Be Sensitive to the Holy Spirit
down to the scruple: to the smallest item
We want to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit, as Oswald Chambers says in this excerpt. I pray we will all work at being open and ready to listen. He deals with the smallest areas of our life.
Never object to the intense sensitiveness of the Holy Spirit in you when He is educating you down to the scruple.* When we are first put right with God, it is the great general principles that are at work, then God begins to make the conscience sensitive here and there. Don’t quench the Spirit. His checks are so tiny that common sense cannot detect them. If there is a sense of being out of touch with God, then at the peril of your soul you go and ask someone else what you have done wrong, you must go direct to God. The other soul is never so keen as the Spirit of God.
When He checks, never debate, but obey at once. It is not a question of having had the law of God put in front of our mind: “This is what you must do and that is what you must not do,” and then deliberate disobedience on our part. It is more an instinct of the spirit, an instantaneous feeling, a still small voice which we can easily quench; but if we do quench it, we become soiled, and every time the check comes and we do not heed it, the soiling is deepened. “Grieve not the . . . Spirit.” He does not come with a voice like thunder, with strong emphatic utterance—that may come ultimately; but at the beginning His voice is as gentle as a zephyr. At the same time it carries an imperative compulsion—we know the voice must be obeyed.
Oswald Chambers, So Send I You: The Secret of the Burning Heart (Hants UK: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1930).
