The Narrow and Intensely Steep Way

Forgiveness: the Way to the High Places

There are reasons why people do not make it to the high places. It costs something. In fact, it costs a lot. As Brother C. E. Orr writes:

You need to pray more, meditate more, lift up your soul to God more, have more reverence and holy awe upon your soul, live more in godly fear, have more of the anointing of the Holy Spirit upon you, and more peace and power and glory in your soul. You can have it. It will cost you something, but you can have it if you will.

[Charles E. Orr; Helps to Holy Living, “Part I”]

To live in this way is to have the feet of the hind, and God is calling to all His little children to undertake the quest from the spiritual lowlands to the high places.

In the book Hinds’ Feet in High Places, Much-Afraid set her heart upon traveling to the Shepherd’s high places wherein He had promised her that her lame feet would be changed into hinds’ feet. “The Lord God is my strength, and He will make my feet like hinds’ feet, and He will make me to walk upon mine high places.”* (Habakkuk 3:19) Her pilgrimage had not gone as she thought it would go. The road to the high places turned away from the mountains and took her into things she would not have chosen. After many experiences, all valuable if taken rightly and all appointed of the Shepherd, she was elated when the way turned toward the heights, and she anticipated soon being in the mountains, just as people imagine what it is like to be spiritual and grow excited at the prospect. If you wish to read of this in the book, it begins in the ninth chapter and continues through the tenth.

At first, the way was without obstacle, and the mountains loomed higher and higher. And then Much-Afraid received a dreadful shock. For the path dead-ended at “the foot of an impassable precipice.”

This is not just a story; it is an accurate depiction of the nature of the difficulties of those who really live for God. The inner adjustment of the attitude of Much-Afraid was and is the vital thing. For it is not so much what happens to us in life that matters; it is how we take it. What appears to be impossible, is possible with God. He is waiting on us. The entire account of her stunned perplexity, her baffled amazement, her disappointed expectation is classic. Many want to be more spiritual, but they want to be more spiritual for God in their way. God has His own plans for us—and they are vastly superior to our greatest imaginings. His way up is frequently a way down. He has in mind to present us with His ways, step by step, and leave it to us whether we will follow all the way or draw back.

To consecrate to go all the way with the Lord is to consecrate to walk with Sorrow and Suffering, both before the transformation and afterwards. It is to find a Way—the one and only way that God has chosen for us—through all the happenings of life.

When God allows someone to really injure you, and you are still reeling from the injustice and lack of love manifested, then this allegorical representation at the foot of the precipice of injury will take on a depth of meaning previously unknown. I learned about it in my youth. In a naive, trusting manner, I got myself into a position before others which left me wide open to scathing criticism, not totally undeserved, but certainly not to the extent that it was dished out. And there I was (right where God intended for me to be), with the precipice filling the sky and the experience of damage overshadowing my entire life, trying to find the way that God had for me through all of it. As a poet put it many years before,

My soul had longed for more of God,
More glory in the cross;
But never dreamed that it must come
Through such a bitter loss.

[Daniel S. Warner, quoted in Birth of a Reformation, by Andrew L. Byers]

With your head at an impossible angle, your neck aching, and your eyes straining, you stare up… up… at what it means to forgive from the heart as a Bible Christian must do—and it just flat looks impossible. I thought the injustice of it all would drive me mad. The prejudices of others tower up into the very clouds and beyond, and there seems no hope of ever being even understood, to say nothing of being accepted.

What did Jesus do? For He came this way Himself in the days of His flesh. Yes! The glory of His passing lingers yet, and those who are given the feet of the spiritual hind and the hart follow in His steps. For there is a way up. “God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”* (1 Corinthians 10:13)

The hart, which was leading the way, was following what appeared to be a narrow and intensely steep track which went zig-zagging across the face of the cliff.

[Hannah Hurnard; Hinds’ Feet on High Places (Copyright 1975 by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.)]

There was a path which led onwards; there was a way of escape from despair and discouragement without turning back.

Except the Lord help us in our need, we are not even able to trace the narrow path of trueness to God in the injuries we receive, but by His assistance, we can both learn and follow. In the allegorical representation of these things in the book, Much-Afraid could scarcely win the consent of her heart to ask for the help she needed, and it really appeared for a short time as if this was the end of her quest for a deeper, higher life. After stewing about, attempting to deal with her problems on her own by not taking God’s way, she finally called for help. And here a profound truth appears. God already knows how we will react in any of life’s circumstances. He carefully measures out the trials of His children for our good. He intends that our weaknesses be strengthened and our strengths perfected.

“I don’t think—I want—hinds’ feet, if it means I have to go on a path like that,” she said slowly and painfully.

The Shepherd was a very surprising person. Instead of looking either disappointed or disapproving, he actually laughed again. “Oh, yes, you do,” he said cheerfully. “I know you better than you know yourself, Much-Afraid. You want it very much indeed, and I promised you these hinds’ feet.”

“But I never dreamed you would do anything like this! Lead me to an impassable precipice up which nothing can go but deer and goats, when I’m no more like a deer or a goat than is a jellyfish. It’s too—it’s too—” She fumbled for words, and then burst out laughing. “Why, it’s too preposterously absurd! It’s crazy! Whatever will you do next?”

The Shepherd laughed, too. “I love doing preposterous things,” he replied. “Why, I don’t know anything more exhilarating and delightful than turning weakness into strength, and fear into faith, and that which has been marred into perfection. If there is one thing more than another which I should enjoy doing at this moment, it is turning a jellyfish into a mountain goat. That is my special work,” he added with the light of a great joy in his face.

[Hinds’ Feet on High Places]

What a beautiful picture of a soul learning to trust! Out of weakness being made strong and brought on the way to be made stronger yet.

But Thou art making me, I thank Thee, Sire.
What Thou hast done and doest Thou know’st well,
And I will help Thee: gently in Thy fire
I will lie burning; on Thy potter’s-wheel
I will whirl patient, though my brain should reel;
Thy grace shall be enough the grief to quell,
And growing strength perfect through weakness dire.

[George MacDonald; The Diary of an Old Soul, “October”]

All this is precious and exceedingly valuable. All of it is the necessary prerequisite to actually beginning to climb. But now we want to focus on what it means to forgive—forgive freely and from the heart—the necessary inner steps that must be taken to climb the precipice and come out on top.

All of us possess a certain dignity and standing with others which varies to a certain extent, but is more or less fixed by our place in life, our conditioning, our culture, our kin. All have an inner sense of justice/injustice. With some of us, it is somewhat muted, while with others, it is hair-trigger. With some, stones could be thrown at them for no apparent reason, and they still would not be much upset; but with others, the slightest thing sets off an avalanche of outrage. When any of us encounter the precipice of injury, the reaction is almost always proportionate to how highly we think of ourselves. We climb as we humble ourselves. The more lowly-minded we are, the better we ascend. The more that we think of ourselves, the harder it is to even see the way of escape, much less to ascend it. It may appear contradictory, but Jesus is calling each of us to greater heights of lowliness and meekness.

To become convicted of our smallness and littleness, yet stay true to God, and not enter into bondage to man, is vastly more than adopting a serious inferiority complex. We catch a hint of it in Philippians, “For we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.”* (Philippians 3:3) It is not just to have no confidence in my flesh, but in the flesh of everyone overall, including me. It is to realize that the glory of man is as the grass. It is to catch a glimpse of how incapable we are of getting along as we need to without the intervention of the Almighty. It speaks with profound authority in this text, “O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.”* (Jeremiah 10:23) It is to realize how greatly all humanity is in need of the grace of God, and particularly all humanity as it applies to me.

To be willing to be stripped of our heritage of dignity and standing among our peers, to consecrate to be misunderstood and misrepresented, to continue to labor for the good of others at the Lord’s direction through it all; these are the steps of our Master. For He, long ago, in the days of His flesh, labored up this faint trace of a path up the sheer sides of the precipice of injury. “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.”* (Isaiah 53:3-4) He, too, put no confidence in His flesh. “And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself.”* (Philippians 2:8) Every child of God, in learning to forgive, follows this same path. It is an acceptance of the way of Jesus for ourselves, an embracing of the cross—of the path of the humbly-minded.

One slip off this path can shatter your whole life. For to commit to follow the way of the Lord is to commit to not fit in all other paths. “Normal” human life, in the sense that pride, dignity, and peer standing are the “normal” way of life for most, becomes more and more unsuitable to a soul who has launched out to follow Jesus in the adoption with all his heart. If you give up after truly following the Lord in this way, you will find that you are not very suited any more for just a shallow religious professor or good-moral-worldly life. Let me put it this way: if you have ever been helped by the Lord to fully and freely forgive another from the heart, then you know something about victory on this line that goes far beyond words. If you turn away from following God, and you react to an injury from another as the world does, it will do you greater damage than if you did not have the inner knowledge you possess. Your inner understanding makes you more accountable, and you will be handicapped and restrained in your carnality. If you deliberately override this understanding, it will make you harder and prouder than would have otherwise been the case. “For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning. For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them.”* (2 Peter 2:20-21)

Someone has said that to understand all is to forgive all. There is some truth to this. There are reasons why people do as they do, and why they did the way they did in the injury you received. Frequently, these reasons have deep roots and go beyond personal malice. The people that crucified Jesus did not understood at all the extent to which they were sinning. And He grasped this in His forgiveness of them. “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”* (Luke 23:34) His comprehension of the extent of their ignorance assisted in maintaining a forgiving attitude toward them.

A Christian must possess the spirit of forgiveness and forbearance toward all at all times (Colossians 3:13). “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”* (Ephesians 4:31-32) A follower of the Lord Jesus Christ should be one of the most tenderhearted and kindest of men, easy to be entreated, and gentle (James 3:17). He has been forgiven through the forbearance of God with him (Romans 3:25), and he bears about this disposition to forgive others their trespasses against him.

Some folks are willing to extend a grudging pardon to those who grovel for mercy, but such is far short of Christ-like forgiveness. This attitude betrays a lack of understanding in the inner man of the character of God. For He delights in mercy and is ready to forgive (Psalms 86:5). Forgiveness is in His heart, and He only waits for the petition of a contrite heart to complete the act of pardon.

A little girl once expressed the feeling to me, with a child’s outspoken candor. She had asked whether the Lord Jesus always forgave us for our sins as soon as we asked Him, and I had said, “Yes, of course He does.”

“Just as soon?” she repeated, doubtingly.

“Yes,” I replied, “the very minute we ask, He forgives us.”

“Well,” she said deliberately, “I cannot believe that. I should think He would make us feel sorry for two or three days first. And then I should think He would make us ask Him a great many times, and in a very pretty way too, not just in common talk. And I believe that is the way He does, and you need not try to make me think He forgives me right at once, no matter what the Bible says.”

She only said what most Christians think, and, what is worse, what most Christians act on.

[Hannah W. Smith; The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, “Failures”]

God is easy to be entreated for forgiveness because He possesses the spirit of forgiveness. This spirit of forgiveness manifests itself in the preparations that He has made to forgive and restore each fallen member of the human race. It is also seen in His forbearance and in how His Spirit strives with each member of the human race. A child of God is easy to be entreated because he/she has received this spirit of forgiveness from God, and he, as his heavenly Father, is predisposed to forgive. He carries within himself the spirit of forgiveness, forgiving the offender’s trespass before it is committed.

Sometimes this disposition to forgive is tried greatly. Sometimes the enemy comes in like a flood and presents a resentment and an attitude of feeling sorry for one’s self, which would replace the spirit of forgiveness if the temptation is accepted. There may be a struggle here, and it may be necessary to get more grace to get smaller in our own estimation to be able to have victory on this point, but that overcoming is ours for the taking by the help of Him who loves us.

The Mountain of Injury can be surmounted by the grace of God. Indeed, it is the only way to the high places. No one ever got deeper in the Lord without learning how to forgive all.