The Christian's Secret to a Happy Life

CHAPTER XVI. ITS PRACTICAL RESULTS. If all that has been written in the foregoing chapters on the life hid with Christ be true, its results in the practical daily walk and conversation ought to be very marked, and the people who have entered into the enjoyment of it ought to be, in very truth, a peculiar people, zealous of good works. My son, now with God, once wrote to a friend something to this effect, that we are God's witnesses necessarily, because the world will not read the Bible, but they will read our lives, and that upon the report these give will very much depend their belief in the divine nature of the religion we possess. This age is essentially an age of facts, and all scientific inquiries are being increasingly turned from theories to realities. If, therefore, our religion is to make headway in the present time, it must be proved to be more than a theory, and we must present to the investigation of the critical minds of our age the realities of lives transformed by the mighty power of God, working in them all the good pleasure of His will. I desire, therefore, to speak very solemnly of what I conceive to be the necessary fruits of a life of faith such as I have been describing, and to press home to the hearts of every one of my readers their personal responsibility to walk worthy of the high calling wherewith they have been called. I think that I may speak to some of you, at least, as personal friends, for I feel sure we have not gone thus far together through these pages without there having grown in your hearts, as there has in mine, a tender personal interest and longing for one another, that we may in everything show forth the praises of Him who has called us out of darkness into His marvelous light. As a friend, then, to friends I speak, and I am sure I shall be pardoned if I go into some details of our daily lives which may seem of secondary importance, and which make up the largest part of them. The standard of practical holy living has been so low among Christians that the least degree of real devotedness of life and walk is looked upon with surprise, and often even with disapprobation, by a large portion of the church. And, for the most part, the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ are satisfied with a life so conformed to the world, and so like it in almost every respect, that, to a casual observer, no difference is discernible. But we who have heard the call of our God to a life of entire consecration and perfect trust must do differently. We must come out from the world and be separate, and must not be conformed to it in our characters or in our lives. We must set our affections on heavenly things, not on earthly ones, and must seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, surrendering everything that would interfere with this. We must walk through the world as Christ walked. We must have the mind that was in Him. As pilgrims and strangers, we must abstain from fleshly lusts that war against the soul. As good soldiers of Jesus Christ, we must disentangle ourselves inwardly from the affairs of this life, that we may please Him who hath chosen us to be soldiers. We must abstain from all appearance of evil. We must be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ's sake, hath forgiven us. We must not resent injuries or unkindness, but must return good for evil, and turn the other cheek to the hand that smites us. We must take always the lowest place among our fellow men, and seek not our own honor, but the honor of others. We must be gentle and meek and yielding, not standing up for our own rights, but for the rights of others. We must do everything, not for our own glory, but for the glory of God. And, to sum it all up, since He who hath called us is holy, so we must be holy in all manner of conversation, because it is written, Be ye holy, for I am holy. Some Christians seem to think that all the requirements of a holy life are met when there is very active and successful Christian work, and because they do so much for the Lord in public, they feel a liberty to be cross and ugly and unchristian-like in private. But this is not the sort of Christian life I am depicting. If we are to walk as Christ walked, it must be in private as well as in public, at home as well as abroad, and it must be every hour, all day long, and not at stated periods or on certain fixed occasions. We must be just as Christ-like to our servants as we are to our minister, and just as good in our counting house as we are in our prayer meeting. It is in daily, homely living, indeed, that practical piety can best show itself, and we may well question any professions that fail under this test of daily life. A cross Christian or an anxious Christian, a discouraged gloomy Christian, a doubting Christian, a complaining Christian, an exacting Christian, a selfish Christian, a cruel hard-hearted Christian, a self-indulgent Christian, a Christian with a sharp tongue or bitter spirit, all these may be very earnest in their work and may have honorable places in the church, but they are not Christ-like Christians, and they know nothing of the realities of which this book treats, no matter how loud their professions may be. The life hid with Christ in God is a hidden life as to its source, but it must not be hidden as to its practical results. People must see that we walk as Christ walked if we say that we are abiding in Him. We must prove that we possess that which we profess. We must, in short, be real followers of Christ and not theoretical ones only. And this means a great deal. It means that we must really and absolutely turn our backs on everything that is contrary to the perfect will of God. It means that we are to be a peculiar people, not only in the eyes of God but in the eyes of the world around us, and that, wherever we go, it will be known from our habits, our tempers, our conversation and our pursuits that we are followers of the Lord Jesus Christ and are not of the world even as He was not of the world. We must no longer look upon our money as our own, but as belonging to the Lord to be used in His service. We must not feel at liberty to use our energies exclusively in the pursuit of worldly means, but must recognize that, if we seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, all needful things shall be added unto us. We shall find ourselves forbidden to seek the highest places or to strain after worldly advantages. We shall not be permitted to make self, as heretofore, the center of all our thoughts and all our aims. Our days will have to be spent, not in serving ourselves, but in serving the Lord. And we shall find ourselves called upon to bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. And all our daily homely duties will be more perfectly performed than ever, because whatever we do will be done, not with eye service as man-pleasers, but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. Into all this we shall undoubtedly be led by the Spirit of God if we give ourselves up to His guidance. But unless we have the right standard of Christian life set before us, we may be hindered by our ignorance from recognizing His voice. And it is for this reason I desire to be very plain and definite in my statements. I have noticed that wherever there has been a faithful following of the Lord in a consecrated soul, several things have, sooner or later, inevitably followed. Meekness and quietness of spirit become, in time, the characteristics of the happy life. A submissive acceptance of the will of God as it comes in the hourly events of each day is manifested. Pliability in the hands of God to do or to suffer all the good pleasure of His will, sweetness under provocation, calmness in the midst of turmoil and bustle, a yielding to the wishes of others and an insensibility to slights and affronts, absence of worry or anxiety, deliverance from care and fear, all these and many other similar graces are invariably found to be the natural outward development of that inward life which is hid with Christ in God. Then, as to the habits of life, we always see such Christians sooner or later laying aside thoughts of self and becoming full of consideration for others. They dress and live in simple, healthful ways. They renounce self-indulgent habits and surrender all purely fleshly gratifications. Some helpful work for others is taken up and useless occupations are dropped out of the life. God's glory and the welfare of His creatures become the absorbing delight of the soul. The voice is dedicated to Him to be used in singing His praises. The purse is placed at His disposal. The pen is dedicated to write for Him, the lips to speak for Him, the hands and the feet to do His bidding. Year after year such Christians are seen to grow more unworldly, more serene, more heavenly-minded, more transformed, more like Christ, until even their very faces express so much of the beautiful inward divine life that all who look at them cannot but take knowledge of them that they live with Jesus and are abiding in Him. I feel sure that to each one of you have come some divine intimations or foreshadowings of the life I here describe. Have you not begun to feel dimly conscious of the voice of God speaking to you in the depths of your soul about these things? Has it not been a pain and a distress to you of late to discover how full your lives are of self? Has not your soul been plunged into inward trouble and doubt about certain dispositions or pursuits in which you have been formerly accustomed to indulge? Have you not begun to feel uneasy with some of your habits of life and to wish that you could do differently in certain respects? Have not paths of devotedness and of service begun to open out before you with the longing thought, Oh, that I could walk in them? All these questions and doubts and this inward yearning are the voice of the Good Shepherd in your heart seeking to call you out of that which is contrary to His will. Let me entreat of you not to turn away from His gentle pleadings. You little know the sweet paths into which He means to lead you by these very steps, nor the wonderful stores of blessedness that lie at their end, or you would spring forward with an eager joy to yield to every one of His requirements. The heights of Christian perfection can only be reached by each moment faithfully following the guide who is to lead you there, and He reveals a way to us one step at a time in the little things of our daily lives, asking only on our part that we yield ourselves up to His guidance. Be perfectly pliable, then, in His dear hands to go where He entices you and to turn away from all from which He makes you shrink. Obey Him perfectly the moment you are sure of His will and you will soon find that He is leading you out swiftly and easily into such a wonderful life of conformity to Himself that it will be a testimony to all around you beyond what you yourself will ever know. I knew a soul thus given up to follow the Lord whithersoever He might lead her, who in a very little while travelled from the depths of darkness and despair into the realization and actual experience of a most blessed union with the Lord Jesus Christ. Out of the midst of her darkness, she consecrated herself to the Lord, surrendering her will up altogether to Him that He might work in her to will and to do of His own good pleasure. Immediately He began to speak to her by His Spirit in her heart, suggesting to her some little acts of service for Him and troubling her about certain things in her habits and her life, showing her where she was selfish and unchristlike and how she could be transformed. She recognized His voice and yielded to Him each thing He asked for the moment she was sure of His will. Her swift obedience was rewarded by a rapid progress and day by day she was conformed more and more to the image of Christ until very soon her life became such a testimony to those around her that some, even who had begun by opposing and disbelieving, were forced to acknowledge that it was of God and were won to a similar surrender. And finally, in a little while it came to pass, so swiftly had she gone that her Lord was able to reveal to her wandering soul some of the deepest secrets of His love and to fulfill to her the marvelous promise of Acts 1.5 by giving her to realize the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Think you she has ever regretted her wholehearted following of Him? Or that aught but thankfulness and joy can ever fill her soul when she reviews the steps by which her feet have been led to this place of wondrous blessedness, even though some of them may have seemed at the time hard to take? Ah, dear soul, if thou wit'st no alike blessing, abandon thyself, like her, to the guidance of thy Divine Master and shrink from no surrender for which He may call. The perfect way is hard to flesh, it is not hard to love. If thou wert sick for want of God, how swiftly wit'st thou move. Surely thou canst trust Him, and if some things may be called for that look to thee of but little moment and not worthy thy Lord's attention, remember that He sees not as man seeth, and that things small to thee may be, in His eyes, the key and the clue to the deepest springs of thy being. No life can be complete that fails in its little things. A look, a word, a tone of voice even, however small they may seem to human judgment, are often of vital importance in the eyes of God. Thy one great desire is to follow Him fully. Canst thou not say, then, a continual Yes to all His sweet commands, whether small or great, and trust Him to lead thee by the shortest road to thy fullest blessedness? My dear friend, whether thou knew it or not, this, and nothing less than this, is what thy consecration meant. It meant inevitable obedience. It meant that the will of thy God was henceforth to be thy will under all circumstances and at all times. It meant that from that moment thou didst surrender thy liberty of choice and gave thyself up utterly into the control of thy Lord. It meant an hourly following of Him, whithersoever He might lead thee, without any turning back. All this and far more was involved in thy surrender to God, and now I appeal to thee to make good thy word. Let everything else go that thou mayest live out in a practical daily walk and conversation the Christ-life thou hast dwelling within thee. Thou art united to thy Lord by a wondrous tie. Walk, then, as He walked, and show to the unbelieving world the blessed reality of His mighty power to save by letting Him save thee to the very uttermost. Thou needst not fear to consent to this, for He is thy Saviour, and His power is to do it all. He is not asking thee in thy poor weakness to do it thyself. He only asks thee to yield thyself to Him that He may work in thee and through thee by His own mighty power. Thy part is to yield thyself, His part is to work, and never, never will He give thee any command that is not accompanied by ample power to obey it. Take no thought for the morrow in this matter, but abandon thyself with a generous trust to the Good Shepherd, who has promised never to call His own sheep out into any path without Himself going before them to make the way easy and safe. Take each little step as He makes it plain to thee. Bring all thy life in each of its details to Him to regulate and guide. Follow gladly and quickly the sweet suggestions of His Spirit in thy soul, and day by day thou wilt find Him bringing thee more and more into conformity with His will in all things, molding thee and fashioning thee as thou art able to bear it into a vessel unto His honour sanctified and meet for His use and fitted to every good work. So shall be given to thee the sweet joy of being an Epistle of Christ, known and read of all men, and thy light shall shine so brightly that men seeing not thee but thy good works shall glorify not thee but thy Father which is in heaven. But thou art making me, I thank thee, sire, what thou hast done and doest thou knowest well, and I will help thee in thy prayer. I will lie burning on thy potter's wheel, I will whirl patient though my brain should reel. Thy grace shall be enough the grief to quell and growing strength perfect through weakness dire. I have not knowledge, wisdom, insight, thought, nor understanding fit to justify thee and thy work, O perfect! I know what thou hast and lo, what thou hast wrought I cannot comprehend, but I can cry. O enemy the maker hath not done, one day thou shalt behold and from the sight shall run. Thou workest perfectly, and if it seem some things are not so well, tis but because they are too loving deep, too lofty wise, for me, poor child, they are laws. My highest wisdom half is but a dream, my love runs helpless like a falling stream. Thy good embraces ill, and lo! its illness dies.