Messages on the Victorious Life
Message Three – Part Two
Victory is not concealing your wrong desires. Concealing your wrong desires is counterfeit victory. Yet, how many of us have supposed that victory is simply keeping our wrong feelings from expressing themselves. Do you remember the story of the old Quaker lady, told over and over again, to illustrate victory? This dear old Quaker lady, who apparently never lost her temper, always keeping unruffled under the most trying circumstances, was approached one day by a young girl friend, who said: “I want you to tell me how under the sun you do it. How do you always keep sweet the way you do? Why, if some of the things happened to me that I have seen happen to you, I would just boil over; but you never do.”
And the old Quaker lady answered quietly, “Perhaps I don’t boil over, my dear, but you don’t know what boiling is going on inside.”
That story has been told as an example of wonderful Christian victory. It is no such thing. It is a counterfeit; it is a fake; it denies the offer of the Word of God. If the only victory we can have is to be boiling inside and not let people know how sinful we feel, that is a poor kind of victory. The Lord Jesus Christ never offered it to anyone. It does not take any supernatural grace to keep from boiling over if you are boiling inside.
Anybody can do that if there is inducement enough. Any businessman who wants to sell goods, or to get another man to sign a business contract so that he can make money – if the man he is talking to says something that makes him “boil inside,” he is not going to boil over. It is not good business. He smiles, and for purely selfish reasons he does not let the other know how he feels.
But there is no grace, no miracle and no victory in that. Anybody can keep from boiling over, I say. Women do it all the time for social reasons – and there is no Christianity and no grace in that.
I heard of a woman who did not “boil over” for a very different reason. She was out in India as a missionary. She had gone out there to serve Christ; doubtless she was a surrendered Christian. But she was not yet a victorious Christian. Perhaps we do not realize that surrender and victory are not always the same thing. It is possible to be a completely surrendered Christian and a defeated Christian, as some of you may know to your sorrow. An older missionary friend of the younger missionary told of her experience himself.
One day he with other missionary friends said, “We are not living the kind of life that the New Testament describes and that those early Christians apparently lived. Let us go away by ourselves and ask God to show us what the matter is, and to give us what we have not got.”
They dropped their work and went off for a few days, asking for they knew not what, but hungry for what they did not have. And God met them, and gave them what they asked for. They came back changed men, with Christ in His fullness reigning in their hearts, and with the victory. Then this older missionary told the younger woman about it. He told her of the revolution wrought in his life, veteran missionary though he was. She saw the truth and took it all by faith.
Some months later, he – then at a distance – had a letter from her saying that she must now tell him of the wonderful things that were happening in her life, so wonderful, she said, that she could hardly believe they were true.
“I wanted to write you at first,” she said, “but I was afraid it would not last. But it has lasted. – For example, do you know that for three months now I have not only not once slammed the door in the face of one of these Indian servants that used to get on my nerves so, but I haven’t even wanted to, once in the three months?”
That was a miracle. That was victory. It is not a miracle to go without slamming the door for three months. We can put our hands behind our back, set our teeth, and not slam the door. But would it be a miracle for you to go three months without ever once feeling within your heart that angry surge of irritation, impatience, lack of love that would make it a relief to “slam the door” or give expression in some way to your feelings? Would that be a miracle?
Yes, our hearts tell us that it would. We know that no effort of our own can possibly bring such a miracle to pass; the taking away from our hearts of even the “want to” of sinful desire. That young woman now had real victory, the miracle, the gift of victory, which can never be wrought by our will power or resolution, or by our efforts of any sort.
Dear friends…that is the real thing. That is real victory. In the counterfeit victory we have to conceal how we feel. The counterfeit victory means a struggle; whatever we do, we do by our efforts. Oh, yes, we ask Him to help us; and then we feel that we must do a lot to help Him – as if He needed to be helped! In real victory, He does it all. We do not dare to help. We realize that the battle is His. And remembering that Christ is our life, we do not need to conceal Christ. The things we have to conceal in our lives are the things that are from Satan, not from Christ; from our sinful nature, not from our “born again” nature.
When the Lord Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit works in our life to give us this victory, it is a miracle every time. If it is not a miracle, it is not victory. Yet that is the man who had said a few days before, “If you say that is true of you, I believe you; but it never could be true of me.”
Yes, it can be true of anyone whom GOD has created. The Redeemer Christ can be our victory. It is not a matter of temperament or environment; it is a matter of Jesus Christ, and it is His grace that is sufficient.
By Charles G. Trumbull
Edited by Verona