This passage shocked me. I hope you enjoy and learn from it as much as I did.

Passionate genuine affection for Jesus will lead to all sorts of vows and promises which it is impossible to fulfil. It is an attitude of mind and heart that sees only the heroic. We are called to be unobtrusive disciples, not heroes. When we are right with God, the tiniest thing done out of love to Him is more precious to Him than any eloquent preaching of a sermon. We have introduced into our conception of Christianity heroic notions that come from paganism and not from the teaching of Our Lord. Jesus warned His disciples that they would be treated as nobodies; He never said they would be brilliant or marvellous. We all have a lurking desire to be exhibitions for God, to be put, as it were, in His show room. Jesus does not want us to be specimens, He wants us to be so taken up with Him that we never think about ourselves, and the only impression left on others by our life is that Jesus Christ is having unhindered way.

“Peter . . . walked upon the waters, to come to Jesus (Matthew 14:29). Walking on water is easy to impulsive pluck, but walking on dry land as a disciple of Jesus Christ is different, Peter walked on the water to go to Jesus, but he followed Him afar off^††† on the land. We do not need the grace of God to stand crises; human nature and our pride will do it. We can buck up and face the music of a crisis magnificently, but it does require the supernatural grace of God to live twenty-four hours of the day as a saint, to go through drudgery as a saint, to go through poverty as a saint. to go through an ordinary, unobtrusive, ignored existence as a saint, unnoted and unnoticeable. The “show business,” which is so incorporated into our view of Christian work to-day, has caused us to drift far from Our Lord’s conception of discipleship. It is instilled in us to think that we have to do exceptional things for God; we have not. We have to be exceptional in ordinary things, to be holy in mean^* streets, among mean people, surrounded by sordid sinners. That is not learned in five minutes.

Jesus took the early disciples in hand to train them, and at the end of three years of intimate companionship with Him, they all forsook Him and fled.^† Then they came to the end of themselves and all their self-sufficiency, and realised that if ever they were going to be different, it must be by receiving a new Spirit. After the Resurrection, Jesus “breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost.”

Do we really believe we need another Spirit? Are we basing our religious life on our impulses, on our natural affections, on what other people tell us we are? or are we based on what Jesus wants us to be? Jesus guides us by making us His friends.

^* mean: ordinary, common, low, or ignoble, rather than cruel or spiteful

 Oswald Chambers, So Send I You: The Secret of the Burning Heart (Hants UK: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1930).