LIVING UNTO GOD by T. E. BOWEN

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 30, 1901

LIVING UNTO GOD

By T. E. BOWEN

T. E. BOWEN

While the Lord loves His children as dearly in the hour of death as at any other time, and counts them His, although sleeping, yet greater emphasis in the Word is put upon our living for God than upon our dying for Him. Among the most precious things God counts our living for Him. He says: “Likewise reckon ye yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

When the temptations of the enemy are being pressed in like a flood, when every fiber of faith is needed to sustain the pressure upon the soul because of contact with sin, then it is that God is glorified in our living for Him. Christian courage and fortitude are needed in living for Christ, and filling up that life of suffering left behind by our Lord. He left us a pattern for living. It would have been easier had it been possible for Jesus to exclaim, “It is finished,” before He spent that terrible night in Gethsemane, that morning of cruel mocking, scourging, and shame. But in all this He was living unto His Heavenly Father.

We count ourselves dead because the law has condemned us as sinners worthy to die, but Christ was not satisfied with this condition of things. He lived in the flesh—sinful flesh at that—that we might not die; He died that we might live. And because of all this, Paul, expressing the truth for all the rest of us who have sinned, wrote: “For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

All this is beautifully expressed in the following prayer by a Chinese disciple of Christ, and although the reader may have seen it before, it is worth rereading and reprinting many times:

“Rev. D. H. Clare, of Waverly, N. Y., recently received a letter from a friend across the sea, in which the following pathetic incident is related:—

“Never shall I forget the impression made by a wonderful prayer offered by a Chinaman at a meeting in Shanghai just before I left for Japan. He was a member of a native church near Tien-tsin, and was going back there with every expectation of death at the hands of the Boxers. He prayed: “O Lord, we rejoice in persecution, as thou hast taught us; and as thou knowest it is harder to live a martyr life than to die a martyr death, grant us grace to offer this small service acceptably when thou shalt call upon us. Should any, like Peter, deny thee in the hour of trial, O Lord, wilt thou turn and look upon him as thou didst upon Peter, and by that look call him into the life of witness with power to which thy disciples of old were called.” This man, with sixty others of his church, has since offered that smaller service.”

Paul wrote: “I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course [living for Christ], I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge [not one like the cruel Nero], shall give me at that day.” 2 Tim. 4: 6–8. It was keeping the faith when men and evil spirits were seeking to destroy it; it was fighting the battles of the Lord under great opposition; it was continuing his course unto the end, that filled the life of this apostle so full of blessing to his fellow men, and brought such great joy to the heart of God.

Shall we not likewise count ourselves indeed dead, actually dead, to sin, that we may be reckoned among those who are “alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord”?