When possessed with selfishness, we are laying up in our subconsciousness any number of self-seeking motives which come to the surface disguised and compel us to make impulsive and often foolish efforts to gain our own ends.

The self is every day proving to be the enemy of the man or woman whom it possesses.
God leaves us free to obey Him or to choose our own selfish way, and in His infinite Providence He is constantly showing us that our own selfish way leads to death and obedience to Him leads to life.

That is, that only in obedience to Him do we find our real freedom.

He is constantly showering us with a tender generosity and kindness that seems inconceivable, and sometimes it seems as if more often than not we were refusing to see.

Indeed we blind ourselves by making all pains of body and faults of soul positive and our efforts against them negative.
If we had a disagreeable habit which we wanted to conquer and asked a friend to remind us with a pinch every time he saw the habit, wouldn't it seem very strange if when he pinched us, according to agreement, we jumped and turned on him, rubbing our arm with indignation that he should have pinched?
Or would it not be even funnier if we made the pinch merely a reminder to go on with the habit?
The Lord is pinching us in that way all the time, and we respond by being indignant at or complaining at our fate, or reply by going more deeply into our weaknesses of character by allowing them to be positive and the pinches only to emphasize them to us.
One trouble is that we do not recognize that there is an agreement between us and the Lord, or that we recognize and then forget it; and yet there should be--there is--more than an agreement, there is a covenant.