that is worth living for, and surely worth dying to this misery-making self for.
Francois Fenelon
If we look carefully within ourselves, we shall find that there are certain limits beyond which we refuse to go in offering ourselves to God. We hover around these reservations, making believe not to see them, for fear of self reproach. The more we shrink from giving up any such reserved point, the more certain it is that it needs to be given up. If we were not fast bound by it, we should not make so many efforts to persuade ourselves that we are free.
A. W. Tozer
Father, I want to know Thee, but my coward heart fears to give up its toys. I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try to hide from Thee the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but I do come. Please root from my heart all those things which I have cherished so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that Thou mayest enter and dwell there without a rival. Then shalt Thou make the place of Thy feet glorious. Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for Thyself wilt be the light of it, and there shall be no night there. In Jesus Name, Amen.
Jessie Penn-Lewis
The believer’s death with Christ upon His Cross therefore means being crucified to the world in all its aspects. Not to be a miserable, joyless person, but one filled with the joy and glory of another world. It is not the “cross” that makes us miserable, but the absence of it. It is a delivering Cross – a Cross that liberates you to have the very foretaste of heaven in you, as already sharers of the power of the age to come…. Glory to God for the Cross that severs us from the world, and the world-spirit, and makes a way for us into another world where all is peace and joy and love.
E. H. Hamilton
Afraid? Of what? To feel the spirit’s glad release? To pass from pain to perfect peace, the strife and strain of life to cease? Afraid of what? — Afraid? Of what? Afraid to see the Saviour’s face, to hear His welcome, and to trace the Glory – Gleam from wounds of Grace? Afraid of that?? Afraid? Of what? A flash – a crash – a pierced heart; darkness – light – O Heaven’s art! A wound of His counterpart! Afraid of that? — Afraid? Of what? To enter Heaven’s Rest, and yet to serve the Master blest, from service good to service best? Afraid of that?? Afraid? Of what? To do by death what life could not — Baptize with death a stony plot, till souls shall blossom from that spot? Afraid of that??
Andrew Murray
The deeper we are willing to enter into the death of self, the more shall we know of the mighty power of God, and the perfect blessedness of a perfect trust.
Francois Fenelon
It does not follow, because the love of ourselves is lost in the love of God, that we are to take no care, and to exercise no watch over ourselves. No one will be so seriously and constantly watchful over himself as he who loves himself IN and FOR God alone. Having the image of God in himself, he has a motive strong, we might perhaps say, as that which controls the actions of angels, to guard and protect it.