How to Become a C h ris tian continued
Communists a year. Do you think your kind of reli gion is enough to stand up against that? The Christians in a free world have got a tremendous job of per suading to do, if we are going to keep the world free. Visiting one of our great eastern universities some months ago, I met a young freshman, blue-eyed, healthy, but going through a bad patch because his girl had just thrown him over. I told him I was very sympathetic, but I believed if he could turn his disap pointment over to God and surrender it, God might be able to help him find the meaning of it, and help him to use it in understanding other people in trouble. He wanted to do this, and we had some prayer about it together. Next day he was in again, looking like a different person. He had really surrendered his sorrow and loss, and God had given him peace. Listen to this letter from him: “I wish I could put down in writing everything that is in my heart, but that is sort of impossible. Consequently you will have to read a little into what I say. Ever since that wonderful day when we were together, my life has become a sort of a picture that is constantly unfolding to me. Now I can see where I am, and, I think, where I am going. I am really and seriously thinking of becoming a min ister. Whereas before I had too many interests in a life’s work, now there is just one. The more I think about it, the more it seems to fit in with what I want and feel. Perhaps this can show you how deep this wonderful thing has gone with me. Going to church now really means something. It is hard to see how I remained cold to it in the past. The same thing has applied to the Bible. Every night when I read a little out of it, it gives me a feeling of grasping something concrete as well as spiritual. Tonight I started reading The Greatest Story Every Told. God brought this book to me which I can really understand and appre ciate. At last the answers to my questions about Jesus are beginning to come. With each page I realize more and more what a tremendous story of strength and good surrounds Him. This is truly the start of my Christian education. . . . I feel a great benevolence toward the people around me, a desire to share with them what I have found. Several times within the last few weeks I have had very gratifying talks with others on what has happened to me. It was amazing to see the old fumbling, reticent person I used to be, talking freely and saying what he meant. Words won’t convey how grateful I am.” He is a student in one of the most corrosively irre ligious universities on this continent. The education he was getting did not help him to meet life. His Christian conversion did. The conversion happened in connection with the thing that huinanly meant most to him, namely, the loss of his fiancee. God came to him right at the point of his need. He always does.
been willing to submit to God. Or there is some lie we are living or repeating. Or there is some kind of self-importance which brings everything back to its relation to us. Someone once said we take hold of God by the handle of our sins. When we let Him come in fully, He takes over those unyielded areas where self has reigned before. A young fellow was converted not long ago. The conversion revolved around letting God have the problem of his nerves, his fears about support for the future (he had practically no human means of support), and his relation to girls. They were spe cific, concrete. He handed them to God as you would pay out three one-dollar bills to a man to whom you owed them. Because the conversion was concrete, it meant something, and it stuck. Second, a provision for adequate time to be given to God daily. When a child is bom, it needs nourish ment at once and from then on. You will need at least 20 minutes to half an hour in the morning. The mind is fresher then, and a good period of prayer with God before the day begins insures a different kind of day. You will need a Bible, and some plan by which to read it. You will need some great devotional books to help you and some great experimental books about prayer, like John Baillie’s Diary of Private Prayer. But you will have to learn to say your own prayers, too, for no book covers everything in your daily life and all that needs praying for. Third, fellowship with other Christians. You are bom into a human family, and you are bom again into a spiritual family. That family is the Church. A member of a family who never stays home, and only occasionally sends a small check, is not much of a family;member. You need the sustenance of the family food and the family caring and the family responsibility. Many think they can break off a piece of faith and continue it by themselves: but they have not yet learned what Christianity is. There is no such thing as Christianity apart from the life of the Church. The spiritual life of people who try to do it all by themselves is as unnatural as a plant that grows up somewhere under a porch, or in a cellar: it is spindly and yellow and misshapen because it has not grown in the sun, as healthy plants grow. Fourth, we must begin giving away what we have, or we shall lose it. One of the first impulses after we hear a good story is to find someone to tell it to. And one of the first impulses after we have had a real Christian experience is to want to impart it to others. These people who say that their religion is too per sonal to talk about seem to me to have so little of it they haven’t got much to talk about. Falling in love is very personal, too, but did you ever see a youngster in love who didn’t want to tell you about his or her beloved? Communists make a hundred million more
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