Ceasing to live that we may live

"Ceasing to live that we may live" by james Andrews 1961
It is not easy to cease from the workings of our own mind, to give up, to cease to live any longer after the understanding of things as they appear to us
But we can never know the joy of living a "Life that is hid with Christ in God," until and only as we do.
An intelligent person is not able to think without "willing" ----exercising his will. As long as we THINK things will appear to us as they do, not, "as they are," and we will live in a world where we are ever learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth.
But in the hour that we "cease to live," God's mind will be revealed and we shall awake in a new realm of conscious realization where things will no longer appear to us as they now do but we shall see them "as they are" in the very mind and purpose of God.
In all of us there is that principle of sin--that desire to have our way, to impose our will upon others because it seems to us that it is right. It is natural to believe in the vision that fills our own eyes and not realize that God is greater than that and knoweth all things. It is only natural to put your confidence in your own undrestanding and be determined that it shall prevail and when it does not to resent everthing that gets in the way.
God knows this. He remembers our frame that it is but dust. That is the reason He has arranged things as He has in this world to destroy sin, to make us realize that we cannot have our own way, that we must give up to God's will and His judgment--that we must cease to live any longer in the will of the flesh--(our own understanding and will of things as they appear to us).
God's arrangement of parenthood teaches us this fact. When our children are small we impose our will upon them but when they reach a certain age we can no longer do this but must stand helplessly by as we see them go contrary to what seems to us the right way. Happy indeed are those parents then who have learned to put their trust in the "one who guides thru the air the birds in their uncertain flight." Who have reached the end of self and are willing to let God have His way. Who have learned the secret of living so in the mind and heart of God that He will use them to carry His Devine righteousness and restraining grace into the lives of those that mean so much to them.
It is my faith that unless one learns in this life to fully surender his mind and will to God that our heavenly father has devised means whereby such accomplishment must be made in the life to come before one can enter into eternal rest. All God would have to do is to hold them in consciousness in that great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us where they could see everything that goes on and yet because of being absent from the body not be able to do anything about what they behold. In this way they would be forced to recoginize things as they are and surrender to God.
Oh wonder of wonders that we, so earthly, should bear the image of the heavenly. And yet it is true. Blessed God it is true! "When at last I sin no more and my running is o'er"--Then we shall know the perfect joy of Full Salvation Union. All of us shall be made "One" in Him. Those who are alive and remain and those who have fallen asleep shall be caught up
'together" with the Lord --in God's mind. And so shall we ever be with the Lord.