George D. Watson writes:

“But God designs to concentrate our faith in Him alone by removing all other foundations, and one step after another, detaching us from all other supports. There are many souls which cannot endure this utter desolation of secondary supports, which would be more than they could bear, and they would react into open rebellion; so God allows them to have a junior faith, and to lean on other things more or less.

He allows all sorts of disappointments, the death of bright hopes, the removing of earthly friendships or body and mind, the multiplied infirmities, the destruction of property, the misunderstanding of dear ones, until the landscape of religious life seems swept with a blizzard, to compel the soul to house itself in God alone.

And thus our faith is strengthened by disappointment, until it reaches such perfect union with God that it never looks to anybody, or anything, or any mode, or any old channel, or any circumstances, or any frame of mind, or any meeting, or any set of feelings, or at any time or season; but keeps itself swung free from all these things, and dependent on God alone.

This degree of faith can never be disappointed, can never be jostled, because it expects nothing except what God wills, and looks to no mode except infinite wisdom. Its expectation is from God only.” (George Watson)

For those who long to walk in the holiness of God, to behold and to live within the beauty of His holiness, brother Watson is unveiling nothing less than a divine stripping. Not a stripping of sin alone, but of every secondary support that subtly competes with total reliance upon God. These things are not evil in themselves, yet they divide the heart and weaken that absolute dependence for which we were created.

So God, in His mercy, removes them.

One by one He loosens our grip on all that is not Himself. Whether for a season or for a lifetime depends upon His sovereign calling upon each life. But make no mistake, the narrow path is a lonely path. It is a path where lesser comforts fade, where familiar supports fall away, and where the soul is brought into holy isolation with God alone.

Yet this is not loss, this is the refiners fire. And more often than not, at some point we are restored to those places from whence wr came, blessing the Body of Christ with what we learned in the wilderness, the place where we were taught to fully rely upon God and Him alone.

The apostle Paul declared that he had learned the secret of contentment in all things. Not because his circumstances were easy, but because his attachments had been severed. He counted the loss of all things to be nothing in the end, rather the overwhelming desire of his heart was to be found in Him. He was no longer anchored to this world, rather, he was intimately connected to His singular source of strength. Everything that could be shaken had been shaken, and what remained was Christ alone.

This is the life, to be unmoved, yet not untouched.

We feel the sorrow. We feel the weight of loss, the sting of disappointment, the deep ache of separation. But none of it has the power to move us from the Rock upon which we stand. Christ is our foundation, unshakable, immovable, eternal.

And this is revealed in us by a quiet, immovable peace and a singular, unwavering focus.

So then shall we not press onwards and upwards toward this place?

Shall we not hunger to stand as Paul stood, unmoved by circumstance, unshaken by storm, undistracted by the fleeting shadows of this world?

For when our eyes are fixed upon the unseen, upon that which is eternal, we begin to walk beneath the undeniable weight of His glory. We step into the reality of His Kingdom. Walking in Kingdom power.

The alternative is to walk in mediocrity.

Caught up in the visible, entangled in the temporary, anchored to that which is passing away. In this place, faith recedes, typically replaced by fear. Anxiousness rises. We see only what the world sees. We begin to sound like the world. We complain, we grumble. Oftentimes we present our fear as compassion. Our complaints are passed of as virtues. They are not, and its very best, its humanism and humanism has no place in the realm of God.

Come up a little higher brothers and sisters. The flesh is anchored to the ground, the spirit has wings are we are called to high and lofty places where the Lord dwells with the lowly and contrite and the broken.