For this reason, God often disciplines us through outward circumstances. He arranges persons, matters, or things to deal with our being, including our mind, emotion, and will. For example, you may be a person who is very thoughtful and who always likes to use the mind. Your mind always comes first in your dealing with any matter. Unless God deals with you severely, it will be difficult for someone like you to realize how terrible your mind is. If you do not allow God to enlighten you to such an extent so that you see that your thoughts must be condemned before Him, then it will not be easy for you to put them aside. Therefore, God raises up certain environments to do a breaking work on you. When you look back on some of the things that happened to you, you will become clear that they were solely to deal with your mind with its thoughts. You are a person with a thoughtful mind, so God allows you to encounter some situations which are beyond your comprehension. God especially uses these situations to deal with your thinking, your intelligence, your cleverness. People like you who are so clever and have much intelligence and who like to use their minds must be dealt with by God if they do not allow Him to enlighten them. If God is not successful in trying to enlighten you by His light, then He must strike you with the environment to deal especially with the clever mind which you always love to use.
A person might be very clever formerly, but after he has been dealt with by God, even though we cannot say he is no longer clever, his cleverness has been broken. Such a person cannot use his cleverness any longer. When you touch him, you can still tell that he was born a very clever person, but you feel that his cleverness has been broken by God. When he faces any situation now, he does not dare use his cleverness; rather, he is afraid of it. This is not to say that he is no longer clever, but he is afraid to use his cleverness. He has been struck and dealt with by God. He has suffered in his cleverness. His cleverness is still here, but it has been broken. In this breaking there is the release of the spirit. When he encounters any situation now, he uses his spirit to feel. Instead of using his mind, he uses his spirit first, and instead of acting according to his thinking, he acts according to the sense of his spirit.
With someone who is rich in emotion and who lives in his emotion, God will also raise up environments to strike and touch his emotion. In this kind of dealing, God’s hand usually strikes precisely and heavily. After a person has been struck by God in his emotion, whenever he touches the Lord’s work or meets with certain situations again, he will be afraid of his emotion and will not dare use it. This does not mean that he becomes a wooden person. Rather, it means that his emotion has been dealt with and broken by God and can no longer occupy the first place within him. Once the emotion is broken, the spirit within can come out and have a chance. This is God’s purpose in raising up environments to discipline us.
Someone may have a very strong will and live entirely according to his will. With such a person, his will becomes his spiritual problem. His will hinders him from living in spirit and disables him from serving God in spirit. He may have some sense regarding this problem and may even have been enlightened by God, but he is not willing to learn to reject his will in every situation. Therefore, God arranges and raises up some circumstances to deal with him until his will has been broken and subdued. When you touch him after this, on the one hand, you can sense that he has a strong will, but on the other hand, you can also feel that his human will has been struck and broken. You can see that his spirit is released and strong. Whenever he touches the service of God, it is his spirit instead of his will that comes first.
The sufferings we face and the circumstances we encounter are mostly to deal with our natural man and the things in our soul. Many times our mind, emotion, and will all require God’s environmental dealings. These things are not easily broken without the dealings in our environment. If these things are not broken, then the spirit within, the life within, which is our inner man, cannot be released. In order to release our spirit from within, God often uses the environment to break our outer man, our outer shell.