Quiet Talks on Following the Christ by S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
page 78 of 195 (40%)
page 78 of 195 (40%)
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crop up into and out of the three-and-a-half. The life lived was the great
fact at work, as the Man went about doing good. The hidden life of Nazareth lies open in the Galilean ministry. When you are reading the wonderful works among the needy throngs, you are reading the biography of the Nazareth years, in their outer reach. The life you live is the thing that tells! This is the meaning of the thirty hidden years. The Father said, "My Son shall spend most of His years down there _living_, just living a true, simple Eden life; living with Me in the midst of home and carpenter shop and village." This is what the world needs so much to be taught, how to live. And the teaching must be by living, teaching by action. The message must be lived. If we men might live Jesus! That's what the world needs. At one of the smaller meetings of the Edinburgh Conference, in 1910, a Christian gentleman from India, native of that land, said, "We don't need more Bibles in India." And then to this surprising statement, he added, "We have enough Bibles. If the Christians in India would _live the Bible_, India would be converted." And I thought, that will do for America, and England, and for all the world. _Jesus lived it_. As a man in His decisions and actions, His habits and daily round, He lived the truth. The story is told of a missionary in some part of Africa who had not had much success in his work. He was in the habit of explaining some portion of the New Testament to the people at His house. One day the portion contained the words, "give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn thou not away."[60] The people asked him if this meant what it said. He told them that it did. One of them said he would like to have the table, pointing to it; another asked for a chair, another for the bed, and so on. The missionary was rather startled at such literal |
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