Christian's Secret of a Happy Life , livre ebook

Baker Publishing Group - Whitall Smith Hannah

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

89 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

A complete and unabridged edition of the inspirational classic that has sold more than 10 million copies.

Sujets

Lifestyle

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 décembre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441240118
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0144€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 1952 by Fleming H. Revell
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www . revellbooks .com
Ebook edition created 2012
Ebook corrections 05.17.2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-4011-8
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
The Cry of Saint Paul
Part 1: The Life 9
1. Is It Scriptural? 11
2. God’s Side and Man’s Side 23
3. The Life Defined 33
4. How to Enter In 41
Part 2: Difficulties 53
5. Difficulties Concerning Consecration 55
6. Difficulties Concerning Faith 65
7. Difficulties Concerning the Will 75
8. Difficulties Concerning Guidance 87
9. Difficulties Concerning Doubts 101
10. Difficulties Concerning Temptation 115
11. Difficulties Concerning Failures 125
12. Is God in Everything? 141
Part 3: Results 153
13. Bondage or Liberty 155
14. Growth 169
15. Service 183
16. Practical Results in Daily Life 195
17. The Joy of Obedience 207
18. Divine Union 217
19. The Chariots of God 227
20. The Life on Wings 237
About the Author
Back Cover
The Cry of Saint Paul
Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved.
Romans 10:1
Oh, could I tell, ye surely would believe it!
Oh, could I only say what I have seen!
How should I tell, or how can ye receive it,
How, till He bringeth you where I have been?
Therefore, O Lord, I will not fail nor falter;
Nay but I ask it, nay but I desire,
Lay on my lips thine embers of the altar,
Seal with the ring, and furnish with the fire.
Give me a voice, a cry, and a complaining,—
Oh, let my sound be stormy in their ears!
Throat that would shout, but cannot stay for straining,
Eyes that would weep, but cannot wait for tears.
Quick, in a moment, infinite forever,
Send an arousal better than I pray;
Give me a grace upon the faint endeavor,
Souls for my hire, and Pentecost to-day!
Scarcely I catch the words of His revealing,
Hardly I hear Him, dimly understand;
Only the Power that is within me pealing
Lives on my lips, and beckons with my hand.
Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest,
Cannot confound, nor doubt Him, nor deny;
Yea, with one voice, O world, though thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.
F. W. H. Myers

1 Is It Scriptural?
N o thoughtful person can question the fact that, for the most part, the Christian life, as it is generally lived, is not entirely a happy life. A keen observer once said to me, “You Christians seem to have a religion that makes you miserable. You are like a man with a headache. He does not want to get rid of his head, but it hurts him to keep it. You cannot expect outsiders to seek very earnestly for anything so uncomfortable.” Then for the first time I saw, as in a flash, that the religion of Christ ought to be, and was meant to be, to its possessors, not something to make them miserable, but something to make them happy; and I began then and there to ask the Lord to show me the secret of a happy Christian life.
It is this secret, so far as I have learned it, that I shall try to tell in the following pages.
All of God’s children, I am convinced, feel instinctively, in their moments of divine illumination, that a life of inward rest and outward victory is their inalienable birthright. Can you not remember, some of you, the shout of triumph your souls gave when you first became acquainted with the Lord Jesus, and had a glimpse of His mighty saving power? How sure you were of victory, then! How easy it seemed to be more than conquerors, through Him that loved you! Under the leadership of a Captain, who had never been foiled in battle, how could you dream of defeat? And yet, to many of you, how different has been your real experience! Your victories have been few and fleeting, your defeats many and disastrous. You have not lived as you feel children of God ought to live. You have had perhaps a clear understanding of doctrinal truths, but you have not come into possession of their life and power. You have rejoiced in your knowledge of the things revealed in the Scriptures, but have not had a living realization of the things themselves, consciously felt in the soul. Christ is believed in, talked about, and served, but He is not known as the soul’s actual and very life, abiding there forever, and revealing Himself there continually in His beauty. You have found Jesus as your Saviour from the penalty of sin, but you have not found Him as your Saviour from its power. You have carefully studied the Holy Scriptures, and have gathered much precious truth therefrom, which you have trusted would feed and nourish your spiritual life, but in spite of it all, your souls are starving and dying within you, and you cry out in secret, again and again, for that bread and water of life which you see promised in the Scriptures to all believers. In the very depths of your hearts, you know that your experience is not a Scriptural experience; that, as an old writer said, your religion is “but a talk to what the early Christians enjoyed, possessed, and lived in.” And your hearts have sunk within you, as, day after day, and year after year, your early visions of triumph have seemed to grow more and more dim, and you have been forced to settle down to the conviction, that the best you can expect from your religion is a life of alternate failure and victory, one hour sinning, and the next repenting, and then beginning again, only to fail again, and again to repent.
But is this all? Had the Lord Jesus only this in his mind when He laid down His precious life to deliver you from your sore and cruel bondage to sin? Did He propose to Himself only this partial deliverance? Did He intend to leave you thus struggling under a weary consciousness of defeat and discouragement? Did He fear that a continuous victory would dishonor Him, and bring reproach on His name? When all those declarations were made concerning His coming, and the work He was to accomplish, did they mean only this that you have experienced? Was there a hidden reserve in each promise that was meant to deprive it of its complete fulfillment? Did “delivering us out of the hand of our enemies” mean that they should still have dominion over us? Did “enabling us always to triumph” mean that we were only to triumph sometimes? Did being made “more than conquerors through him that loved us” mean constant defeat and failure? Does being “saved to the uttermost” mean the meager salvation we see manifested among us now? Can we dream that the Saviour, who was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, could possibly see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied in such Christian lives as fill the Church today? The Bible tells us that “for this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil”; and can we imagine for a moment that this is beyond His power, and that He finds Himself unable to accomplish the thing He was manifested to do?
In the very outset, then, settle down on this one thing, that Jesus came to save you now, in this life, from the power and dominion of sin, and to make you more than conquerors through his power. If you doubt this, search your Bible, and collect together every announcement or declaration concerning the purposes and object of His death on the cross. You will be astonished to find how full they are. Everywhere and always, His work is said to be to deliver us from our sins, from our bondage, from our defilement; and not a hint is given, anywhere, that this deliverance was to be only the limited and partial one with which Christians so continually try to be satisfied.
Let me give you the teaching of Scripture on this subject. When the angel of the Lord appeared unto Joseph in a dream, and announced the coming birth of the Saviour, he said, “And thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins.”
When Zacharias was “filled with the Holy Ghost” at the birth of his son, and “prophesied,” he declared that God had visited His people in order to fulfil the promise and the oath He had made them; which promise was, “that he would grant unto us, that we, being delivered out of the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of our life.”
When Peter was preaching in the porch of the temple to the wondering Jews, he said, “Unto you first, God, having raised up his Son Jesus, sent him to bless you in turning away every one of you from his iniquities.”
When Paul was telling to the Ephesian Church the wondrous truth that Christ had so loved them as to give Himself for them, he went on to declare that His purpose in thus doing was “that he might sanctify and cleanse it by the washing of water by the word, that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.”
When Paul was seeking to instruct Titus, his own son after the common faith, concerning the grace of God, he declared that the object of that grace was to teach us “that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world”; and adds, as the reason of this, that Christ “gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify us unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.”
When Peter was urging upon the Christians to whom he was writing a holy and Christlike walk, he tells them that “even hereunto were y