I. Lilias Trotter

“ There is a crisis like that which the flower reaches, when all things are ready. If that crisis is not seized, nothing lies before the plant but useless, irrevocable decay; the power to receive withers and vanishes; and nothing can renew it.
"That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, ye must be born again." "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, neither doth corruption inherit incorruption." Are you letting pass the moment on which all eternity hangs? ”

“ Again and again has a breaking come:--the seed broke to let go the shoot--the leaf-bud broke to let go the leaf, and the flower-bud to let go the flower--but all to no practical avail, if there is a holding back now. "Love is the fulfilling of the law," and sacrifice is the very life-breath of love. May God shew us every witholding thread of self that needs breaking still, and may His own touch shrivel it into death. ”

“ Let us come as fast as we can to letting the seed-vessel go as well as the leaves, God wants to bring us to a life of childlike simplicity, taken up with His Christ; always lower and lower at His feet in the consciousness of shortcoming and unworthiness as His Glory shines, but with our spiritual selves and all their intricacies fading out of sight before Him. As we go on, we learn to draw the supply of every need for spirit and soul and body from the simplest, barest, most direct contact with Him. ”

“ A dying must come upon all that would hinder God's working through us--all interests, all impulses, all energies that are "born of the flesh"--all that is merely human and apart from His Spirit. Only thus can the Life of Jesus, in its intensity of love for sinners, have its way in our souls.
Death to Self is the Way Out into a Life of Sacrifice.
This dandelion has long ago surrendered its golden petals, and has reached its crowning stage of dying--the delicate seed-globe must break up now--it gives and gives till it has nothing left. ”

“ They just give and give, with no aim but to be bare footstalks when all is done. Everything is loosened and spent without a shade of calculation or self-interest.
"Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory," they are all saying in spirit: they teach us absolute indifference as to whether our service is appreciated or even recognised, so long as the work is done and the Lord is glorified. The plant itself asks for nothing to keep, nothing to show, nothing to glory in from its whole life toil.
Nothing to glory in--God cannot get His whole glory while man gets any. ”

“ Every stage of the heavenly growth in us is lovely to Him; He is the God of the daisies and the lambs and the merry child hearts! It may be that no such path of loss lies before you; there are people like the lands where spring and summer weave the year between them, and the autumn processes are hardly noticed as they come and go. The one thing is to keep obedient in spirit, then you will be ready to let the flower-time pass if He bids you, when the sun of His love has worked some more ripening. ”

“ Are we longing that He should find when He comes no unspent treasure, no talent laid up in a napkin, like the unshed seed in its shelly fold? Are we acting as if it were our longing? "By Him actions" (not longings) "are weighed!"
Take one more look at our meadow. The summer days are cooling down, and the storms have begun to come. The ground is bare and blackened, the stalks and leaves are battered to shreds: but seeds are everywhere. The earth is strewn with the husks. Whence they come none can tell, and they are broken down into nothingness. All is death--death reigning. ”

“ Think of the wonder of it--the Fountain of Life Himself wells up within us, taking the place of all that we have delivered, bit by bit, into His grave. "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." Little have we proved, any of us, the resources that lie in that mighty indwelling, little have we learnt what it is to have all our soul-fibres penetrated by its power. May God lead us, no matter what the cost, into all that can be known of it, here on earth. ”

“ The flesh--the life of nature--is all, good and bad alike, that we had and were before Christ came to us. We see its shadow in the life of root and stem, leaf and tendril and petal, that made up the plant before its new birth took place; "for all flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field." It is not only that which is sinful as opposed to that which is holy: it is that which is human as opposed to that which is Divine.
In the earlier stage of the seed-vessel's growth we see the two lives, the old and the new, practically going on alongside. ”

“ And that way is again the way of death.
A stage of dying must come over the plant before the new leaves can grow and thrive. There must be a deliberate choice between the former growth and the new; one must give way to the other; the acorn has to come to the point where it ceases to keep its rag of former existence, and lets everything go to the fresh shoot: the twig must withdraw its sap from last year's leaf, and let it flow into this year's bud. ”

“ For the spirit of abandonment has to be carried into our spiritual life, as well as into the things that only touch the natural. The seed-vessel has to go down into death as well as the leaf. Look at it as it begins to pass into the valley of that shadow and its strength begins to ebb away. ”

“ The first hour that the sap begins to withdraw, and the leaf-stalk begins to silt up, the leaf's fate is sealed: there is never a moment's reversal of the decision. Each day that follows is a steady carrying out of the plant's purpose: "this old leaf shall die, and the new leaf shall live." So with your soul. Come to the decision once for all: "every known sin shall go--if there is a deliverance to be had, I will have it." ”

“ The most wonderful secrets of the plant world hang round the process of fertilisation, and the ways in which these springs of the second birth are guarded and set going, but the flower's simple work is to open and receive.
"The gift of God is eternal life"--oh, marvellous words!--"through Jesus Christ our Lord." "As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name." "He that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." ”

“ For here again death is the gate of life: it is an entering in, not a going forth only; it means a liberating of new powers as the former treasures float away like the dying petals.
We cannot feel a consciousness of death: the words are a contradiction in terms. If we had literally passed out of this world into the next we should not feel dead, we should only be conscious of a new wonderful life beating within us. Our consciousness of death would be an entirely negative matter--the old pains would be unable to touch us, the old bonds would be unable to fetter us. ”

“ Death is the Gate of Life
There was deep insight in those old words. For man's natural thought of death is that of a dreary ending in decay and dissolution. And from his standpoint he is right: death as the punishment of sin is an ending.
But far other is God's thought in the redemption of the world. He takes the very thing that came in with the curse, and makes it the path of glory. Death becomes a beginning instead of an ending, for it becomes the means of liberating a fresh life. ”

“ All gives way to the ripening seed. In the grasses the very root perishes by the time the grain is yellow, and comes up whole if you try to break the stem. They "reign in life" above through the indwelling seed, while all that is "corruptible" goes down into dust below. They have let all go to life--the enduring life: they are not taken up with the dying--that is only a passing incident--everything is wrapped up into the one aim, that the seed may triumph at any cost. Death is wrought out almost unconsciously: the seed has done it all. ”

“ We have seen in parable, in the seed's growing and ripening, the work of the Spirit within us, forming the life of Jesus, and bringing down the flesh into the grave. In its scattering we see shadowed forth the Spirit upon us in His power of reaching other souls. There is no needs be with us that this double work should be consecutive as in the plants--it may go on simultaneously. There is never a moment, from the first receiving of Christ as Saviour, when the full outpouring of the Holy Ghost may not take place--never a moment when, in figure, the seed may not be set free. ”

“ The hour of this new dying is clearly defined to the dandelion globe: it is marked by detachment. There is no sense of wrenching: it stands ready, holding up its little life, not knowing when or where or how the wind that bloweth where it listeth may carry it away. It holds itself no longer for its own keeping, only as something to be given: a breath does the rest, turning the "readiness to will" into the "performance." ”

“ Surrender--stillness--a ready welcoming of all stripping, all loss, all that brings us low, low into the Lord's path of humility--a cherishing of every whisper of the Spirit's voice, every touch of the prompting that comes to quicken the hidden life within: that is the way God's human seed-vessels ripen, and Christ becomes "magnified" even through the things that seem against us. ”

“ Death means a loosened grasp--loosened beyond all power of grasping again.
And it is no strange thing that happens to us, if God takes us at our word, and strips us for a while of all that made life beautiful. It may be outward things--bodily comfort, leisure, culture, reputation, friendships--that have to drift away as our hands refuse to clasp on anything but God's will for us. ”

“ The annuals give us the secret. Look back at the vetch seed-vessels. Why is it that the leaves which used to stand firm and fresh like those of the flowering clover, have begun to shrivel and turn yellow? It is because they have acquiesced wholly now in the death sentence of their new birth, and they are letting the new life live at the expense of the old. Death is being wrought out by life. ”

“ This bit of sphagnum shows the process in miniature: stage after stage of dying has been gone through, and each has been all the while crowned with life. Each time that the crown has sunk down again into death, that death has again been crowned in the act of dying: and the life all the time is the apparent thing: the daily dying that underlies it is out of sight to the passing glance.
Yes, life is the uppermost, resurrection life, radiant and joyful and strong, for we represent down here Him who liveth and was dead and is alive for evermore. ”

“ Yes, it is a broken spirit that we need--a spirit keeping no rights before God or man, longing to go down, down, anywhere, if other souls may be blessed. It is an indefinable thing, this brokenness, and yet it is as unmistakable when it has been wrought, as that of the seed-vessel in the field.
God has His promise for those "who sow in tears": those to whom to be a channel of Divine communication to the world means soul burden and travail. It is they who are bound to "reap in joy." ”

“ How long we are in grasping that we are His workmanship, even as they--in discovering the simple fact that it is exactly as impossible by our own striving to develop the Christ-life in our hearts as to form the seed in the pod! We have not to produce out of our higher nature a lowliness and a patience and a purity of our own, but simply to let the pure, patient, lowly life of Jesus have its way in us by yieldingness to it and by faith in its indwelling might. "All that God wants from man is opportunity." ”

“ For the blessedness of receiving is not all that God has for us: a new world lies beyond--a world of giving: a giving first to God in surrender, then to man in sacrifice.
A flower that stops short at its flowering misses its purpose. We were created for more than our own spiritual development; reproduction, not mere development, is the goal of matured being--reproduction in other lives. There is a tendency in some characters, running parallel to the high cultivation that spends its whole energy on the production of bloom at the expense of seed. ”

“ And then reckon into life the new-born growth of faith in your soul, and put all your force into believing: lift up your eyes to the God in Whom you believe: believe in the teeth of everything, as if the cause for doubt were not there. Then the sap, ceasing from feeding the old shoot, will flow into the new. ”