5. What Does She
Teach?
"MISS MEARS, when you teach Christianity in Hollywood, don't you have to soft-pedal a lot of it? Certainly it must be hard to get Hollywood to walk in the straight and narrow and like it!"
Miss Mears is asked this question wherever she goes, and her reply is always the same. She does not believe in "soft-pedalling" the Gospel message of Christ.
I have a letter on my desk from Don Moomaw, all-American football player. He writes: "As an athlete, there are some obvious things that cause me to admire the ministry of Miss Mears. She has never yielded to the fashion of the day in toning down the atoning work of Christ or the peril of those who live without the Gospel . . . She valued the esteem of the educated world, but in such matters she dared to stand on her own feet. Her ardent zeal for missions, both home and abroad, communicated to youth with her unique eloquence, has probably enlisted more men and women for Christ's service than any other woman's voice in the history of our church."
Miss Mears teaches a hard-hitting, heart-winning, life-lifting message of Christianity that has won the hearts and minds of athletes and campus leaders, and of the potential, dynamic leaders and ministers who have gone into the ministry because of her. How many letters I have which say, "I wouldn't have gone into the ministry if it hadn't been for the influence of Miss Henrietta Mears!"
These days, terms in "spiritual" circles seem to be getting all mixed up as to who means what, and when, so perhaps it may be a good
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time to stop and define some terms. If the term "converted" is used in some circles, panic swiftly follows. Yet the same people can listen to government and military experts talk about converting war plants to peace-time manufacture without batting a spiritual eyelid. But mention a person being spiritually converted from pleasing self to pleasing God, and their spiritual "sensitivity" has been shattered.
If you mention saving a man's soul, the same group blanches and shudders violent spiritual shudders, but if you mention saving their children's lives from polio through immunization, they take it in their stride. If the Cross is spoken of as the way of salvation, they shudder as though you had mentioned a great indelicacy and an insult to supposed intellect, completely ignoring the 150 times it is stated in the New Testament as the condition of salvation.
Since the success of a spiritual program depends upon the philosophy of the person promoting the program, I would like to clarify what Miss Mears believes in the field of doctrine. That she was called to train leaders has been indicated and could be carried out into facts and figures too bulky for this book to hold, but I think the important thing to establish now is what she teaches them and how they are to practice it in leadership. In this chapter we shall take up doctrine and some spiritual applications of it.
By her own definition, Miss Mears is a Trinitarian. She believes in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, individually and collectively, and that you can't put any more emphasis on one than you can on the other. There must be a perfectly balanced emphasis; and the great emphasis of her ministry is on the Triune God, the Trinity, the Godhead. One member of the Trinity cannot be emphasized to the exclusion of one or both of the others without an unbalanced spiritual life. You cannot preach on God the Father and leave out the Son, our Mediator to God the Father, who came to reveal the Father. As a Christian you will have "the form of godliness but deny the power thereof" and your life will be powerless and empty and spiritually ineffective, unless you have the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit.
Her messages are always "Christo-centric" and the speakers she invites to minister in any way have the same message. Yet she points out that if everything is just Christ-centered, without a full realization of the sovereignty of God or the Power of the Spirit, the result will not be a full-bodied Christian life. We need the Son better to understand the love of God, and Miss Mears points out what Dick Hillis, a life recruit now active on the mission field, used to say: "It would be far
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easier for me to give my own life than it would be to take my two-year-old boy and sacrifice his life!" When we think in terms of this human relationship, we can better understand the great love of God for us.
Miss Mears uses the first chapter of Ephesians to illustrate the great sovereignty of God. She presents God the Father; Christ, His Son who is our Saviour and Mediator and the only way to God the Father; one way of salvation only, through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, with great emphasis on the risen Saviour as a constant, living experience, as Christ living out the abundant life in our lives; the Holy Spirit as the Comforter, giver of wisdom and spiritual power and strength. She feels that many people leave Christ as Saviour on the cross and fail to serve Him as the Risen Lord of their lives. Not only does a Christian accept Jesus Christ as Saviour but he should immediately see the Lordship of Christ and seek His plan for his individual life. Accept as Saviour, salute as Lord — you should not have one without the other — as though you kneel before the Saviour, then stand at salute to the Lord of your life and say with Paul, "Lord, what will you have me to do?"
The urgency of the Christian life is a facet that Miss Mears has always stressed to her young people and to all others who come under her influence. Even as God spoke to Moses and told him to take the shoes from his feet because the place where he stood was holy ground, Miss Mears has always pointed out that wherever we are, that place can be holy ground because God is there. She stresses that we must begin our Christian life, our Christian ministry, where we are, and let God lead from that moment on.
We must have the drive of Joshua in our Christian life. "Wherever the sole of your foot shall tread, that place shall be yours," said the Lord to Joshua. So, with the urgency of the hour and the Joshua "drive," we should go out and spiritually possess the land.
The prime requisite of a Christian leader, the very spiritual life-line, is one that Miss Mears explains by the "perpendicular-horizontal" relationship in our life. We must maintain our perpendicular connection to God by prayer, Bible study and communion; only as that perpendicular to God is well established and maintained can a Christian reach out to others on the horizontal. The closer we are to God on the perpendicular, the more people we can reach on the horizontal. Like the old song, "Nothing between my soul and my Saviour" — so the effective outreach to others will increase. It is easy for a Christian
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leader so to be driven to all the many and diversified needs on the horizontal that he forgets to maintain the perpendicular connection with God. As we lose our connection with God, the effect of the life we live on the horizontal becomes powerless and meaningless.
Miss Mears has never had any aspirations to occupy the pulpit as a preacher or minister. She has always felt that her place, as a woman, was in the ministry of teaching. Although she has spoken in hundreds of pulpits across America, it has been as a Christian educator, and she does not feel that she was ever called to preach.
In her teaching ministry Miss Mears has never compromised, modified or adapted the Scriptures. She takes them complete, inspired and as the Word of God. "If in your early Christian life you come across something in the Scriptures that in your limited knowledge you do not understand just then, lay the item aside temporarily and go on. Later on in your study, and in spiritual maturity, you will find the solution. It's just like eating fish. You come across a small bone that you cannot swallow, but you do not throw out the rest of the fish; you just remove the bone, lay it to one side and continue enjoying the rest of the fish."
Of course, analogies can be dangerous. For while you don't eat the fishbone you have laid aside, the spiritual truth that temporarily halted you will finally be completely assimilated. "Very early you'll find yourself at a standstill in your spiritual life or separated from it altogether, if you continue 'gagging on the bone.' Lay it aside and go on with the meal!" says Teacher.
Miss Mears has never felt it safe to take anything out of the Word of God, for two reasons. There is always something literally and figuratively, on both sides of the page, in the Bible. Cut something out on one page of the Bible and there will be something on the other side that you will lose, too. Remove one fact from the Bible and others will have to go, too. You must believe all Scripture with the same faith or you will have as many different versions of the Bible as the Bible has readers, as each reader begins to alter it and doctor it to his taste.
Miss Mears' second reason for feeling it is dangerous to remove things from the Bible is that many people begin to take things out of their Bibles because they seem incompatible with certain current beliefs. Then, as science makes new discoveries and new scrolls are unearthed, and history substantiates the very things that have been
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taken out of the Bibles, there is a mad scramble to get them back in again!
"But I'm very calm when all this scrambling takes place," smiles Teacher, "because I never took them out in the first place."
Just as the power came into Billy Graham's ministry when he completely and irrevocably accepted all Scripture as divine authority, so Miss Mears teaches all her leaders the same, and has through all the years of her life.
Looking over her years of Christian work and reviewing the thousands of lives she has witnessed in Christian service, Miss Mears has concluded that every Christian who is really going to accomplish anything in the work of the Kingdom must have a "crisis" experience, over and apart from accepting Christ as personal Saviour. She has never seen really effective Christian leaders who are truly accomplishing work for the Lord who have not, at some time, come to the complete end of self, overwhelmed with personal inadequacy, aware of how little they have and of their tremendous limitations in trying to serve the Lord and live the Christian life. Then, in the crisis of this experience, they allow the Holy Spirit to take over complete possession of their lives. There is a terrible sense of inadequacy of self, even after one is a Christian, a complete end of self, a complete emptying of self, a deadness to self and aliveness to God, as the Apostle Paul stated it. Christians become aware that there is no personal virtue in themselves, no personal ability, no personal strength except as the Holy Spirit controls and empowers and uses their lives.
The Holy Spirit has promised us power, and to lead us into all truth. The life that is not filled with the Spirit of God is indeed powerless. The Holy Spirit needs to fill our inadequacy with the adequacy of God. Those who are working in the enthusiasm and thrill of their new Christian decision will not last in their Christian witness if they "keep the outward form but deny the power thereof," if they do not have this crisis experience of the infilling of the Holy Spirit.
To return to the issue of the soft-pedalling of the Christian life and to Miss Mears' answer, she says, "There are two kinds of separation in the Christian life: separation from the world and separation unto God. The separation from the world is the negative Christianity and separation unto God is the positive Christianity." The emphasis she makes is on the separation unto God, the positive life.
She points out that the Children of Israel were separated from Egypt but that they wandered in the wilderness for forty years; they
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had separated from the world, so to speak, but they did not possess any land; rather they wandered around in bitterness and frustration, with empty lives. God was with them and He provided for them but they had no victory, there was no joy of obedience, there was no promised land; it was a negative life. They were sure of where they had been but they weren't sure of where they were going. They probably kept talking continually among themselves as to what they had left, but there was no talk about the triumphant living they were called to experience presently and in the future.
There are a lot of "do not" Christians who don't do much. If a Christian keeps talking about the life he left when he became a Christian, he must not be doing very much living in the new environment of his Christian life.
Finally, the Children of Israel were separated unto the promised land. Then they were victorious; they were living in the place of promise. And just so, Christians should live in the place of promise; they should have liberty in Christ and be so conscious and busy doing the things they can do unto the Lord that they forget the things they don't have time to do and wouldn't do even if they had the time. Miss Mears has never been as interested in getting people out of the world as she has been in getting them to separate themselves unto Christ. "Many Christians," she says, "put the emphasis on putting up fences to keep people out of the world, instead of putting up bridges to bring people unto God. If you separate Christians from the world but give them no promised land to possess, they will wander around in the wilderness having nothing — nothing from the world and nothing from the Lord."
I have never heard Miss Mears teach a lesson on what Christians should not do. She always kept us so busy doing the things we could and should do, happily and enthusiastically, that we didn't have time to realize or think too much about the things we shouldn't do. If anyone would ask, "Do you believe you can do this or that, or do you think this is wrong?" our answer would be the same: a look of surprise, a startled thought, "Well, I don't know; it's been so long since we even thought about it that I don't know if we believe in it or not. You see we just don't have time for that sort of thing!" She has kept us busy being alive unto God and that is the most important principle; in the selection of what you will use your time for, what you aren't doing isn't as important as what you are doing.
It was in 1934 that Miss Mears learned her great lesson on the subject
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of being alive unto God and having the fruits of the Spirit. She had been in Minneapolis visiting her family, after being conference speaker at the annual Keswick Conference in Mound, Minnesota. On the train returning to Los Angeles, she had just prepared the lesson for the college hour on the fruit of the Spirit as found in Galatians 5:22,23: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance . . . " Her lesson was prepared and she lay down in her Pullman berth in her compartment. But her thoughts continued and she mused to herself, "Do I really have the fruit of the Spirit? How much of my joy and peace is dependent upon things and conditions and people around me, and how much comes from the Spirit of God? Why don't I have the fruit of the Spirit so I will have love, joy and peace regardless of any outside conditions, regardless of what people are near me? The class isn't growing the way it should; I'm not satisfied with it. What's wrong?" She thought over the verse she was using in her lesson, Romans 6:11: "Likewise consider yourselves to be dead unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord."
The train swayed from side to side as it rushed through the darkness, the steady, rhythmic clacking of the wheels marking cadence to her troubled thoughts. "I know I am dead to sin. I have cut everything off in my life that could possibly keep me from God. If there is anything at all, Lord, that is still in my life that I should get rid of, please let me know. I have let all the big things go; of that I'm absolutely certain. So I don't want some little thing left to ruin everything. I know of nothing big or small in my life that would separate me from You. Then what is the matter?"
The train whistle blew long and shrill as the train rushed on. She thought back to her family in Minnesota. She thought ahead to the church waiting in Hollywood. It was as though she were between two worlds, with the rushing train the only connecting link in the darkness. She had left Minneapolis but hadn't arrived in Hollywood. She felt alone, shut off. Then suddenly, with sharp, bright clarity, the last part of the verse came alive in her heart. "Likewise consider yourselves to be dead unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord."
"That's it!" She sat up in bed. " 'Alive unto God!' That's the secret. It doesn't do you any good to be dead to sin if you are not alive to God. In the thirteenth verse it says: '. . . yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead . . . ' That's it! You can be dead to
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sin, but you are just dead, unless you become alive to God as 'one alive from the dead!' " Instantly she was out of bed and kneeling by her berth in her compartment.
"Lord, I want to be alive unto You! I want to be alive to You and then I know the fruits of the Spirit will follow. We need to stop poking around among the old dead embers of self, lose our self-absorption and self-consciousness and become alive to You."
When she arrived at the College Department with her lesson, she was bubbling over with her new experience. "I want to share with you a wonderful discovery I have just made," she said.
Ethel May Baldwin, her secretary, sat forward on her chair. "Well, if she is still learning things, the rest of us had better sit up and take notice," she thought.
It was time to go up to the annual conference at Mount Hermon. This was her message. The results shook the conference and the group brought the results back in testimonies in the echo service which filled the entire lower auditorium. This is another example that the Christian life is one of continual learning.
The vital quality of Miss Mears' ministry is the fact that she is constantly learning, even as she is constantly teaching. Her secret is that she does not teach with head-knowledge only; she teaches with heart-knowledge, and she must experience the truth first, completely, wholly, wonderingly, and then she is so alive with her message that it gushes forth in streams of living water. She has continually sought for a new approach, a different appeal, and a new realization in a more vivid way of an old truth. If she presents material she has used before, it always sounds refreshed, revised and current, and you have as tremendous a challenge as ever, even if you recognize some of the illustrations or the theme. It is almost as with the sea; it is the same substance that beats upon the shore but every wave is fresh and new in its approach.
So it was with her new realization of the will of God. A few years ago at Forest Home Miss Mears was searching for a new idea to present, a different message. One of the speakers was stressing, for daily study, Philippians 2:12-13; Miss Mears joined in the study eagerly and enthusiastically with everyone else, as much a first-time student as anyone there, and began to search the verses. Suddenly the words gripped her anew: ". . . work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who works in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure."
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There was a sudden shaft of light on a new facet of the prism of God's Word. Miss Mears mused, "Lord, do you mean to tell me that You are in me and are actually working out Your will and Your pleasure; that I do not need to plead with You and struggle before You to have You show me Your will, if I am working out my salvation with fear and trembling, You are already working in me?"
Now she turned to the familiar Romans 12:1-2, and read, "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is the good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God!" With keen spiritual perception, Miss Mears began to put things together with all the zeal of a spiritual chemist.
She thought, "If we yield ourselves, He wants to reveal His will to us. And how does He reveal His will? If we are 'working out our salvation with fear and trembling' then God is in us and working out His will and His pleasure through the renewing of our minds! To us, the will of God, then, doesn't have to be vague, mystical, uncertainty; He will renew our minds, direct our thoughts. It is as simple as that. If we yield ourselves to Him, He wants to reveal His will to us. Only our holding back will prevent it!"
Right then and there Miss Mears gave up "all-night" prayer meetings and the idea of beating one's breast day and night, pleading to know God's will. She decided that God wants us to know His will even more than we want to know it. It is literally a matter of yielding ourselves to Christ and thinking God's thoughts after Him.
Needless to say, Miss Mears had a new message for the conference that year. Her mind had been "renewed" and the Lord, speaking through her, renewed the hearts and minds of her listeners.
She did not know it then, but she had received the God-sent message that she might revive many around the world. It was just after she had received this new spiritual insight that she was to take her trip to Korea and to Formosa, where she ministered to so many weeping and weary and frustrated missionaries, shut out of their mission stations in China and trying to find the will of God for their lives at this crucial time. The message was fresh in her heart and mind: "Here is our certainty. God is in us, and He is going to work in us to do His will and pleasure; this is the promise. And through what vehicle will He work to reveal His will except through our minds? We do not have to go
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chasing a will-o'-the-wisp, or strain after something outside ourselves. God is in us, working out His will and we will be transformed by the renewing of our minds that we may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God." Miss Mears had learned the lesson first, before she taught it to others.
She believes in waiting on the Lord with all of her heart, but she believes in working with her hands while waiting. She is very outspoken in her criticism of people who do too much waiting on the Lord without doing any work while waiting!
"The Lord does most of the waiting, waiting for us to get up and get going," she says. "How can the Lord stop you if you haven't started? And how can He change your direction if you aren't moving but are just standing still? You can't steer a car that is standing at the curb. Even if you move the steering wheel, nothing happens. Ask any frustrated little boy who is trying to steer his daddy's parked car! Before you can guide a car, it has to be moving. So only when we're moving can the Lord direct us. He can stop us, or let us go on, or change the course."
Anyone familiar with Forest Home, or any forest retreat, knows how essential a flashlight is to light one's path through the velvety darkness — velvety, that is, until a "prayer-rock" turns into a "stumble-rock." Miss Mears points out that just as the flashlight serves to light your path, so does the psalmist say, "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet," which means that the Lord will light one step at a time. "When you take a flashlight out into the night at Forest Home, you certainly don't say, 'I can't see all the way to my cabin, so I'm not going to start!' Of course not! You take the step that the flashlight reveals, then you have light enough for the next step; you take that step, and the flashlight gives enough light for one more, and one more, and so you get to your cabin."
Anyone who has ever been in the dark, physically or spiritually, can understand that! In spiritual matters she is just as confident that the light will be there for the second step as for the first: "When I leave my home and start out for church on Sunday morning, I don't stop and pray on every street corner to see whether I should cross the street or not, or whether I should continue or turn back. I go happily and at peace, knowing that it is the Lord's will for me to go to church. When I come to a stop light, I don't fret and scream and beat my head and wonder what's wrong; I just stop and wait for the light to turn green and on I go! Even as a preacher once said, 'The stops of a
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good man are ordered of the Lord,' instead of 'The steps of a good man are ordered of the Lord'; if we yield our wills and commit our way unto the Lord, we can have this confidence that the Lord is directing our paths."
But don't rush off with the misconception that Miss Mears does not believe in prayer. Rather, I would liken her continual prayer to know the will of her Heavenly Father to that of a small child who comes up to his earthly father and says, "What do you want me to do now, Dad? I'll just go on gathering wood until you call me for something else."
Miss Mears in her early life learned the secret of the needle's-eye experience, in a spiritual sense, when her life narrowed down to the place where just she and the Lord could walk through in fellowship. Then from that place her life enlarged in the tremendous sphere of social fellowship and spiritual leadership. She has expressed this idea through the years in the lesson that she calls the "Circles of Fellowship." Probably every one of her spiritual charges from her twenty-eight years of ministry will remember this.
First, there is the circle of faith. This is the circle of five hundred in the Bible, I Corinthians 15:6: "After that he was seen by more than five hundred brethren at once." This is the first circle of fellowship, the circle of faith.
The second circle narrows it down to the 120 in Acts 1:15: "Peter stood up in the midst of the disciples (a group numbering about a hundred and twenty) . . ." And Acts 2:1: "and when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place." This is the circle of power.
The next circle of fellowship is that of service. The circle of service reduces the number to the seventy found in Luke 10:1: ". . . the Lord appointed seventy and sent them two by two ahead of Him to every town where He was about to go." The next circle is the circle of companionship, and this number is twelve as recorded in Mark 3:14: "And he ordained twelve, that they should be with him . . ."
The next circle is limited to three and it is the circle of real fellowship; the three are Peter, James and John. These three seem to be the greatest intimates of Jesus. They were at the Mount of Transfiguration, they were in the Garden of Gethsemane, and they were with Him when He raised Jairus' daughter.
Finally, the last circle is limited to one, just one, with Christ in the circle of love. John the Beloved seems to be the nearest and dearest to Christ. And the circle of love is illustrated in Christ's repeated question
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to Peter, "Simon, do you love me?" This is the final circle of fellowship, the circle of love. Miss Mears has always closed the lesson with an invitation, her gentle, low voice inviting each one of her listeners to enter into that circle of love with the Lord Jesus Christ where there is room for just two — you and the Lord Jesus Christ in a circle of love.
Perhaps this is the best place to end this chapter. So let us leave very quietly, with hearts bowed in prayer, eyes closed, as Miss Mears asks, "Do you want to be in this circle of love with the Lord Jesus Christ, just the two of you? It costs everything you have in yourself to be in this circle, but the Lord will give in return everything He has. If you want to be in this inner circle of love, alone with your Saviour, right now in the quiet of your heart enter that circle."
