Be thankful for mountain top experiences but don't live there!

“And Peter answered and said to Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here: and let us make three tabernacles; one for Thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias. For he wist not what to say; for they were sore afraid ” (Mark 9:5–6).

Peter wist not what to say, then why did he say it? Have you never said things you should not have said? If we get a great grasp in vision of Who Jesus is and try to work it out in our ordinary human life by the energy of the flesh, we shall do what Peter did, talk nonsense through sheer bewilderment. 

When we come to Peter’s Epistles, there is nothing hysterical about them. Peter has gone through disillusionment about himself; he has gone through seeing the death of his Lord and through identification with His death; through the experience of receiving from the Risen Lord the gift of the Holy Spirit, and he says, we are not hysterical, we were eyewitnesses of His majesty when we were with Him in the holy mount.

Repeatedly the vision of entire sanctification, or of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, is mistaken for the actuality. The only test of the actuality is when we are brought down into things as they are; it is then that the reality must manifest itself. When Jesus had healed the demoniac boy, the disciples asked Him, ‘How is it that we could not cast it out?’ and Jesus said unto them, “This kind can come out by nothing, save by prayer and fasting,” by spiritual concentration on Him. 

We can ever remain powerless, as were the disciples, by trying to do God’s work through ideas drawn from our own temperament instead of by concentration on His power.

Never mistake the wonderful visions God gives you for reality, but watch, for after the vision you will be brought straight down into the valley. We are not made for the mountains, we are made for the valley. Thank God for the mountains, for the glorious spiritual realisation of Who Jesus Christ is; but can we face things as they actually are in the light of the Reality of Jesus Christ? or do things as they are efface altogether our faith in Him and drive us into a panic? When Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you,” it was to the Cross He went. 

Through His Cross He prepared a place for us to “sit with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus” now, not by and bye. When we get to the Cross we do not go through and out the other side, we abide in the life to which the Cross is the gateway; and the characteristic of the life is deep and profound sacrifice to God. We know Who our Lord is by the power of His Spirit, we are strongly confident in Him, and the reality of our relationship to Him works out all the time in the actualities of our ordinary life.

Chambers, O. (1930). Making all things new. Hants UK: Marshall, Morgan & Scott.