William Still On Christ Within

The apostle Paul teaches some of the most wonderful truths in Galatians 1:15-16, when he writes of his own conversion and calling: “But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone; nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus.” Picking up on the glory of what Paul was saying,  William Still noted:

The ordination of God is beyond a man’s personal experience; and it is this to which any significant servant of God gives the sense of purpose of being in the stream of God’s unfolding will, and enables him to endure the obloquy and persecutions of men. It is indeed the backward extension of this (in Eph. 1:4) which enables pygmies of men to see themselves in their divine calling as chosen of God before the foundation of the world.

He who can identify his calling in time and in experience with an ordination beyond his personal consciousness knows himself to be carried forward on a stream of grace so mighty that no human agent or agency can daunt his spirit. This man has something to say to men, but nothing to learn from them, relative to his calling. Ps. 119:97-104.

Besides, when the supernatural ordination and subsequent calling leads on to a revelation far more wonderful than (although not as cataclysmic as) the light on the Damascus road, (namely of the Son of God within, as a new, gracious and powerful personality filling the infant Christian mind with new thoughts, purposes and ways of living) what need has the man of human approbation? This is the greatest revelation of all–that Christ, as a human babe and as a carpenter, dying a shameful death and rising to highest heaven to arrest men in a blaze of celestial glory, should now be found in man’s mind, working his own pattern of thoughts and directing the whole personality, body and soul, to new endless ends–that is beyond all.