God can gift people, but it is something else when a man is in favour with God; when God can say “For this man’s sake, I will not judge this city or will show favour to this church.”
Death to self is the only entrance into the Church of the living God; and nothing but God can give this death, and that alone through the inward work of the cross of Christ by His Spirit made real in the soul.
It is one of the ironies of the ministry that the very man who works in God’s name is often hardest put to find time for God. The parents of Jesus lost Him at church, and they were not the last ones to lose Him there.