Week 14 Sunday
Week 14 Sunday
Results of the Victorious Life
Romans 6:6-7; 12:2-3; 13:14
We have seen some of the things that inwardly bind us. We must now see some of the positive fruits that result when we find the victory at the center.
The first thing will be that we will be released from ourselves and our own problems. Many never get beyond their own problems. They seem constantly tied up with them. When any occasion arises where help could be given to someone, the inhibition comes from within: “But how about your own self?” That stops dead the processes of helping others. We haven’t release from ourselves and our own difficulties.
On my way back to India I came through Persia, on the worst roads in the world, in a sputtering, protesting, broken-down car. It would run thirty or forty miles and then sputter, protest, and die. We would tinker with it a bit, and it would start again, and the same process would be repeated. At the end of the day I was worn out. One night after such a day, when I had to give an address, my head began to whirl, and I could not do it. A badly functioning car engine did it. How I wanted to look at the scenery as we went by, for I had never been in Persia before, and I wanted to be effective at the close of the day. I could do neither. All my attention was absorbed in that badly functioning engine. Had the engine been normal, I could have forgotten it; I could have enjoyed the scenery and remembered my address at the end of the day!
Many of us have our strength and attention absorbed by badly functioning inner lives. We haven’t hearts at leisure from themselves to enjoy God’s world and to soothe and sympathize with others. And at the end of the day we are worn out with ourselves. And when life presents an opportunity for service, our minds are too much in a whirl to meet it.
The victorious life would release us from our own problems and our own selves.
O Christ, your problems never inhibited you from helping the needy that crowded around you. You were always free, full, and available. Make me like that. Amen.
Week 14 Monday
The Leisured Heart
Matthew 6:25, 34; Acts 14:19-20
Yesterday we said that many are absorbed with themselves and their own problems. They haven’t the leisured heart. But some have. Jesus had. He was never in a hurry, never ran, was never fussed and worried, was always busy—so much so that often there was no time even to eat. But he always had time for that next person and that next need. And at the end of the day he was fresh and adequate. Why? He was not worn out by inner conflicts. He was inwardly adjusted to the will of God. That adjustment meant adequacy.
Many of his followers have found the same secret. Many such instances leap to the mind. While attending college, I lived in a home in which the mother, surrounded by a dozen young people, most of them growing boys of her own, and with a multiplicity of interests outside the home, was never seen ruffled or angry, and always leisured. She always had time for our problems. She was inwardly adjusted to the will of God. That will operated as peace, power, poise, and adequacy.
When David Livingstone came back from Africa in the mid-1800s, after spending years there with his beloved Africans, someone asked him about his soul. “My soul, my soul, I almost forgot I had a soul,” replied Livingstone. He was so interested and absorbed in other people’s souls that he had almost forgotten about his own soul. This is a healthy condition. It’s much more healthy than a great deal of modern spiritual advice that sets us to too much introspection, too much absorption with self. It tends to morbidity. It is true that we must perhaps periodically look at ourselves with one long, searching self-examination that results in complete surrender, a complete adjustment. And then, we dismiss our “selves” from the focus of attention, and get on with the work. That will bring us the leisured heart.
O Christ of the adjusted will, give us that inner adjustment, that we too may move quietly through our tasks with our heads high, our hearts adequate, and our hands full. Amen.
Week 14 Tuesday
The Power to Live in Spite Of
Acts 14:21-22; 26:29; Philippians 1:12-14
The second thing that will come to us with the coming of the victorious life will be the power to live “in spite of.”
Many of us know the power to live “on account of,” but not “in spite of.” When our surroundings are favorable and life is with us, we go on. But life is not like that always. It often turns rough. And then we are tested to the depths. If our faith is but an echo of our surroundings, then it will fade out. But if it is real, it will then speak from the depths. Before finding the victorious life the disciples were at the mercy of many of their circumstances. Afterward they were the masters of them. They learned how to mold life instead of being molded by it.
There are three kinds of Christians: the rowboat type, the sailboat type, and the steamboat type. The rowboat type is humanistic, self-dependent, trying to get on with its own resources. But as those resources are limited, the progress is limited. The sailboat type depends on the winds, on circumstances—the other-dependent ones. If the winds are with them, if people are constantly complimenting and encouraging them, they get on. But if the patting on the back stops, they stop. They are circumstance-conditioned, not very dependable Christians.
Then there is the steamboat type; those who have power on the inside, and they go on whether winds are favorable or unfavorable. It is true they go on faster when there is a helping wind, but nevertheless they go on, wind or no wind. They have inner adequacy. They are not self-dependent or circumstance-dependent, but Christ-dependent. They are dependable. This power to go on when life is dead against us is the deepest necessity of our lives. In victorious living this becomes a working fact.
O Christ, who did go on when life turned to such roughness that it meant a cross, help us to find that same power of going on—in spite of. Amen.
Week 14 Wednesday
The Strain Taken Out
John 14:1; 19:8-10; Philippians 4:7; Colossians 1:11
The third thing that the victorious life means is that the strain is taken out of our lives. Many are living strained spiritual lives. They are trying, trying hard to be good. Their fists are clenched, their teeth set, their backs to the wall; they are fighting, fighting. It is all very earnest, but not very inviting, for the type of piety thus produced is strained. And strained piety is not contagious. Moreover, it wears on the person concerned. For all strain means drain. We are inwardly screwed up so tight that we snap under stress.
I was once in a tin-plate factory and was told that in one of the processes the inner strain was taken out of the plates by subjecting them to very severe heat, seventeen hundred degrees. By this process the molecules were so harmonized that when the tin plates were bent they would not break. Without this fiery process, bending meant breaking.
Do we not need something like that to take place within the soul, a fiery baptism that will set every molecule of our souls in right relation, so that when the strain comes we shall not break but only bend?
Jesus bent in Gethsemane, for the weight upon him was very, very heavy. But, thank God, he did not break! Why? Because that prayer, “Not my will but your will be done,” set every fiber of his spirit in right relation with the indwelling will of the Lord. Thereafter, life might bend, but it would not break, for there was no inner strain.
Life is often not broken from without but from within. The victorious life takes away the inner strain, and makes life so harmonized that it can stand anything that can happen to it.
O Christ, we thank you that you did not break! For had you broken, we should have broken too. Put us through your fiery baptism until all strain is taken out! We consent to the fire, for we know it means freedom. Amen.
Week 14 Thursday
Power over Every Sin
Romans 5:20-21; 6:6-7, 11-12, 14
One of the greatest difficulties in evangelism, particularly in the East, is the moral fatalism that says in regard to one’s own personal sin: “What could I do? I am a man.” The implication is that sin is an integral part of human nature, and as long as we remain human we remain sinful. The tyranny of that fatalism must be broken if we are going to live the victorious life. In the depths of our being—note I say “the depths,” for a mere surface acceptance will not do—we must get hold of the idea that sin is unnatural, an invasion, an intruder, and thus no necessary part of human nature. When we sin, we are not normal humans; we are subhuman, or antihuman. There are three unnatural things which have invaded life: Sin is the unnatural evil of the soul, error is the unnatural evil of the mind, and disease is the unnatural evil of the body.
Jesus said that salvation is health. Wherever he uses the term “be saved,” it can be literally translated, “be whole.” The health of the soul is goodness, the health of the mind is truth, and the health of the body is freedom from disease. Is a mind more of a mind when it has error in it? Is a person more of a person when evil resides within? No, the mind, the person is less and other.
Every sin, then, can be conquered. Hold that within the mind. Do not allow the mind to admit of any exception. That exception will be the loose bolt that lets the bridge down. “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom. 13:14). In other words, do not provide for any failure; provide for victory. There must be an absoluteness about the whole thing.
I know the dangers of hypocrisy involved in this absoluteness. But of the two dangers, the greater is in mentally providing for sin in the life.
O Christ, we thank you that no word of yours ever fell upon human ears except a complete offer of complete release from all sin. Help us to accept that deliverance. Amen.
Week 14 Friday
Simplicity and Straightforwardness
Luke 10:41-42; Acts 4:13; 2 Corinthians 1:12; 11:3
During the response time at the end of a lecture, a Hindu sent up this comment: “I am not enamoured by your dramatic gestures. If you have found Christ, tell us simply and straightforwardly.” I could reply only that my gestures were a natural part of me, and that I was not conscious of them, but that I was deeply impressed by his demand that we be simple and straightforward. He was right. The victorious life should and does reduce life to inward unity, and, therefore, to outward simplicity and straightforwardness.
We need to be cleansed from all double purposes in word and attitude. Our speech should become “chaste” in the sense of expressing a single thing.
See what the coming of the Spirit into Peter’s life did for him. Note the contrast. At the denial, Peter says, “Man, I don’t know what you are talking about!” (Luke 22:60 CEB). Here was Peter double-minded and double-worded.
Now:
Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit, and he replied, “Rulers and Elders of the people, if we today are under examination concerning the benefit conferred on a man helplessly lame, as to how this man has been cured; be it known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that through the name of Jesus the Anointed, the Nazarene, whom you crucified, but whom God has raised from among the dead—through that name this man stands here before you in perfect health. This Jesus is the Stone, treated with contempt by you the builders, but it has been made the Cornerstone. And in no other is the great salvation to be found; for, in fact, there is no second name under Heaven that has been given among men through which we are to be saved.” (Acts 4:8-12 Weymouth)
Note the straightforwardness, the directness, the chaste simplicity of his words. The Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Truth—the Spirit of Simplicity and Directness—brought this revolution into Peter’s life. The same Spirit will bring it into ours. Weasel words and weasel attitudes will give way to words that flow in simplicity out of the depths of unified life.
O Christ of the simple speech and of the direct attitude, give to us of your likeness in this. For we too would be saved from complexities and diplomacies and double-meanings. Amen.
Week 14 Saturday
Life Creative
John 7:37-39; 15:5; 1 Thessalonians 1:8
The last thing we shall mention as being a sign of the victorious life is the fact that life now becomes spiritually creative. The victorious life is organized around love. But as love is creative, life now becomes creative.
With love there is always a plus, a margin for somebody else. We have enough and to spare. A woman, who became one of the great missionaries of the world, was being taken in a sedan chair through the dirty, narrow, crowded streets of a Chinese city just after her first arrival. Everything in her revolted against the strangeness and the dirt. “O God,” she cried, “how can I live among these people without love in my heart?” An immediate answer came in the flooding of her heart with what was nothing less than divine love. From that moment on she forgot dirt and narrow streets and strangeness; she saw only people for whom Christ died. Instead of being driven back upon herself, love drew her out of herself into an amazingly creative service for her beloved people. There was a plus.
In Bengal, when the wedding ceremony is taking place, a child is placed in the arms of the bride as a symbol of her fruitfulness. When the soul is inwardly wedded to Christ in complete surrender, then there are put within our arms tasks and responsibilities and opportunities, for love can and will be creative.
The victorious life means the heightening of all the powers of the personality. The mind becomes keener and more creative, the emotions become broader and more sensitive, and the will more active and decisive. The whole of life is outreaching. Lives begin to be changed, movements begin to be launched, a creative impact is made upon life. “I used to pick and choose my friends,” said a recently changed society lady, “but now since the great change has taken place I take everybody into my heart.” Love had begun to be creative.
O Christ, we thank you for the creative impact of your love in our hearts. Make us creative this day as we come into contact with dull, dead life. Amen.