p. 5 | Ignoring Our Record

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Feb 21, 1911

Ignoring Our Record

It is not a man’s long record in right-doing, nor any firmly established habit, nor his finely tempered, well-disciplined will, that keeps him from going down before the onslaughts of temptation. There is power and helpfulness in all these things; but there is greater power in sin. Many a man of good record, good habit, and strong will, has collapsed in moral failure in spite of the costly accumulation of character-assets that he had been laying up. Above and beyond these frail and uncertain resources is the only sure Resource, Jesus Christ. For Christ is the only unfailing life-power in the world. And when sin, which is a death-power, attacks us, we are doomed unless we lay hold in confessed helplessness upon the only life-power, Christ, which is sufficient to resist.

There is warning here for those who find themselves relying in some confidence upon the fine record of victory which Christ has already given them. Even tho the record be from Him, it is not in the record that any strength lies, but only in Him. And there is comfort here for those who have no such record, or whose record, hitherto good, has suddenly been blackened and broken in failure. Our record is not our hope; only Christ is our hope. His omnipotence is equally at hand for the man of no record, the man of broken record, or the man of good record; and without conscious and confessed dependence upon Christ for each new minute of life each of these men is doomed. Christ would have us forget both the successes and the failures of yesterday, and live to-day only and wholly in Him.—Sunday School Times.