66The average Christian today needs above all else to learn how to maintain or recover his lost radiance. ”
rest and exercise. Trying to live in a crisis all the time would produce a fever, not normal health.
I f we are sure of that but the joy of salvation is lost; if we have left our first love; if the glow has departed; then we need to recover it. David lost his joy because of sin and recovered it by repentance and con fession. Ephesus left her first love and our Lord called her to remember, repent and repeat, do again the first works. Just as we came to Jesus for salvation in the first place, we come for forgiveness and renewed fellow ship as Peter did at Tiberias. He was still a believer but temporarily not a disciple, and at Tiberias he be came a disciple again.
^■et me make clear, however, that when I speak of normal spiritual health, I do not mean subnormal. A lot of dear people accept the subnormal as normal and any call to the abundant life is viewed with suspicion. I have spent years trying to stir up the saints in our churches and I have heard all too often the old excuse, “But no body is perfect.” One would think the New Testament standard is imperfection! There is nothing more won derful on the physical plane than abounding good health and there is nothing more glorious in this world than a healthy, happy Christian living abundantly. When one compares the average sickly midweek prayer meeting with the gatherings of the early church, he is painfully aware that this is not that. I know that the good old-days had their limitations. A newspaper reader wrote to the editor, “Your paper is not as good as it used to be.” The editor replied, “It never has been.” One feels like that sometimes when some lament for the former age. But just the same, what we call a New Testament church today is often as much like the orig inal as an axe we read about recently. Its owner claimed that it had been used in George Washington’s day but admitted under pressure that it had worn out three han dles and two heads! “An original experience of Jesus Christ”—original in that it is our own and not second hand; original in that it is the New Testament, first-century sort—is our scarcest article these days, both with the individual and the church. To obtain it if we never had it, to recover the joy and glow of it if we lost it, and to maintain it if we have it: that is Item Number One on the calendar of the Christian and the church. It deserves top pri ority. To attend to anything else first is not only a waste of time; it is downright disobedience. Evangelism and missions wait upon it, for only after the lost joy of salvation has been restored will transgressors be taught God’s ways and sinners converted to Him. The edification of the.church waits for it, for only after we have been converted can we strengthen the brethren. It is a clever device of the enemy to make us so busy with other good things to the neglect of the first thing, and thus, the good becomes the enemy of the best. We must know Him, and know Him better, before we can effectively make Him known.
H o w to obtain this experience, how to regain it, and now there remains HOW TO MAINTAIN IT. If we are to glow, we must grow. The glow of health shows in the growing normal child. He eats, rests and exercises and thereby grows. So does the Christian, not by mor bid introspection, trying by taking thought to add cubits to his spiritual stature. We do not grow by strenuously trying to grow. We grow physically as we eat, rest and exercise, and so does the Christian as he feeds on the Word, rests in the Lord and exercises himself unto God liness. Some mortals try to look healthy by smearing on an artificial glow. Alas, some Christians do the same with an artificial piety but God looks on the heart and sees the ailment untouched. Some work up a fever of religious enthusiasm and activity but a sick man may have rosy cheeks. The cure for the subnormal is not the abnormal. We do not get out of the stupor by getting into a stew. “I am come that they might have life” . . . that is every Christian’s possession . . . “and that they might have it more abundantly” : that is the provision and possibility for every Christian. It is not something abnormal; it is simply normal spiritual health. We can have life without good health but we should have both, physically or spiritually. Life, both eternal and abun dant, is not for a privileged few, but for every Christian. This may sound like a primer to advanced believers, but most of us do not belong to that category, so we had better “familiarize ourselves with the familiar.” How to be a growing, glowing, going Christian, not just for personal enjoyment but to the glory of God: that is our chief concern. It will involve examination; it may re quire surgery; it will call for a crisis, just as there is often a crisis in a return to normal physical health. But the crisis is followed by a process of proper food,
17
FEBRUARY, 1966
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