W. Ian Thomas: The Adventurous Life
Paraphrased and expanded by Dan Trygg from They Found The Secret, by V. Raymond Edman.
"Then, one night in November, that year, just at midnight, in my room at home, I got down on my knees before God, and I just wept in sheer despair. I said, 'Oh, God, I know that I am saved. I love Jesus Christ. I am perfectly convinced that I am converted. With all my heart I have wanted to serve You. I have tried to my uttermost and I am a hopeless failure! So far as doing anything more, I am finished. I am not going to be a missionary. It is useless for me to continue like this.' That night things happened.
"I can honestly say that I had never once heard from the lips of men the message that came to me then. I never had read it in print; but God, that night, simply focused upon me the Bible message of "Christ Who is our Life". This was the moment He had been waiting for; seven weary years He had watched me running round and round in the wilderness! He had been waiting for the time when at last I would fall down in hopeless despair. I heard His voice: 'To me to live is Christ. ... I am the way, the truth, and the life. ...If, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life... When Christ who is our life shall appear, then shall we appear with Him in glory.' Life! New Life! To me to live is Christ!
"It just came from every area of God's Word, ...and very kindly and very lovingly the Lord seemed to make it plain to me that night, through my tears of bitterness: 'You see, for seven years, with utmost sincerity, you have been trying to live for Me, on My behalf, the life that I have been waiting for seven years to live through you. I have been there the whole time. All the things you have been pleading for, all the things for which you have been asking, have been yours since the day seven years ago, at your request and invitation, I came into your heart at that Crusader boys' camp. But, you see, although you have given mental consent to the truth that I have been in your heart, "and have accepted it as a theory", you have lived totally ignoring the fact. You have been busy trying to do for Me all that only I can do through you. Now supposing I am your life, and you begin to accept it as a fact, then I am your strength! You have been pleading and begging for that for seven years. I am your victory, in every area of your life, if you want it! I am the One to whom it is perfectly natural to go out and win souls; and I know precisely where to go to find them. Why don't you begin to depend on Me, and say 'Thank You.'"
That night, all in the space of an hour, Ian Thomas discovered the secret of the adventurous life. He said: "With nothing to support the theory, and without the testimony of any other known Christian to the facts, I simply said to the Lord Jesus Christ that night, 'Well, it is that, or nothing! If this is true, then I am going to thank You for it in sheer cold-blooded faith, "with no evidence to support it", and nothing but a history of failure behind me! I am going to thank You that if You are my life, and this is true, then You are my victory, You are my strength, You are my power, You are my future! You are the One Who is going to go out now, clothed with me, to do all that I so hopelessly have been trying to do in the past seven years!' Then I went to sleep!
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What do you think about Christ Who is our Life?