I saw Him as a Person apart from flesh and blood, and He said to me, "As the Saviour had a body, so I dwell in the cleansed temple of the believer. I am a Person. I am God, and I am come to ask you to give your body to Me that I may work through it. I need a body for My temple (1 Cor. 6:19), but it must belong to Me without reserve, for two persons with different wills can never live in the same body. Will you give Me yours? (Rom. 12:1) But if I come in, I come as God, and you must go out (Col. 3:2-3). I shall not mix myself with your self."
He made it very plain that He would never share my life. I saw the honour He gave me in offering to indwell me, but there were many things very dear to me, and I knew He wouldn't keep one of them. The change He would make was very clear. It meant every bit of my fallen nature was to go to the Cross, and He would bring in His own life and His own nature.
It was unconditional surrender.
I knew the only place fit for the old nature was on the Cross. But once this is done in reality, it is done for ever. I could not run into this. I intended to do it, but oh, the cost! How I wished I had never seen it!
He had only come to take what I had already promised the Saviour, not in part, but the whole. Since He died for me, I had died in Him, and I knew that the new life was His and not mine. He had only come to take what was his own: and I saw that only the Holy Ghost in me could live like the Saviour. Everything He told me appealed to me; it was only a question of the loss there would be in doing it. I didn't give my answer in a moment, and He didn't want me to.
