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Wednesday February 18, 2026

The inescapable pressure of the Spirit

“The inescapable pressure of the Spirit comes, if we are really His to the limit, which will not allow us to live our lives on the comfortable level of such a word as ‘God has given us richly all things to enjoy’; but rather on those others which say: ‘All things are lawful, but all things are not expedient’; ‘Though I be free from all, yet have I made myself servant to all, that I might gain the more’; ‘I endure all things for the elect’s sake.’ Enjoyments there will be, many and continual, for all life has joy and zest in it when it is mediated through Christ; but a conscious binding sense of dedication will be upon us, a voluntarily accepted yoke of holy servitude. We are prisoners of the Lord, bound in spirit, even as Paul deliberately renounced certain of life’s normal privileges that he might better preach the Gospel, a kind of voluntary extremism. So will we, in this way or that, according to the measure of our faith and light, gladly give up some of the lesser good to gain the greater. We shall be a people with a purpose, even as for temporal ends the athlete denies himself, the scientist devotes himself, the soldier risks himself.

In a special sense it appears that the Holy Spirit sets men apart, when they allow Him to, for special ends, and lays on them the burden that has to be borne, the price to be paid, the travail to be endured, and even the death to be died, to bring that special end about. It is what the Scripture calls God finding an intercessor. They are rare, for God in a past emergency wondered that there was no intercessor. It is costly to be an intercessor, reaching far beyond the ordinary prayer-life of request and supplication, for there is expenditure of heart’s blood and agony of soul in it. ‘He poured out His soul unto death,’ we read, ‘and was numbered with the transgressors, and bare the sin of many’; and so, it says, ‘He made intercession for the transgressors.’

The reward of the intercessor is as great as his travail. He fulfills the Law of the harvest. He goes through the processes of death, accepts them voluntarily, has them laid on him by the travailing Spirit who groans within him with groanings which cannot be uttered; and by so doing the upspringing of the harvest, resurrection life for the world, is as sure as that spring and summer follow winter.”

Taken from: The Law of Faith

By Norman Grubb

Pages 221-222