Without Reserve

I read a book. Sounds weird, but I’ve hardly been reading anything that is not related to my studies during the last couple of months. But two weeks ago, while I was actually terribly distracted and trying to focus on praying, I stopped pacing through my room and stared at the bookshelf. My mind was wandering. Then I grabbed that book, I’ve never peeked into before and started reading. At first, I didn’t know if it would have been better to keep praying but I was just so absent… so I read.
Few pages and it hit me like ten thousand volts.

The next morning Mr. Hopkins spoke about the Holy Spirit. He made it plain that He is a Person, with all the faculties of a Person, exactly like the Savior. He has intelligence, love and a will of His own; and as a Person, before He comes to live in a man, He must be given full possession of his body.
”As he spoke,” Rees said, “the Holy Ghost appeared to me and I knew him to be the One who had spoken to me the day before and shown me that place of splendor and glory into which natural eyes can never look. It never dawned on me before that the Holy Ghost was a Person exactly like the Savior, and that He must come and dwell in flesh and blood. In fact, the Church knows more about the Savior, who was only on the earth thirty-three years, than about the Holy Ghost who has been here two thousand years. I had only thought of Him as an Influence coming on meetings, and that was what most of us in the Revival thought. I had never seen that He must live in bodies, as the Savior lived in His on earth.”
The meeting with the Holy Ghost was just as real to Rees Howells as his meeting with the Savior those years before. “I saw Him as a Person apart from flesh and blood, and He said to me, ‘As the Savior had a body, so I dwell in the cleansed temple of the believer. I am a Person. I am God, and I am come to ask you to give your body to Me that I may work through it. I need a body for My temple (1 Cor 6:19), but it must belong to Me without reserve, for two persons with different wills can never live in the same body. Will you give me yours? (Rom 12:1). But if I come in, I come as God, and you must go out (Col 3:2-3). I shall not mix Myself with your self.’
”He  made it very plain that He would never share my life. I saw the honor He gave me in offering to indwell me, but there were many things very dear to me, and I knew He wouldn’t keep one of them. The change He would make was very clear. It meant every bit of my fallen nature was to go to the cross, and He would bring in His own life and His own nature.”

Grubb, Norman: Rees Howells Intercessor, CLC Publications, Washington 2002, 39-40

That’s what I read and it kind of hit the nail right on the head. Answering all questions and at the same time creating a bunch of new ones. This little, unimpressive book with it’s confusing title – I always thought Rees Howells is the author who writes on intercession – from last year’s IHOP Commission gift bag was definitely entailing some hardcore truth to be dealt with. I actually stopped reading after this passage, because I knew this topic would need some careful digestion and I felt someone very important wanted to talk to me about this.