Finally, blessed finally, all the mistaken ways of the flesh having failed, self dies and we learn to say, "I accept the will of my God as good and acceptable and perfect, for loss or for gain."

In another chapter we shall show how utter yieldedness to God must precede resistance of the devil.  Many souls become nervous wrecks through holding out against and resisting some providential suffering or sickness.  They persist in viewing their suffering as the work of the devil, and therefore to be resisted.  Poor souls, they know not that, in most all such providences, the way of victory and peace is to accept the difficulty as from the Lord.  Certainly if they are His, the trouble must get by Him to get to them.  And unless things are manifestly the direct work of a demon and therefore to be resisted, God's way of peace is to accept the difficulty in the spirit of their Master.  "The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?" Miss Carmichael says: "There is no strength to resist the ravaging lion as he prowls about seeking whom he may devour, unless our own hearts have learned to accept the unexplained in our own lives." We can never do better than to say with the Saviour, "Thy will be done"--not in any sluggish, sleepy resignation as to the inevitable, but in a positive spirit of cooperation with the Lord, actively willing what He wills to "be done."
  For a time we had contact with a circle of dear friends where the phrase, "Thy will be done," was never used in prayer for a sick person.  They held that healing was in the atonement in the same sense that sin was there.  They therefore consistently refused to add in their prayer for the sick, "Thy will be done." Was it not the will of God to heal everyone, just as He is unwilling that any should perish?  Such praying, of course, leads to a resisting and straining of nerve and mind that can drive one almost to insanity.  During a sickness, poor untaught Mimosa (perhaps fortunate for her, for she was not mistaught by the Spirit), experienced that when "relief did not always come at once, peace did." She took it for granted that the Lord could heal, but "in acceptance lieth peace." In her simplicity she said, "And is not peace of more importance?"

We have often wondered how Job could better have triumphed over the devil, had he known all about that great destroyer's existence.  When his despairing wife cried, "Curse God and die," Job replied, "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." Many mistaught saints today would have said, "The Lord gave and Satan hath taken away--I am therefore going to resist the devil." But job went through the very valley of strip--all, even to the smiting of his body with disease, and came out without the smell of smoke, yea, without the smell of self upon him.  "I abhor myself," said the old patriarch.  How could he have better foiled the devil than to resign himself completely to the good hand of God?  Satan came again and again, but in Job he could find not so much as a toe-hold.  Job would not rebel.  The devil was foiled.  "We conclude. therefore," says Hudson Taylor, "that Job was not mistaken, and that we shall not be mistaken, if we follow his example in accepting all God's providential dealings as from Himself, and are sure that they will issue in ultimate blessing, because God is God, and therefore, 'all things work together for good to them that love God."' Let us then sing with Faber: