Second Mile People

Here is an excerpt from Isobel Kuhn's "Second Mile People (pages 37-39):"

"Oswald Chambers says, 'The people who influence us most are not those who buttonhole us and talk to us, tut those who live their lives like the stars in heaven and the lilies in the field, perfectly simply and unaffectedly.  Those are the lives that mould us.'  A great mistake is to think that a Spirit-filled man or woman must always be casting sermons at people.  Being 'filled with the Spirit' (which is a first qualification of Second Mile People) is merely a refusing of self and a taking by faith of the life of Christ as wrought in us by His Holy Spirit.

'Many who claim by faith this fullness, and who, up to the measure of their light, are yielded and obedient, are disappointed and perplexed because they are aware of no particular manifestation.  They expect a glowing sense of power...But let us take to heart what others have pointed out, that the Spirit's chief work is to make us HOLY.  The truest evidence is not gift but grace...The Spirit will divide the gifts.  One man may have a gift for preaching, another a gift for intercession, another a gift for personal dealing, and another by administration.  Still others may glorify their Lord by some kind of seeming drudgery, even as lowly as that of Brother Lawrence, who "practised the presence of God" in the monk's kitchen.

"A work of lowly love to do for Him on Whom I wait."  'But let it be said again, once you open your being to His fullness your life must be enriched; you will never be the same again"...We fall in defeat when we try to 'judge' the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives; ours is to yield to Him in joyous faith, and not worry as to the kind or value of the fruit He is producing."