"If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth ... Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief" (Mark 9:23-24)
The Holy Spirit, when He effects His gracious invasion of the believing heart, must win that heart to glad and voluntary obedience to the whole will of God. The cure must be wrought from within; no outward conformity will do.
Until the will is sanctified the man is still a rebel just as an outlaw is still an outlaw at heart even though he may be yielding grudging obedience to the sheriff who is taking him to prison. The Holy Spirit achieves this inward cure by merging the will of the redeemed man with His own. This is not accomplished at one stroke.
There must be, it is true, some kind of overall surrender of the will to Christ before any work of grace can be done, but the full mergence of every part of life with the life of God in the Spirit is likely to be a longer process than we in our creature impatience would wish.
No sin is so sweet that the sanctified person is not willing and resolved to forsake. He takes up the cross at the hazard of everything.
~A. W. Tozer~
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