Victorious Living. E. Stanley Jones
you will find God all the time and everywhere. If you are to find God all the time, you must find God some time; and if you are to find God everywhere, you will have to find God somewhere. That sometime and somewhere will be the special prayer time and the special prayer place. Fix them. And, as you do, you put your feet upon the road that leads to victory. For spiritual prayer and spiritual fare sound alike and are alike; they are one.
O Christ of the silent midnight hour, teach me to fix the habit of prayer, that I may find the habit of victory. Help me to begin this day in unhurried talk with you. Amen.
Week 9 Thursday
Assimilate the Living Word
Psalm 119:11; Isaiah 55:2; Matthew 4:4; Luke 4:16; John 6:27
Into the prayer hour, take your Testament and a pen. Had I not written down what came to me through the years in the quiet hour, I should have done myself a wrong. For those notes now seem to have been written by someone else. They seem so fresh and new.
A British government official told how he came out to India with no basis for life. His mother gave him a New Testament, which he put in his trunk, at the bottom. But one day out in camp, sick and discouraged, he remembered the Book, fished it out of his trunk, and the first word his eye fell on was the word redeemed. That one word was the pivot around which life swung from moral defeat and discouragement to victory and a new life. And no wonder, for what a word!
You will find such words in the Book, and they will meet your need just when you need them. For here life speaks out of life. God has gone into these words, so God comes out of them and meets you there. Sometimes in the rhapsodies of my early Christian life I would find myself pressing my lips to some verse that seemed so living and saving. I do so still. And why not? For through that verse I kiss my Lord’s cheek. Does God’s face not shine through those words? And I thus tell God I am so grateful that I cannot use the language of words.
And sometimes the word seems so personal, almost as if your own name were called through it. When my Chinese friend, Doctor Lo, homesick and discouraged in America, turned to his New Testament for light and comfort, the first verse his eye fell on was “Lo, I am with you always” (Matt. 28:20). It is often just as personal as that!
The Danish children shake hands with their parents at the close of each meal and say, “Thank you for our food.” At the close of your prayer hour you will do the same to your Heavenly Father.
O Christ, in your Word we find the Bread of your life and we feed upon it. We thank you for this food. Amen.
Week 9 Friday
The Habit of Sharing
2 Kings 5:3; Matthew 10:8; Mark 5:18-20; 10:3; 1 John 1:3
We have talked about the discipline of prayer and the assimilating of the Word of God. The natural and necessary outcome of those disciplines is the third: the discipline of sharing. The first two have reference to the inflow, and this third has reference to the overflow. There can be no overflow without an inflow, and the inflow will stop, stop dead if there is no overflow.
I call this the discipline of sharing. We should discipline ourselves as definitely to share by deed and word what we have found as to pray and read the Word. Many do not do this. They are earnest and regular in their quiet time, but have never disciplined themselves to share. If a happening or a conversation, bumping against them, jolts it out of them, well and good. But sharing seems to depend on accident instead of on choice; it seems to be in the whim instead of the will. Rather it should be the natural flowering of communion with God. A doctor found a little dog by the roadside with a broken leg, took it to his house, and attended to it until it was well. It began to run around the house, and then it disappeared. The doctor felt let down. But the next day there was a scratching at the door. The little dog was back again, and had another little dog with him, and the other little dog was lame! The impulse in that little dog’s heart was natural and right. Has not Christ healed you? And if so, is not the natural normal thing for you to do to find somebody else who needs that healing too?
Someone has defined a Christian as one who says by word and life, “I commend my Savior to you.” No better definition. Will you define your Christian life in those terms? If so, put the discipline of sharing deep down in your life purposes.
O Christ, your healing is upon our hearts. Help us to bear your healing help within our hands. Help us this day that we may find some stricken human spirit we can lead to you. Amen.
Week 9 Saturday
The New Life and Recreation
Mark 4:31; 1 Corinthians 9:24-27; 10:31; 2 Timothy 2:15
You must now relate your new life to your recreations. Or rather, you must relate your recreations to the new life. For recreation must not be the center and the new life fitted into it. If you try that, the new life will die. You must now go over your recreations and see whether they contribute to or dim the new life. They should stay only as they minister to your total fitness.
Some recreations do not re-create; they exhaust one. They leave one morally and spiritually flabby and unfit. They should therefore go or be so controlled that they really do re-create. I find after seeing some films that I have been inspired and lifted. But often a film leaves one with the sense of having been inwardly ravished. The delicacies of life seem to have been invaded, the finest flowers of the spirit trampled upon. You come out drooping. You should never expose yourself to such a film, not if you value the higher values. It is like turning pigs into your parlor.
The same can be said of many books. To read books that leave you with a sense of exhausted nerves and emotions is to handicap the spiritual life within you. The idea that you must read everything that comes to hand in order to understand life is a false notion. Does the doctor have to take in typhoid germs in order to understand typhoid? Does one have to wallow in a mud hole in order to understand the meaning of faith? To wallow in it is to understand it all the less. Only cleanliness can understand the meaning of filth.
Spending long and exhausting hours over bridge tables, with emotions aroused that have no constructive outlet, leaves you spiritually weaker. Ask yourself, therefore, whether your “bridge” is a bridge that leads to spiritual anemia or toward finer and more victorious living.
Go over your whole life and ask whether your recreations truly re-create.
O Christ of the fit body and soul, make me fit in every portion of my being and may my recreations contribute to that end. Amen.
Week 10 Sunday
Week 10 Sunday
The Corporate Fellowship
Psalm 133:1; Acts 2:43-47; Hebrews 10:45
‘‘Don’t you think I should belong to some church?” asked a lady who had just entered the new life. Was her instinct for corporate fellowship right? It was.
The spiritual life cannot be lived in isolation. Life is intensely personal; it is also intensely corporate, and you cannot separate them. If you should wipe out the church today, you would have to put something like it in its place tomorrow. For there must be a corporate expression of the spiritual life as well as an individual. Even to separate the social and the personal life in this way is wrong. For the social life is the personal in its larger relationships.
The idea that it is your duty to support the church seems to me to be all wrong. The church is not founded upon a duty imposed on you from without. It is founded on the facts of life. Your very inner nature demands it. American evangelist D. L. Moody, in answer to a man who said he did not need the church, quietly pulled a coal from the hearth and separated it, and together they watched it die. It was a legitimate answer.
I am quite sure that I should not have survived as a young Christian had I not had the corporate life of the church to hold me up. When I rejoiced, they rejoiced with me. When I was weak, they strengthened me, and once when I fell—a rather bad fall—they gathered around me by prayer and love and without blame or censure they lovingly lifted me back to my feet again.
I know the stupidities and the