No Christian escapes a taste of the wilderness on the way to the promised land.
The Fruits of the Spirit
The Holy Spirit is called the Giver of Gifts, but the Spirit's cherishing action is only really felt by those who acknowledge their own deep poverty--who realize that we have literally nothing of our own but are totally dependent on God and on that natural world in which God has placed us and which is the sacramental vehicle of God's action. When we grasp this, we are ready to receive God's gifts.
Some souls are so full of pious furniture and ornaments that there is no room for the Holy Spirit. All the correct things have been crammed into the poor little villa, but none of the best quality. They need to pull down the curtains, get rid of the knick-knacks, and throw their premises open to the great simplicity of God.
Faithfulness is consecration in overalls. It is the steady acceptance and performance of the common duty and immediate task without any reference to personal preferences--because it is there to be done, and so is a manifestation of the Will of God.... The fruits of the Spirit get less and less showy as we go on. Faithfulness means continuing quietly with the job we have been given, in the situation where we have been placed; not yielding to the restless desire for change. It means tending the lamp quietly for God without wondering how much longer it has got to go on. Steady, unsensational driving, taking good care of the car. A lot of the road to heaven has to be taken at 30 miles per hour.
Each person's discipline will be different because what God wants from each of us is different. Some are called to an active and some to a passive life, some to very homely and some to hard and sacrificial careers, some to quiet suffering. Only the broad lines will be alike. But no discipline will be any use to us unless we keep in mind the reason why we are doing this--for the Glory of God, and not just for the sake of our own self-improvement or other self-regarding purpose. Our object is to be what God wants of us, not what we want. So all that we do must be grounded in worship. First lift up our eyes to the hills, then turn to our own potato field and lightly fork in the manure.
The series of events which were worked out to their inevitable end in Holy Week sum up and express the deepest secrets of the relation of God to men. That means, of course, that Christianity can never be merely a pleasant or consoling religion. It is a stern business. It is concerned with the salvation through sacrifice and love of a world in which evil and cruelty are rampant. Its supreme symbol is the Crucifix--the total and loving self-giving of man to the redeeming purposes of God.
Because we are all the children of God, we all have our part to play in God's redemptive plan; and the Church consists of those souls who have accepted this obligation, with all that it costs. Its members are all required to live, each in their own way, through the sufferings and self-abandonment of the Cross, as the only real contribution which they can make to the redemption of the world. Christians, like their Master, must be ready to accept the worst that evil and cruelty can do to them, and vanquish it by the power of love.
You remember the noble figure of Faithful in [John Bunyan's] Pilgrim's Progress, Christian's best friend. How he started from the City of Destruction some time after Christian, but soon passed him on the road because he never thought it necessary to linger, to ask for explanations or worry about dangers. He just plodded steadily on. Faithful is the least self-occupied of all the pilgrims. We hear nothing about his burden or fatigue or difficulty or the poor state of the road. Christian makes a good deal of the Valley of Humiliation, tells us about how horrible it was and feels it very remarkable that he ever got through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. There is none of that in Faithful. He is not thinking about saving his soul. He is thinking about God. And so he goes in sunshine all the way.
As we draw near Christmas, the sense of our own need and of the whole world's need of God's coming--never greater perhaps than it is now--becomes more intense.... We seem to hear the voice of the whole suffering creation saying, 'Come! Give us wisdom, give us light, deliver us, liberate us, lead us, teach us how to live. Save us.' And we, joining in that prayer, unite our need with the one need of the whole world. We have to remember that the answer to the prayer was not a new and wonderful world order but Bethlehem and the Cross; a life of complete surrender to God's will; and we must expect this answer to be worked out in our own lives in terms of humility and sacrifice.
If our lives are ruled by this spirit of Advent, this loving expectation of God, they will have a quality quite different from that conventional piety. For they will be centered on an entire and conscious dependence upon the supernatural love which supports us; hence all self-confidence will be destroyed in them and replaced by perfect confidence in God.