INTO CHRIST AND OUT OF SELF

I am enjoying a book by an old author—Romaine’s Life of Faith, It is just the whole truth of the life of faith as we have apprehended it stated in the most forcible and beautiful way. I have never read anything that strengthened my faith so much. It does not turn your attention inward to yourselves at all, but all the time out and away to Christ. One favorite expression is to “live out of ourselves and in Christ;” it conveys a world of truth. I am learning the preciousness of Christ by being made to feel my utter need of Him more and more daily. I am so weak, and so ignorant, and so full of sin that nothing but Christ will do for me; and I must have Him every moment, or I am undone. There is a text which says “Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations, knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire wanting nothing.” I take great comfort in this, for I am indeed surrounded by “divers temptations” and often sigh for deliverance from them. But if it is part of the refining work, I can try to endure, and may end perhaps in counting it all joy. I believe God is teaching me by means of them, lessons concerning the fullness of Christ that I could learn in no other way. Oh! to be lost & swallowed up in Him! I do not suppose others have such a monstrous self to get rid of as I have, so that I need more discipline. But the Lord Jesus is a glorious Saviour, His salvation is a full and complete salvation, this I know, and in this I rest & triumph!. —To a Friend, 1863 Hannah Whitall Smith and Melvin Easterday Dieter, The Christian’s Secret of a Holy Life: The Unpublished Personal Writings of Hannah Whitall Smith (Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997).