CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 3
The Life Defined
The experience sometimes called the “higher Christian life” is the only true Christian life and is best described in the words “the life hid with Christ in God.” The scriptures do set before the believer in the Lord Jesus a life of abiding rest and of continual victory, which is very far beyond the ordinary run of Christian experience. In the Bible we have presented to us a Savior able to save us from the power of our sins as really as He saves us from their guilt.
The chief characteristics of a life hid with Christ are an entire surrender to the Lord and a perfect trust in Him, resulting in victory over sin and inward rest of soul. It differs from the lower range of Christian experience in that it causes us to let the Lord carry our burdens and manage our affairs for us instead of trying to do it ourselves.
Most Christians are like a man who was toiling along the road, bending under a heavy burden, when a wagon overtook him, and the driver kindly offered to help him on his journey. He joyfully accepted the offer but, when seated in the wagon, continued to bend beneath his burden, which he still kept on his shoulders.
“Why do you not lay down your burden?” asked the kindhearted driver.
“Oh!” replied the man, “I feel that it is almost too much to ask you to carry me, and I could not think of letting you carry my burden, too.”
And so Christians who have given themselves into the care and keeping of the Lord Jesus still continue to bend beneath the weight of their burdens and often go weary and heavy laden throughout the whole length of their journey.
When I speak of burdens, I mean everything that troubles us, whether spiritual or temporal.
First of all, the greatest burden we have to carry in life is self, and the most difficult thing we have to manage is self. Our own daily living, our frames and feelings, our special weaknesses and temptations, our peculiar temperaments, our inward affairs of every kind—these are the things that perplex and worry us more than anything else and that bring us most frequently into bondage and darkness. You must hand yourself, with your temptations, your temperament, your frames and feelings, and all your inward and outward experiences, over into the care and keeping of your God and leave it all there.
He made you, and therefore He understands you and knows how to manage you. You must trust Him to do it. Say to Him, “Here, Lord, I abandon myself to You. I have tried in every way I could think of to manage myself and to make myself what I know I ought to be, but I have always failed. Now I give it up to You. Take entire possession of me. Work in me all the good pleasure of Your will. Mold and fashion me into such a vessel as seems good to You. I leave myself in Your hands, and I believe You will, according to Your promise, make me into a vessel unto Your own honor, ‘sanctified, and meet for the Master’s use, and prepared unto every good work.’” And here you must rest, trusting yourself to Him, continually and absolutely.
Next, lay off every other burden—your health, your reputation, your Christian work, your houses, your children, your business, your servants—everything, in short, that concerns you, whether inward or outward.
It is generally much less difficult for us to commit the keeping of our future to the Lord than it is to commit our present. We know we are helpless as regards the future, but we feel as if the present was in our own hands and must be carried on our own shoulders; and most of us have an unconfessed idea that it is a great deal to ask the Lord to carry ourselves, and that we cannot think of asking Him to carry our burdens, too.
I knew a Christian lady who had a very heavy temporal burden. It took away her sleep and her appetite, and there was danger of her health breaking down under it. One day, when it seemed specially heavy, she noticed lying on the table near her a little tract called Hannah’s Faith. Attracted by the title, she picked it up and began to read it, little knowing, however, that it was to create a revolution in her whole experience. The story was of a poor woman who had been carried triumphantly through a life of unusual sorrow.
She was giving the history of her life to a kind visitor on one occasion, and at the close the visitor said feelingly, “Oh, Hannah, I do not see how you could bear so much sorrow!”
“I did not bear it,” was the quick reply; “the Lord bore it for me.”
“Yes,” said the visitor, “that is the right way. We must take our troubles to the Lord.”
“Yes,” replied Hannah, “but we must do more than that: leave them there. Most people,” she continued, “take their burdens to Him, but they bring them away with them again and are just as worried and unhappy as ever. But I take mine, and I leave them with Him and come away and forget them. If the worry comes back, I take it to Him again; and I do this over and over until at last I just forget I have any worries and am at perfect rest.”
It was a very simple secret she found out: it was possible to obey God’s commandment contained in those words, “Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God”; and that in obeying it, the result would inevitably be, according to the promise, that the “peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”
The soul who has discovered this secret of simple faith has found the key that will unlock the whole treasure-house of God.
Some child of God who is hungering for just such a life as I have been describing is reading this book. You long unspeakably to get rid of your weary burdens. You would be delighted to hand over the management of your unmanageable self into the hands of one who is able to manage you. Do you recollect the delicious sense of rest with which you have sometimes gone to bed at night after a day of great exertion and weariness? How delightful was the sensation of relaxing every muscle and letting your body go in a perfect abandonment of ease and comfort! You no longer had to hold up an aching head or a weary back. You trusted yourself to the bed in absolute confidence, and it held you up, without effort or strain or even thought on your part. You rested!
Suppose you had doubted the strength or the stability of your bed and had dreaded each moment to find it giving way beneath you and landing you on the floor. Could you have rested then? Would not every muscle have been strained in a fruitless effort to hold yourself up, and would not the weariness have been greater than if you had not gone to bed at all?
Let this analogy teach you what it means to rest in the Lord. Let your souls lie down upon the couch of His sweet will, as your bodies lie down in their beds at night. Relax every strain, and lay off every burden. Let yourself go in a perfect abandonment of ease and comfort, sure that, since He holds you up, you are perfectly safe. Your part is simply to rest. His part is to sustain you, and He cannot fail.
Take another analogy, which our Lord Himself has abundantly sanctioned—that of the child-life. For “Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, and said, … Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
What are the characteristics of a little child, and how does he live? He lives by faith, and his chief characteristic is freedom from care. His life is one long trust from year’s end to year’s end. He trusts his parents, he trusts his caretakers, he trusts his teachers. He even trusts people sometimes who are utterly unworthy of trust, out of the abounding trustfulness of his nature. The child provides nothing for himself, and yet everything is provided. He lives in the present moment and receives his life unquestioningly, as it comes to him day by day from his father’s hand.
I was visiting once in a wealthy home where there was a little adopted child upon whom was lavished all the love and tenderness and care that human hearts could bestow or human means procure. And as I watched that child running in and out day by day, free and lighthearted with the happy carelessness of childhood, I thought what a picture it was of our wonderful position as children in the house of our heavenly Father. How much more must the great, loving heart of our God and Father be grieved and wounded at seeing His children taking so much anxious care and thought! Who is the best cared for in every household? Is it not the little children? And does not the least of all, the helpless baby, receive the largest share? We all know that the baby toils not, neither does he spin; and yet he is fed and clothed and loved and rejoiced in more tenderly than the hardest worker of them all.
This life of faith consists in just this—being a child in the Father’s house.
Let the ways of childish confidence and freedom from care, which so please you and win your hearts in your own little ones, teach you what should be your ways with God. Leaving yourselves in His hands, learn to be literally “careful for nothing,” and you shall find it a fact that the peace of God, which passes all understanding, shall keep (as with a garrison) your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
It is no speculative theory. Neither is it a dream of romance. There is such a thing as having one’s soul kept in perfect peace, now and here in this life; and childlike trust in God is the key to its attainment.