by T. Austin-Sparks
Date messages given unknown. Edited and supplied by the Golden Candlestick Trust.
Heavenly things cannot arise out of the natural, it just cannot be. God has settled it; and we may struggle for years in our Christian life to try to produce something of God by natural energies and natural resources of brain and will and organization and all that sort of thing, and nothing will come. We may build up something externally, we may make a big thing, but so far as it being of heaven is concerned, there is nothing. God is bent upon increasing, strengthening, intensifying what is heavenly and what is spiritual. Those who, like Abraham, are going to walk with God and go on with God, will find that they have less and less to glory in on this earth, and their glorying will not be of men, but of God. That is, their glorying will be in the increase of their spiritual life and spiritual measure, which is the increase of Christ, the heavenly Man.