Quench not the Spirit

From Oswald Chambers' devotional My Utmost for His Highest:

"Quench not the Spirit." — 1 Thessalonians 5:19

"The voice of the Spirit is as gentle as a zephyr, so gentle that unless you are living in perfect communion with God, you never hear it. The checks of the Spirit come in the most extraordinarily gentle ways, and if you are not sensitive enough to detect His voice you will quench it, and your personal spiritual life will be impaired. His checks always come as a still small voice, so small that no one but the saint notices them.

"Beware if in personal testimony you have to hark back and say--'Once, so many years ago, I was saved.' If you are walking in the light, there is no harking back, the past is transfused into the present wonder of communion with God. If you get out of the light you become a sentimental Christian and live on memories, your testimony has a hard, metallic note. Beware of trying to patch up a present refusal to walk in the light by recalling past experiences when you did walk in the light. Whenever the Spirit checks, call a halt and get the thing right, or you will go on grieving Him without knowing it.

"Suppose God has brought you up to a crisis and you nearly go through but not quite, He will engineer the crisis again, but it will not be so keen as it was before. There will be less discernment of God and more humiliation at not having obeyed; and if you go on grieving the Spirit, there will come a time when that crisis cannot be repeated, you have grieved Him away. But if you go through the crisis, there will be the pean of praise to God. Never sympathize with the thing that is stabbing God all the time. God has to hurt the thing that must go.

"It is very easy to quench the Spirit; we do it by despising the chastening of the Lord, by fainting when we are rebuked by Him. If we have only a shallow experience of sanctification, we mistake the shadow for the reality, and when the Spirit of God begins to check, we say--oh, that must be the devil.

"Never quench the Spirit, and do not despise Him when He says to you--'Don’t be blind on this point any more; you are not where you thought you were. Up to the present I have not been able to reveal it to you, but I reveal it now.' When the Lord chastens you like that, let Him have His way. Let Him relate you rightly to God.

"'Nor faint when thou art rebuked of Him.' We get into sulks with God and say--'Oh, well, I can’t help it; I did pray and things did not turn out right, and I am going to give it all up.' Think what would happen if we talked like this in any other domain of life!

"Am I prepared to let God grip me by His power and do a work in me that is worthy of Himself?

"Sanctification is not my idea of what I want God to do for me; sanctification is God’s idea of what He wants to do for me, and He has to get me into the attitude of mind and spirit where at any cost I will let Him sanctify me wholly."