The Word must hold me...

It is a common experience for us to go through several up-down-up cycles in our spiritual life, which if we don’t know
what it is all about, will be confusing at best and often devastating to us. We call these “emptying cycles”, because
our Lord’s purpose in them is for us to be forced to die to self so that He can do His doing through us free from
hindrances from us. They are God-given experiences of us first being given a taste of future fullness in Christ with
respect to some promise or calling, followed by a period of loss to it, and finally we being raised to that promised
fullness.
For instance:
[1] you get a vision or a higher revelation of the ascension life, seated with Christ in the heavenly places, and
the joy and light of it is so real, that you think you will never come down again to the lower planes you now leave
behind you; but
[2] loss - in a brief while of weeks, or months, the conscious blessing - lasting according to the extent of the
revelation and its power - apparently disappears; and
[3] you perhaps struggle to regain what you think you have lost. Now you have to fight by bare faith, to hold
the ground you have taken. Then
[4] you “give up” trying, surrendering I apparent hopelessness. Then
[5] follows what may be called a “tunnel” experience, when you go through test upon test; in which, perhaps,
you may think you fail, but through all you find there is advancement and restoration of what you think you have
lost; and
[6] final emergence into the full consummation of the vision of that specific plane of the spiritual life, where
you understand the way of abiding; for in the working into you of that life by the “tunnel” experience, God has
removed what stands in the way of the permanent abiding in that stage of the knowledge of Him.
But note that if God gives you a message which He means you to take hold of, He holds you, even when you appear to
lose it. His Word given to you lays hold of you. That word has divine life and energy in it, and it can grip you and
hold you to it. God requires your co-operation, of course, and you must actively take the word by faith; but the power
is in the Word itself when God has spoken it to you. If the Lord has given you the word 'power over the power of the
enemy', you have to co-operate by saying in response, “I choose and accept it, Lord, but I have no power to hold it;
the Word must hold me.”