"Who gives himself with his alms feeds three: To be a friend of Christ, therefore, one must serve him. Not that Christ needs our service so much as we need to cultivate the spirit which this service will engender. To grow in Christian life one must give himself freely to those who need him and share his love of Christ with those who know him not. "Lord, when did we see you hungry and fed you? or thirsty and gave you drink? . The King will answer then, I tell you truly, in so far as ye did it to one of these brothers of mine, even to the least of them, you did it unto me." (Matt. xxv. 37-40.) Whatsoever does not serve dies. This is a law of life. If I tie my hand to my side and allow it to stay there for six months and then remove the bandage, it will hang limp and lifeless by my side. It has not served; it has been inactive and has atrophied. Full many a man starts out with a deep religious impression and aspirations, but for some cause or other he fails to give these aspirations expression in action. Later he is amazed to find that his truest aspirations seem to be dead. His deep yearning for fellowship with Christ has vanished. He finds his soul cold and without religious enthusiasm. He has not served his cause, and his religious soul has died. At our peril do we get too busy to have a share in the Christian campaign; and if later we wake to the fact of an atrophied soul, it will be the sure sign that we have been breaking an inexorable law. I think this is the authentic sign and seal And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts And recommence at sorrow: drops like seed After the blossom ultimate of all. Say, does the seed corn scorn earth and seek the sun? Surely it has no other end and aim Than to drop, once more to die, into the ground, Taste cold and darkness and oblivion there, And then rise, treelike, grow through pain to joy, -Browning's "Balanstion's Adventure." STUDY III. PERSONAL RESULTS OF CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." (John iii. 6.) "For the mind of the flesh is death; but the mind of the Spirit is life and peace. But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus from also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit (Rom. viii. 6-11.) from the dead dwelleth the dead shall give life that dwelleth in you." "And [the jailer] brought them out and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be saved, thou and thy house. And they spake the word of the Lord unto him, with all that were in his house. And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their stripes; and was baptized, he and all his, immediately. And he brought them up into his house, and set food before them, and rejoiced greatly, with all his house, having believed in God." (Acts xvi. 30-34.) PART I. WHAT IS CONVERSION? IN the preceding chapter we have gone over the steps which one takes in entering a Christian life and growing into a Christian experience. At the very threshold of this growing experience one passes through what is commonly called conversion. We have discussed these various steps first in order that this difficult topic might become more plain. Of recent years there has been much discussion as to whether one needs to be converted or not. Should not a child, if properly trained and living in the right environment, just grow into a normal religious experience? Does there need to be any great change in such a life as this? Here is a boy who has been reared in a Christian home with the influence of Christian parents. He has gone to Sunday school and church. He has never known anything save to love and obey Christ in so far as his childish mind understands Christ. Does such a child need conversion? Certainly such a child does not need a great cataclysmic break with the past. He does not need to weep and mourn over great sins. So far as he knows, he has been fashioning his life after the life of Christ. What, then, does conversion mean to him? Perhaps it may be best described as a conscious acceptance of the Christ program as his life program, a deliberate giving himself over to Christ, whom he has followed rather by imitation in the past. Up to this time he has been a kind of Christian by authority. He has lived as best he could like Christ because his father and mother taught him to do so. But sometime he must come to accountability. He must deliberately and consciously make this life his own. He must do from inner impulse what he has done by a kind of outward compulsion. When that time arrives there will be a defining of Christian experience, a growth in Christian consciousness. There will be a conscious loyalty which he never had before. There will be a deliberate choosing of the Christian life as his own which will usher him into a deeper experience, and this is certainly a type of conversion. Indeed, something of this same type of experience may come to a man who has been trying to follow the Christian life for years. Speaking of the validity of sudden conversion, Stevens says: "On the other hand, we shall remember this also, that in all education, religious and intellectual, there are times of rapid growth and times of slow; there are moments of surprise when truths burst suddenly on the mind; there are periods of stagnation or even decay, and then times when interest is renewed and the spirit leaps up and presses forward and hastens to maturity.' This dawning of consciousness of the deeper meaning of life, this ripening fellowship with God which seems to come like the ebb of the ocean, this high tide of the Spirit, as some one has called it, is really and truly of the essence of conversion. We must not discredit it because it is not cataclysmic, or of the nature of an upheaval. God works in many ways, and this is one of his genuine methods of changing life. 1Stevens, "The Psychology of the Christian Soul," pages 27, 28. |