The Difference Christ Makes
In Your Understanding of God's Nature

"I'm afraid to give over my whole life to Christ. I'm afraid of what He might ask me to do."

   "If I surrender my entire personality to Christ, how do I know He won't cripple one of my children? So many dreadful things seem to happen to Christians and they are supposed to rejoice in it. I couldn't do this if God harmed one of my children."

   "If I give over the controls of my life to Jesus Christ, how do I know He won't send me to some dreary foreign mission post?"

   "I'm afraid to surrender to Christ because He might ask me to speak before crowds as He has asked you to do."

   These are just a few of the objections to the committed life which I have picked up along the way of my travels and in the daily perusal of my mail.

   In each case, these objections show a glaring lack of understanding of what God is really like!

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   Certainly He often asks us to do difficult things, but if He is God and if He knows the end from the beginning and if He created us in the first place, doesn't it make sense that only He knows exactly how to guide us? Of course, each objection is voiced by a woman who has not tried Him fully. No one who has, gives much thought to what He might do with her life. Invariably, even when the years are filled with hardship, in the minds of those who are wholly His there arises no question but that He will get them through it. Questions often arise in times of rebellion as to how He will do it, but the familiar "if" of the uncommitted is seldom in evidence. This does not mean that fully committed Christians are never discouraged or confused or in doubt. But the doubts seem to concern God's methods, not His character.

   One woman wrote: "How do I know that God will not take my husband as He took Betty Elliot's husband? After all, my husband is just a businessman. And Betty's husband was in God's service. If He took Jim Elliot, what guarantee do I have that He would not take my husband?"

   Here again is an appalling lack of knowledge of what God is really like. The religious philosophies of the East have made sharp inroads into Christian thinking. The law of Karma implies that we are treated by God according to our deserts. This is not dealing with reality. Jesus Christ, and only Jesus Christ, deals with life as it is. Nowhere in the Christian philosophy do we find indication that God blesses or protects according to our merits. Certainly if this were true, He would have protected His own Son from the Cross! Christianity deals with life as it is. Not as it should be. If we read our Bibles, asking the Holy Spirit to give us insight into man and God as they are, we will find that insight. It is certainly there.

   In nothing that God does is He limited by our earthly span

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of years. He is working from an eternal, over-all pattern which only God and those who have gone to be with Him can see. There isn't a human mind brilliant enough, nor a human heart spiritually enlightened enough to be able to see God's entire plan.

   The Christian life is a life of faith. The faith is not, as we have already seen, given to some and not given to others. Faith is merely the natural result of knowing what God is like. If we know Him, then we automatically trust Him to do what He knows to be the best possible thing in our particular circumstance.

   It does no good whatever to tell a woman who is afraid that God might cripple her child that she has no right to question God. In one sense we have every right to question Him. I think God is pleased when an honest man or woman confronts Him with honest questions. And the reason He is pleased is because He knows what He is like. He knows His intentions toward the whole human race. He knows that He can stand the test of our questioning.

   Perhaps we should look for a moment right here at the question which has been on the lips of mankind for most of mankind's existence: Does God send all tragedy? In my own heart the answer to this profound question is no.

   I doubt if anyone has a total answer. But the very question mark itself can be caused to drop away, if we will give ourselves a chance to look at God as He really is in Jesus Christ.

   Some of you who read this book may not be convinced yet that God did visit this earth in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth. To you I recommend the reading of Dr. J.B. Phillips' books Your God Is Too Small and When God Became Man (Macmillan). But whether or not it has become clear to you, He did reveal Himself wholly only in Jesus Christ. It was on this point that I was able to give my life to Him. If God

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and Jesus Christ are one and the same, then I must follow God. And through every year of my Christian life, I have been following God because I now know Him to be One with Jesus Christ. When I look at Christ, I am looking at God Himself. "I and the Father are one." And Paul in Colossians 2:9 says that the fullness of God dwells in the Lord Jesus. Jesus is no less God than the Father is because they are one.

   So that anyone who is afraid of a hidden fiendish side of God, will continue to be, until that person knows Jesus Christ. Can you imagine Jesus Christ crippling a child? All of His earthly days were spent in healing! Did Jesus Christ send the crippling disease just so He could show off His own healing power? This is absurd even to consider. Our God is a God of wholeness. For some reason which we cannot fully understand now, He allows disease. But each time I am in conversation with someone on this point, I seem to become more and more convinced that we must not ask for a pat answer. I am not convinced of this because I follow a fearful, tyrant God who shuts off my aching "why" simply because He's God and I have no right to question Him. I am convinced because more and more I see Him as a totally redemptive God, who is minute by minute working out a great eternal purpose. He is not limited to our earthly lives and neither are we!

  Just recently I sat in a minister's study before the evening service where I was to speak. He told me of a tragedy in one of the families in his congregation. The son was forced to come back from the mission field after having been there only three months, because his fifty-two-year-old father dropped dead suddenly from a heart attack. The mother was hospitalized also with a severe heart condition. Quietly, the devout minister was exploring God's purpose in so much tragedy. The father had been one of the strong members of the church. The boy had just entered the Lord's service.

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The mother lay ill. When the minister asked me what I thought about it, I said this: "I'm not sure God caused any of this. Certainly He allowed it. But certainly He allows sin! God didn't create sin. He died in order to be able to redeem us from it. I am able to keep my heart quiet in the face of these blows life hands us only by keeping my entire attention focused on the Nature of Jesus Christ Himself."

   Over and over as my own father lay suffering so horribly during the days before his death, I was kept from asking why simply because of the time and effort I had spent during the last few years in order to find out what Jesus Christ is really like. Many times I had to remind myself that Jesus had so completely identified with me in my heartache that He had even asked my "why" for me from the Cross! So, if your own heart cries "why" at God, Christ himself holds your answer. He is not shocked or offended at your cry. He has already asked, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

   He knows.

   Somehow, somewhere in the dark recesses of the human heart, there lies a deep suspicion of God. This must bring Him great pain. In His written-down Word He tells us that His intentions toward us are the highest and most peaceful. "I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you hope and a future."

   The end is already in His mind. He, Himself, is the end. "I am the beginning and the end," Jesus said. And yet there is within us all the natural bent to expect the worst of God.

   If we look at human history, this bent is understandable. Not because God has intended human history to turn out as it has, but because so few persons who have made human history have bothered to find out what God is really like! If more had discovered Him as He is, human history would

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have been a different story. We who are living through the twentieth century are not experiencing the results of God's Nature when we look at the tragedy and heartbreak and tyranny in the world. We are experiencing the consequences of human nature lived without contact with God from our side.

   God did not strike Elizabeth Elliot's beloved Jim with a savage's spear. The fear and distrust and darkness in the heart of the savage struck him. And here we come to the proof of the glorious fact that even when sin strikes its darkest blow, God, because He is forever a Redeemer God, will make good, creative use of the blow! Hasn't God made magnificent use of the tragedy in the jungle when the five missionaries were murdered by the very savages they longed to reach with the God News of Love? Just as He turned the world's greatest tragedy, Calvary, into the world's greatest victory, so He has turned that tragedy in the jungle to victory. Not only triumph for the cause of Christ, but triumph in the midst of heartache in the torn lives of the widows left behind. Elizabeth Elliot would be the first to agree that the death of her Jim was not wasted.

   It could have been. But nothing needs to be wasted when Jesus Christ is in command of the situation and of the personalities of those involved in it.

   It is this deep tendency of the human heart to suspect God which prompts questions such as those shared at the beginning of this chapter. "How do I know God won't send me to a foreign field?" "How do I know God won't make me speak before people?" If God sends you to a foreign field, He will go with you, and before you are sent, you can depend on it that He will create such a love in your heart for the people to whom He is sending you, and such a desire to go, that you will scarcely be able to wait to get there.

   If He "makes you speak before crowds of people," He will

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enable you to do it. He will give you His love and concern for the people. He will enable you to overcome your shyness or rebellion. Many times I have arrived at the door of the church or public building where I am to speak, deeply rebellious at having to go at all. But inevitably when I stand up, I am enabled to say what He has given me to say.

   It's true God may ask you to do hard things. But He asks us to do nothing which He Himself will not support.

   When we question God in this way, it is only darkness or disorderly thinking on our part. We are not thinking through to the very Nature of God Himself. We are woolgathering. We are just wondering if God will turn out to adjust Himself to us! No, He can't do this. He is a holy God. But He will come to live right in your mortal body and enable you to adjust to Him. He will never ask you to do anything which He knows you cannot do, with His life operative in you.

   Another question as old as the heart of man: Does God punish by affliction? As clearly as I am able to see, no. He punishes by love. It is His love and longsuffering which cause us real pain. The kind of pain which brings us to repentance. To the point of true faith. I do not fear God's punishment by tragedy when I am disobedient. But I do fear His punishment by love. The severest punishment of Peter's entire life must have been the moment after he had denied Jesus three times in a row. It was then that "the Lord turned and looked upon Peter," and "Peter went out, and wept bitterly." Love Himself had "looked upon Peter," and it broke his heart.

   Our various doctrinal differences often seem to cloud the true Nature of God. Not long ago I received a most interesting but troubled letter from a young woman who had been confused by two incidents in my own life. In my autobiography, The Burden Is Light, she had read the chapter "How Great Is That Darkness," in which I told of emerging

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from a stormy dark period, some four or five years after my conversion. Then in 1958 Christian Life magazine published an article written by Dr. V. Raymond Edman, which gave another account (with many quotes from me) concerning still another emerging from still another period of great darkness. This one three years later. Here is a portion of her letter: "In the chapter in The Burden Is Light you explained so clearly about giving up the right to yourself. Now, I am really confused, because in the Christian Life article the content seems to be identical, but the second giving up didn't happen until later. I may be awfully dense, but I'm mixed up about it. Did you discover that you really hadn't given up your rights to yourself after all? What do you call these experiences? Or do we need to call them anything?"

   The remainder of her letter showed clearly that she was fearful something like this would happen to her.

   I was well aware that this type of confusion could follow Dr. Edman's article, and for the rest of you who may have been mixed up, this is the way I understand it. Once more, we lack knowledge of God's true Nature when we fall into pits of depression at the dark periods which come to all of God's people. There is one baptism, but many fillings, we are told. I do not profess to be an expert theologian. I have simply followed Christ according to the light He has given me. And I have never been much concerned about what certain differing groups would label my various and varied spiritual experiences. No love life runs smoothly all the time. The Christian life is a life of love. I trust my Loved One now because my faith in Him has been strengthened with every emergence from every dark or dry period in my Christian life.

   Here again, even though we don't recognize it as such, is a manifestation of that deep tendency to suspect Him. If we learn that someone whom we admire, or who has helped

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us spiritually, has taken a nose dive, we are crushed. Or at least confused. And we begin to wonder if Christ is going to let this happen to us, too!

   Yes, He probably will.

   Not to punish you, but simply because He will at all times act exactly like God. Jesus Christ is not only the Saviour God, He is also the Creator God. "Without Him was not anything made that was made." We have already spoken of the fact that He created our minds and He works with them according to the way He created them and according to what He knows we can take in at the moment. I have found the Christian life does not build regularly from any pat formula. God always acts according to His Nature, but He also works with us according to what He knows of our nature. Which is more than we know.

   During that first dark period of which I wrote in The Burden Is Light, I did give up every conscious right to myself. I was sincere. Great release came. And after it, came several years of fairly smooth going. Then, when God saw it was time to show me more dust in the depths of my personality which needed to be cleansed and given over to Him, He permitted certain situations to arise in my life which pointed them out to me glaringly. At first, I was depressed. Then again, seeing much more than I had been able to see before, there was another time of reckoning. There have been others since. There will be more. But for the past three years, I have been free of the accompanying depression and discouragement, because He has taught me not only more of what is in my human nature, but more of what is in His God Nature.

   I am His responsibility entirely now. But by no means do I intend to infer that I am an advanced Christian. I am still a sinner who not only must, but joyfully can come to Him

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at any time and hand back the reins of the wild horses of her personality.

   We dare not rely for one moment on one or one hundred "spiritual experiences." But for every moment of all the years of our earthly lives and throughout an endless eternity, we can rely on the living Person of Jesus Christ. And we can do this because of what He is like.

   So much of the confusion among all Christians, new and not so new, could be wiped out if we were all really growing "in the knowledge of Jesus Christ." I can't grow spiritually. Neither can you. But my spiritual growth occurs, I find, in direct proportion to the increase of my knowledge of Him. No one will ever be willing to place her life in the hands of a stranger. If you are hesitating on this point, follow His simple advice to you: "Learn of me . . ." Once you have learned of Him, you will want to belong to Him. And once He is in control of your life, you will find yourself more eager than ever to learn still more of what Jesus Christ is really like. And when you know the Nature of Jesus Christ, you know the Nature of God.

Chapter Seventeen  ||  Table of Contents