Extracted from a Letter.
No doubt we fail in true self-judgment and self-humbling before God; and there is where all true service must begin, when one has departed from his first love. This, I am persuaded, is the root and main cause of the low spiritual state of which many complain. No other remedy can bring the desired end. A true, Spirit-given conviction, resulting in brokenness of spirit, humiliation, and crying to God, is needed if we would recover first love and its spiritual power. . . . Many of us, I believe, often think we have reached the root because we have judged this and that sin, departure, and failure, when in reality we have not reached the root. Thus communion is not re-established, real victory not gained; and what some of us call communion and enjoyment of the Lord, may after all be little more than fitful and momentary emotion. Enjoyment of truth there may be; but it will be chiefly mental; and thus in various ways may a child of God delude himself, or be deluded by the enemy, settling down into a kind of humdrum, matter-of-fact life; the conscience to a large extent perverted, not to say deadened.
Having much to do with divine things hardens if the conscience and heart are not with God, and so it comes to pass that after a time there are no more stirrings of conscience; truth in the abstract has taken the place of truth in the heart; and the person himself may not even realize it; or, if so, in a merely general way, deploring the condition in the collective body, seeing others as himself. Such is the state brought about through lack of self-judgment after the first departure from the Lord, and preceding the many new starts that have been made later on.
But what is self-judgment ? Some one lately said it was not merely judging our present state, but tracing it back to the very beginning of it all, the first departure from the Lord. Some at the time objected to the putting so much into it; but I thought there was much truth in it, and think so still, although humanly speaking it might seem impossible for one who, gradually and through a long range of years, had been getting further and further away from the Lord, to come back to the very point of departure.
Well, to sum up what I had in mind:the low state of the Lord's people can be traced to a defective self-judgment when a desire for return comes after backsliding. The afflicting, fasting, and repenting in dust and ashes of the men of God, of old, in their spiritual significance, are almost unknown, it seems, in this shallow, superficial age.
Many, lacking the knowledge of God and His holiness, do not see that humiliation and self-judgment before Him are the very first conditions for practical soul-restoration. Others do not see what is involved in self-judgment, hence growth is arrested; the activities of the divine life are hindered, and we re-main spiritual dwarfs, many of us. C. A. H.