No matter how long it takes?

Wow. I'll say it again, just in case you casually passed over it. Wow. I was looking through 'My Utmost For His Highest' trying to find a devotional that would fit with the study this week, and I found this. It's deep... and maybe hard to grasp... It's very good though.


" (Colossians 1:24)
'I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of His body, which is the church...'

We take our own spiritual consecration and try to make it into a call of God, but when we get right with Him He brushes all this aside. Then He gives us a tremendous, riveting pain to fasten our attention on something that we never even dreamed could be His call for us. And for one radiant, flashing moment we see His purpose, and we say "Here I am! Send me" (Isaiah 6:8)
This call has nothing to do with personal sanctification, but with being made broken bread and poured-out wine. Yet God can never make us into wine if we object to the fingers He chooses to use to crush us. We say, "If God would only use His own fingers, and make me broken bread and poured-out wine in a special way, then I wouldn't object!" But when He uses someone we dislike, or some set of circumstances to which we said we would never submit, to crush us, then we object. Yet we must never try to choose the place of our own martyrdom. If we are ever going to be made into wine, the we will have to be crushed - you cannot drink grapes. Grapes become wine only when they have been squeezed.
I wonder what finger and thumb God has been using to squeeze you? Have you been as hard as a marble and escaped? If you are not ripe yet, and if God had squeezed you anyway, the wine produced would have been remarkably bitter. To be a holy person means that the elements of our natural life experience the very presence of God as they are providentially broken in His service. We have to be placed into God and brought into agreement with Him before we can be broken bread in His hands. Stay right with God and let Him do as He likes, and you will find that He is producing the kind of bread and wine that will benifit His other children. "
(Oswald Chambers)


I feel lately as though I have been squeezed down to the last drop... I know I've begun to wonder if I've cried everything down to the last tear. But this brings perspective to it.
What is it that God wants to rivet my attention to? I think I'm beginning to sense the answer...