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"He that loseth his life fo r my sake shall fin d i f ’ npHE deepest need of many Christians today is to get into JL God’s “ Lost and Found Department.” In these peril ous times, many saints are being misled by the world, the r
plex with all the miseries of an ingrown personality, makes one demand the center of attention in the house hold. Often it is peevishness and a childish “ won’t-play- if-I-can’t-have-my-way” spirit, and what a plague that can be in a church! Sometimes it assumes a bombastic, self-assertive, dominating attitude that rides rough-shod over everybody and furnishes us church dictators and re ligious Napoleons. Self shows up in perennial chips-on- the-shoulder from the blocks above! Others with nervous ailments make the rounds of resorts and psychiatrists if they can afford it, and perhaps Bible meetings, willing to do anything but admit the real trouble, and honestly face it by the grace of God. There are many today who have real trouble and greatly need comfort, but there are others who are just living for self. God must perform an operation before they can be healed. To try to heal them without bringing them face to face with the real issue is like spreading cold cream on cancers. Our Lord has the only cure for these overgrown babies who keep others busy with milk bottles when they should be living on Bible beefsteak. He would set us at leisure from ourselves and put us in the “ Lost and Found Department” : “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” We are to love our neighbors as ourselves so surely God intends that we should have regard for our selves. We should be at our best for God, keeping our bodies and minds in shape for His service — “ our human best filled with His Spirit.” But that self-life that seeks its own ends, self-centered and self-serving, ends with despising itself and everything and everybody else. Nor is it enough merely to lose oneself in a good cause. That indeed does lift one out of himself, making him useful to others, but what we here have in mind is a life lost not in a cause, not even the cause of Christ, but in Christ Himself. One may live and work for Jesus as one might work for prohibition or world peace, but that is not the Christian way to victory. We are identified with Christ Himself and Paul sums it up: “ I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God; who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). And again: “ For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21). It is not living for Christ, or living like Christ; to live is Christ. Christ was Paul’s life, and Paul, like John the Baptist, was ever decreasing that Christ might increase. THE WAY OF VICTORY Christ dwells in our hearts by faith if we believe in Him. Then, as we are occupied with Him, trusting and obeying Him, following and pleasing Him, our old self life fades out and we become like Him. Self does not die easily, and there will be things that offend, change all our plans and start us up roads we never expected to travel. But it will be like exchanging dirt for diamonds, that foul gutter of self for the mountain peaks of the Spirit. We may seem to have failed in the eyes of men, but we shall have succeeded in the eyes of God. God’s Word tells us that our old self-life is crucified with Christ. We are to reckon it to be true, to count it real because God says it is so. Then we are to yield our selves unto God and obey Him (Rom. 6:6, 11, 13). The sixth chapter of Romans is a Magna Charta of liberty and its secret is Reckon, Yield, Obey. It is the passport into the “ Lost and Found Department” of those who have lost their lives to find them in Christ Jesus.
flesh and the devil. Without drawing too fine a distinction here, we may add that the crowd which has been so de- ceived by the world gets most attention from evangelistic preachers. I recall hearing a minister say he used to preach a lot on bobbed hair, but the longer he preached the shorter it got, so he stopped. It is easy to fall into the mistake of centering our fire on two or three worldly sins; such as theater-going, card-playing and dancing. Cer tainly there is a necessity for messages with no uncertain sound along these lines. I have never yet seen a Spirit- filled, soul-winning Christian who did these things, and I never expect to. But we may well reserve some of our ammunition for sins of the flesh. I do not mean adultery and other gross immoralities, although these do take their toll among be lievers, but there is a more subtle “ sin of the saints” that gets scant attention. It has been said that “ flesh” is “ self” spelled backwards, with the “h” left out. I here refer to the sin of selfishness under its many disguises. Among Christians today are those who would never think of going to the movies, dancing or playing cards, but whose selfishness in various forms is a reproach to the cause of Christ, a burden to their family and friends, and a grief to the Holy Spirit. It is claimed that a man wrapped in himself is the world’s smallest package. Surely sin comes in that kind of a parcel in many a life. Our Lord had this in mind when He referred to “ children in the marketplace,” and to His own generation who cared neither for John nor Jesus, but found fault with everything and could not be pleased. Our generation has grown up, pampered at home, and coddled at school, with silly notions about allowing chil- dren and students to do much as they pleased. The re sults are written large all about us. A mother told her new nurse, “Now I am letting the baby grow up on the new methods. Give him whatever he wants.” Later she heard the baby yell. She called upstairs to the nurse: “ Give him what he wants!” “He done got it,” the nurse replied, “ it was a bumble-bee!” We have been getting what we wanted for years and we have been stung. Such a condition among Christians is due to the fact that they neither know nor practice the Bible truth that not only were our past sins taken care of in the death of Christ, but also that our self-life too was crucified with Him. God says it is so, and we are to reckon it so, and ourselves dead to sin and the world. We are now risen in newness of life in Christ to live unto Him, and not to please ourselves. This truth is well-known in theory among Bible Christians; it has been drummed into our minds and written in our notebooks at Bible conferences, in Bible-believing churches and over the radio. But the fruits of it in practical personal living are woefully short. This selfishness of the saints, sometimes glorified under false colors, is the distress of pastors, the headache and heartache of earnest believers, and the greatest single ob stacle in the way of revival. SELF-EXPRESSION Many and diverse are the forms under which self ex presses itself. Sometimes churlishness and bad temper turn one into a Nabal, a son of Belial, with whom others cannot get along. Sometimes self-pity, or the martyr com
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JA N U A R Y , 1964
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