Christian Living by W. E. HANCOCK

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 27, 1916

Christian Living

By W. E. HANCOCK

Christian Experience — No. 3

Christian Living

W. E. HANCOCK

A DEEP Christian experience involves a right relation between personal piety and Christian activity. If this relation is constantly sustained in the individual, his living becomes a forceful element for good in the world of service. To develop one at the expense of the other means a crippled life. This simple and evident fact, so clearly taught and implied with great force throughout the whole history of God’s dealings with his people, has been often forgotten.

In the early days of the church, after the time of the apostles, many of the most pious and faithful felt themselves being swallowed up by the increasing worldliness of the church and the terrible wickedness of the world. There sprang up within the church itself a reformatory movement which took the form at first of celibacy, and later of monasticism. This movement attained great proportions, did much good, and aimed at a true reform of the Christian church; but its power for good was vitiated, and its high aims were perverted by a wrong emphasis on the truth of personal piety. Men and women were taught to flee from the world of human beings to dwell in mountains, in caves, in wilderness places, or in monasteries. The ideal life was reached in a personal piety that man could attain only by fleeing from the world of evil to live alone.

By this movement a great truth was emphasized to the point of exaggeration. The Lord requires personal piety, and it must become the primary experience of every truly Christian life; but any one who attempts to be a Christian by stopping up all the channels of communication between himself and a sinful world, makes of his life a spiritual Dead Sea. The place for one to be a Christian is in the world of evil. We must let the light shine, and not hide it under a bushel. A Christian ought to be a channel of influence between God and lost mankind.

This important truth was forgotten back there by many of the best men of the time. It was not fully realized

that Christian being necessarily implied Christian doing for and among men and women. The result was the stifling of the regenerating forces of the church, and this in its turn may be considered alone the principal cause of the period of the Dark Ages which followed.

This earnest effort to do a great service for the church failed and became perverted, because, in its attempts to do good, it stopped up, worldward, the channels of communication between God and the world. The Christian believers who compose the church of God form the great connecting link between God’s saving power and lost humanity. That power is Christ residing in and operating through the believer. The believer is both the receptacle and the channel of communication. The receptacle must be always kept open heavenward for the continuous inflowing of soul-saving power; but it is equally important that the outflowing channel, worldward, be unobstructed, if his life is to be a saving force among his fellow men. An obstruction from either side is fatal to a full Christian experience.

In other times the church made the mistake of allowing an obstruction in the channel worldward; in these times of great missionary endeavor and of church activities, we are in great danger of allowing an interruption in the communication Godward. This mistake, if allowed, will be just as fatal to all our efforts toward evangelizing the world in our day as the opposite mistake was to the accomplishment of the church’s high aims in other times. This grave danger which threatens the missionary forces of the church of this time, was forcibly expressed in a statement by Dr. John R. Mott, in the Christian Advocate:—

“An alarming weakness among Christians is that we are producing Christian activities faster than we are producing Christian experience and Christian faith; that the discipline of our souls and the deepening of our acquaintance with God are not proving sufficiently thorough to enable us to meet the unprecedented expansion of opportunity and responsibility of our generation.”

To be always receiving without giving out stagnates Christian life and paralyzes missionary activities; but constant activity without a continuous inflowing of power from above is sure to result in drying up the church’s spiritual forces. Without meeting these essential conditions in our personal experience as Christians, all our Christian activities and our great missionary enterprises will fail to meet the needs and duties of our times.

World-wide opportunities, and urgent needs, and compelling duties press themselves upon the church of God in this generation with such an unparalleled persistence that they stagger us and all but overwhelm us. No one senses this situation more than the missionary who stands on the border of an unwarned heathen world, and no one more than he realizes how completely helpless he is to seize his opportunities and meet the demands resting upon him without a thorough Christian experience and a deep, abiding faith in God. This is an experience which, however, must be attained by every Christian believer; it is not one which will suffice for ministers and missionaries any more than their efforts alone suffice for the work that is to be done.

There is no people of whom this is truer than of Seventh-day Adventists. Surely none more than we need a deepening of experience with God in order to finish the work set before us. No other missionary body, single-handed, as far as human help goes, undertakes so great a missionary enterprise, or teaches a system of Bible truths so extensive. Our missionary aim is, “The message to all the world in this generation,” and the message itself necessitates a complete revolution of the customary habits of living. It ought to be accompanied by a deep and thorough inward experience on the part of every one who accepts it.

To fulfil our aim and mission, to make our activities and enterprises effective, this is the experience that we need as a people, individually and collectively.