Bondage To Freedom - Part 4
Part 4: My Witnesses
The apostle John states, "That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that you also may have fellowship with us.,' 1 John 1:3. Those who can help their fellow men the best are those who can witness from their own personal experience. They can tell what they know, not a mere theory of what could be. Accordingly, I wish to tell how this worked in my life as an assurance to others that this is a tried and proven path to success. There are many others around the world who have since heard the same presentation and they can tell the same success stories for this message.
Back in 1953, I joined the staff of a missionary college as a teacher. In the following year I was elected a church elder. I loved the church, I became actively absorbed in its activities. I understood and loved the doctrines and preached the message with earnestness and enthusiasm. I believed that I was as sure of salvation as anyone could be and rested day by day in the hope of eternal life.
I enjoyed a good reputation and lived a "good" life, but inwardly I had problems over which I could not gain the victory. I was a teacher of woodwork and it seemed that boys who could not do well in the theoretical subjects were assigned to this class. Some of these boys developed a strong resistance to learning until the classroom became the scene of daily battles between my efforts to teach them and theirs to resist learning.
I found my patience to be tried beyond its limits so that my fury was generated against them. There were times when I could cheerfully have banged their heads against the wall. But there was a constraining influence which kept me from doing that. I had a good reputation to preserve. I did not want the censure of the principal or the board, so I suppressed my rage and kept it under so that it hardly showed on the outside.
If you take a steam boiler and light a vigorous fire beneath it, with the outlets all sealed off, it is true that it will hold for a time. But the pressure will mount and mount. Should the fire be put out for a time the pressure will drop without there being the outburst of an explosion, but as the fire is again heated and maintained the time will come when the boiler will blow. The longer it holds against the mounting pressure, the greater the explosion in the end.
So it was with me. As the pressure of temptation upon me during the week heated my anger day by day, I shut off all the outlets so that the wrath within could not escape. But it was there, nonetheless, so that the time had to come when it would explode. The longer I held out, the worse was the outburst when it finally came. Usually it came during the weekend when I was home. Then my undeserving wife and children were the recipients of the wrath the others had generated.
When all the pressure was spent, I would then feel guilty and remorseful. I would go to the Lord and beg His forgiveness and promise ever so earnestly that I would never do it again. With firm, courageous determination I would return to the classroom, to find the whole procedure repeated. Again, the attitude of the boys would stir my wrath. Again, I would close off all the outlets. Again, there would be the build-up and the explosion. Again, there would be the repentance and the plea for forgiveness. Then again there would be another failure.
I was trying and failing, sinning and repenting, sinning and repenting over and over again. It was a Romans seven experience without a doubt. I could not understand myself and the book of Romans seemed the hardest book in the Bible to understand. I searched for the answers. I listened to other preachers to see what they could say about the matter, but everywhere it was apparent that even the most leading men in the church were experiencing the same frustration as I myself was.
So I settled down to a protective philosophy which rationalized my experience into an experience of the saved. I reasoned that I was earnest and sincere, that I was doing the very best I could and that in the great judgment day the Saviour would say, "This man did his best even though he did live a sinful life upon the earth. So we will forgive him and give him a place in the kingdom."
Then came the day when I met a young man who was really filled with the glow of a new experience in deliverance. There was nothing he desired to speak of more than this. At first his conversation with me seemed like a foreign language for he was talking of an experience and of a life of which I knew nothing.
Then quite suddenly he addressed himself to me in a most direct way. "Do you know what it means to have the victory over every known sin, every day?" he asked.
I laughed back at him at that. "Why," I said to him incredulously, "I have sought for ten solid years for that kind of experience. There is no one who has prayed more earnestly or tried harder than I have to obtain it. I have yet to meet another person who has it. Look, I try my best every day. At the end of the day I plead forgiveness for my sins. I believe that God pardons me, and in the resurrection day God will accept my best as the best possible and I believe I will be saved."
I shall never forget his response. It was not in word but in look. The expression on his face clearly said, "Brother you need help and you need it badly and quickly." That unspoken message made a profound impression on me so that when he asked if he could come and give me a Bible study on the subject I was quick to arrange it.
I suppose that I have never been given a stranger study than that one. He would read to me a Scripture text. Then he would make an effort to comment on it and give an explanation to it, but he seemed to be lost for words and would then turn to the next text to save himself. Thus the study progressed so that it amounted to nothing more than the reading of one Bible text after another. I faithfully copied them all down on a piece of paper.
At the end I argued the arguments of unbelief and then I watched him leave. I am sure that he went as a discouraged man fully persuaded that I was a poor subject upon whom to work with his message of deliverance.
Several days went by during which the power of those Scriptures worked on my mind. There was nothing definite or well defined. It reminded me of the blind man who began to see. "And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking." Mark 8:24.
Four days passed. It was a Wednesday afternoon. I came home for a short while during a work break and sat down with the list of Scriptures. One by one I began to read them again. "Sin shall not have dominion over you;" "But thanks be to God, Which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ;" "Now unto Him who is able to keep you from falling."
As I read each text I did so very thoughtfully and slowly letting the meaning sink into my mind. I know that the Holy Spirit was there to illuminate the Word of Truth. So I progressed down one-third of the texts on the list when there came over me a tremendous conviction. Up until that point I had believed that I could not live without sin. Suddenly the fearful implications of this belief came home to my mind with striking force. I saw that if I believed that I would sin every day, then this was to believe that Satan was stronger than Christ and that sin was stronger than righteousness. The moment I understood this fact, I saw that my life had not been a witness to the power of God but to the power of Satan. What made that witness so much the more telling for Satan was the fact that I held the position and maintained the profession I did.
Now the Spirit of God was really able to work. Suddenly, I saw all in which I had ever trusted as an evidence that I was a child of God swept away from me - my knowledge, my zeal, my position, my love for the truth as I had understood it. All this now meant nothing so far as assurance was concerned. I saw myself as God saw me - hopeless, lost, eternally condemned. There rolled over me the blackness of a terrible despair, the darkness of the awful realization that I would not come up in the resurrection of the just. I have never known a blacker or more terrible moment in my whole life and can understand just how the wicked will feel when they stand around the city of God and know that they are eternally lost.
Somehow, and I do not know how, the Lord gave me the naked honesty to admit that this was all too true. I did not back off and argue that I was a church elder, a college teacher, a man well versed in the Scriptures, a preacher, a man of good reputation and of earnest sacrificing zeal for the cause of truth. I thank the Lord for this and plead with each reader that when your awful moment of truth comes, that you face it and accept it as it is, for, if you stifle the convictions which the Holy Spirit has brought to you, you will close the door against any further work of grace being done for you. That would be eternally disastrous.
The Lord never wounds but to heal. In that self-same moment that I saw myself as the hopelessly-lost sinner and accepted the truth of it, the Lord opened before my eyes the promises as I had never seen them before. They were as if they had been written for me personally. Living faith sprang up in my heart as I possessed the power in the living Word. I dropped by the chair and prayed the new prayer for the first time in my life. "Lord, I see now that the trouble is not what I have done, but it is what I am. This evil life in me is the source of the problem. Like a disease, it is the master of my body so that I cannot do the things which I want to do and know I should do. Here is this old life; take it away and give me Your new life in place of the old. Lord, I thank You for it in Jesus' saving name, Amen."
I arose from my knees. Throughout my entire being was a consciousness that I had been born again. It was not a feeling. I did not feel any different. It was a conviction. It was the witness of faith based upon the word of God. It was the same consciousness which led the nobleman to take a very leisurely return trip home for he knew his son was healed. There was no need to hurry home to see. He knew it already. So I knew it, too, and I knew it then. The visual seeing would come later as it did for the nobleman.
In those days we owned a temperamental Model A Ford. My wife drove it to the city quite often, but she did not always make it back again. There would be times when I would get a phone call from her to the effect that she was in trouble. To leave my work and help her was most inconvenient at times, and before the days of my deliverance, I would get very annoyed about it. In angry and impatient words I would tell her so, too. Through all of these problems, our marriage was headed for destruction. I would feel very badly about my behaviour after it was all over and I would confess it and determine that it would not happen again. I recall the day when the call came again and I reminded myself that I had determined to behave patiently and sweetly. All went well for a few minutes. Then the spanner slipped. I skinned my knuckles. Anger rose and soon there followed the torrent of words. A sad feeling of "What's the use" came over me. I drove home, silent and defeated and unable to understand myself.
When the day of deliverance came, I did not feel any differently inside myself. There were no particular pressures upon me just then. The boiler fire was out, it being vacation time and I just lived happily from day to day. Then there came a Friday afternoon when once again my wife had taken the car out and there came the call of distress from the township some four kilometres distant.
Without giving a second thought as to how I should behave, I got to her as quickly as possible, worked on the car, and when unable to start it, sent her home ahead with a neighbour who happened by. I finally had to have the car towed back. Then I went home to supper. After that we attended an evening service in the chapel, after which we came home to rest for the night.
I was almost asleep. My wife had been lying very quietly beside me as if in thought. I paid little attention to it until suddenly she said to me. "What has happened to you?"
I did not have the least notion as to what she was referring and asked for an explanation.
In reply, she said, "Something has happened to you and I want to know what it is."
Again I told her that I did not know what she was talking about and requested an explanation.
"This afternoon I waited at the car all braced for the usual angry accusations when you arrived. But instead, you simply did what you could and then sent me home. I was glad to get away,
but I told myself that when you got home I would catch it then. But when you arrived, you still said nothing. So I thought, when supper is over then it will come, but again you went on your peaceful, undisturbed way. I finally concluded that you had it well bottled up this time, but when you came home wearily at the end of the meeting and we got to bed, then at last it would come. But it has not, even now. Something has happened to you and I want to know what it is."
It was then that the visible evidence was before me of the great change which had taken place within. I suddenly realized that during the whole performance I had acted out the person I now was, just as previously I had acted out the person I then had been. Whereas before that, my natural reaction was one of impatience and anger, now it was one of peace and patience. The wonder of it all so overwhelmed me that I found myself unable to answer, while in my heart there arose the testimony of my soul, "This is the Lord's doing; it is marvellous in our eyes." Psalms 118:23.
Dear Reader, when you come to that place where you know within yourself this marvellous inner transformation and see the outworking of it in an altogether new and different reaction to the pressures of life, then you will know and understand how I felt at that moment. It was wonderful and blessed, to say the very least indeed.
Many years have passed since then. I am glad they have, for those have been years in which the power of this truth has been tested in the battlegrounds of life. I regret that I cannot testify never to have sinned in that time, but I can rejoice to witness to the precious fact that the message still works exactly as it did back there. When I have sinned it has always been my fault. I have lacked faith, have been careless in maintaining my connection with the power of God, or such like. It has never been the fault of the truth of God.
But life has been so different since those days of defeat. Then, it was a continual repeating of the same struggles against the same sins without ever getting out of the circle of sinning and confessing over the same problem year after year. Now those things have been left behind while the work of victory has moved into new areas as more and more light comes through. The book of Romans is no longer a mystery. It is a delight to read it now for I can understand what Paul is saying.