The Christian's Secret to a Happy Life

CHAPTER III. THE LIFE DEFINED In the first chapter, I have tried to settle the question as to the scripturalness of the experience sometimes called the higher Christian life, but which is the only true Christian life, and which, to my own mind, is best described in the words, The Life Hid with Christ in God. In the second, I have sought to reconcile the two distinct sides of this life, that is, the part to be done by the Lord, and the part necessarily to be done by ourselves. I shall now, therefore, consider it as a settled point that 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, and that in the Bible we have presented to us a Saviour able to save us from the power of our sins as really as He saves us from their guilt. The point to be next considered is as to what are the chief characteristics of this life hid with Christ in God, and how it differs from much in the ordinary Christian experience. Its chief characteristics are an entire surrender to the Lord, and a perfect trust in Him, resulting in victory over sin and inward rest of the soul, and 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 kind-hearted 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 through the whole length of their journey. When I speak of burdens, I mean everything that troubles us, whether spiritual or temporal. I mean first of all ourselves. The greatest burden we have to carry in life is self. The most difficult thing we have to manage is self. Our own daily living, our frames and feelings, our especial 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 brings us most frequently into bondage and darkness. In laying off your burdens, therefore, the first one you must get rid of is yourself. 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, and you must trust him to do it. Say to him, Here, Lord, I abandon myself to thee. 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 have always failed. Now I give it up to thee. Do thou take entire possession of me. Work in me all the good pleasure of thy will. Mold and fashion me into such a vessel as seemest good to thee. I leave myself in thy hands, and I believe thou wilt, according to thy promise, make me into a vessel unto thy own honour, sanctified and meet for the Master's use, and prepared unto every good work. And here you must rest, trusting yourself thus to him, continually and absolutely. Next, you must 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 of 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 especially 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, ìOh, Hannah, I do not see how you could bear so much sorrow.î ìI did not bear it,î was the quick reply, ìthe Lord bore it for me.î ìYes,î said the visitor, ìthat is the right way. We must take our troubles to the Lord.î ìYes,î replied Hannah, ìbut we must do more than that. We must leave them there.î 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. My friend was very much struck with this plan, and resolved to try it. The circumstances of her life she could not alter, but she took them to the Lord and handed them over into his management. And then she believed that he took it, and she left all the responsibility and the worry and anxiety with him. As often as the anxieties returned, she took them back, and the result was that, although the circumstances remained unchanged, her soul was kept in perfect peace in the midst of them. She felt that she had found out a practical secret, and from that time she sought never to carry her own burdens, nor to manage her own affairs, but to hand them over as fast as they arose to the divine burden-bearer. This same secret, also, which she had found to be so effectual in her outward life, proved to be still more effectual in her inward life, which was, in truth, even more utterly unmanageable. She abandoned her whole self to the Lord, with all that she was and all that she had, and believing that he took that which she had committed to him, she ceased to fret and worry, and her life became all sunshine in the gladness of belonging to him. It was a very simple secret, she found out, only this, that it was possible to obey God's commandment contained in those words, Be careful for nothing, but in everything, 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 passes all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. There are many other things to be said about this life hid with Christ in God, many details as to what the Lord Jesus does for those who thus abandon themselves to him. But the gist of the whole matter is here stated, and the soul that has discovered this secret of simple faith has found the key that will unlock the whole treasure-house of God. I am sure these pages will fall into the hands of some child of God who is hungering for just such a life as I have been describing. 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. You are tired and weary, and the rest I speak of looks unutterably sweet to 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! The strain of the day had ceased for a few hours at least, and the work of the day had been laid off. You no longer had to hold up an aching head or a weary back. You trusted yourself to the bed in an absolute confidence, and it held you up without effort or strain or even thought on your part. You rested. But suppose you had doubted the strength or the stability of your bed, and had dreaded each moment to find it giving away beneath you and landing on 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. Or 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. Now, what are the characteristics of a little child, and how does it live? It lives by faith, and its chief characteristic is freedom from care. Its life is one long trust from year's end to year's end. It trusts its parents, it trusts its caretakers, it trusts its teachers, it even trusts people sometimes who are utterly unworthy of trust out of the abounding trustfulness of its nature. And this trust is abundantly answered. The child provides nothing for itself, and yet everything is provided. It takes no thought for the morrow, and forms no plans, and yet all its life is planned out for it, and it finds its paths made ready, opening out as it comes to them day by day, hour by hour. It goes in and out of its father's house with an unspeakable ease and abandonment, enjoying all the good things therein, without having spent a penny in procuring them. Pestilence may walk through the streets of its city, but the child regards it not. Famine and fire and war may rage around it, but under its father's tender care the child abides in utter unconcern and perfect rest. It lives in the present moment, and receives its life unquestioningly, as it comes to it day by day from its father's hands. I was visiting once at 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 light-hearted 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, and I said to myself, if nothing would so grieve and wound the loving hearts around her as to see this little child beginning to be worried or anxious about herself in any way, about whether her food and clothes would be provided, or how she was to get her education or her future support, how much more must the great and loving heart of our God and Father be grieved and wounded at seeing his children taking so much anxious care and thought, and I understood why it was that our Lord had said to us so emphatically, Take no thought for yourselves. 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 it spin, and yet it is fed and clothed and loved and rejoiced in more tenderly than the hardest worker of them all. This life of faith, then, about which I am writing, consists in just this, being a child in the Father's house, and when this is said, enough is said to transform every weary, burdened life into one of blessedness and rest. Let the ways of childish confidence and freedom from care, which so please you and win your hearts and your own little ones, teach you what should be your ways with God, and leaving yourself in his hands, learn to be literally careful for nothing, and you shall find it to be a fact that the peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep, as with a garrison, your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusteth in thee. This is the divine description of the life of faith, about which I am writing. It is no speculative theory, neither is it a dream of romance. There is such a thing as having one soul kept in perfect peace, now and here in this life, and childlike trust in God is the key to its attainment.