Living Victoriously
With step triumphant and a heart of cheer;
Who fights the daily battle without fear;
Sees his hopes fail, yet keeps unfaltering trust
That God is God; that, somehow, true and just,
His plans work out for mortals; not a tear
Is shed when fortune, which the world holds dear,
Falls from his grasp. Better, with love, a crust,
Than living in dishonor; envies not
Nor loses faith in man; but does his best,
Nor even murmurs at his humbler lot;
But with a smile and words of hope, gives zest
To every toiler. He alone is great
Who, by a life heroic, conquers fate.
SARAH K. BOLTON.
WE ought not to allow ourselves to be beaten in living. It is the privilege and duty of every believer in Christ to live victoriously. No man can ever reach noble character without sore cost in pain and sacrifice. All that is beautiful and worthy in life must be won in struggle.
The crowns are not put upon men’s heads through the caprice or favoritism of any king; they are the reward of victorious achievement. We can make life easy, in a way, if we will, by shirking its battles, by refusing to grapple with its antagonisms; but in this way we never can make anything beautiful and worthy of our life. We may keep alongshore with our craft, never pushing out into deep waters; but then we shall never discover new worlds, nor learn the secret of the sea. We may spare ourselves costly service and great sacrifice, by saving our own life from hardships, risks, and waste, but we shall miss the blessing which can come only through the losing of self. “No cross, no crown” is the law of spiritual attainment.
“He who hath never a conflict hath never a victor’s
palm,
And only the toilers know the sweetness of rest and calm.”
Therefore God really honors us when he sets us in places where we must struggle. He is then giving us an opportunity to win the best honors and the richest blessings. Yet he never makes life so hard for us, in any circumstances, that we cannot live victoriously through the help which he is ready to give.
This lesson applies to temptation. Not one of us can miss temptation, but we need never fail nor fall in it. Never yet was a child of God in any terrible conflict with the Evil One in which it was not possible for him to overcome. There is a wonderful word in one of St. Paul’s Epistles which we should write in letters of gold on our chamber walls: “There hath no temptation taken you but such as man can bear: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it.”
These are sublime assurances. No one need ever say, “I cannot endure this temptation, and must yield and fall.” This is never true. We need never fail. Christ met the sorest temptations, but he was always victorious; and now this tried and all-conquering Christ is by our side as we meet and endure our temptations, and we cannot fail when he is with us. It is possible, too, for us so to meet temptations as to change them into blessings. A conquered sin becomes a new strength in our life. We are stronger because we have conquered; we are braver and more confident for the next battle. We are stronger because every conquest gives us a new spirit of life; the strength we have defeated becomes now part of our own power.
Victoriousness in speech is among the hardest of life’s conquests. The words of St. James are true to common experience, when he says that the tongue is harder to tame than any kind of beasts or birds or creeping things or things in the sea; indeed, that no man can tame it. Yet he does not say that we need not try to tame our tongue. On the other hand he counsels us to be slow to speak and slow to wrath. A Christian ought to learn to control his speech. The capacity for harm in angry words is appalling. No prayer should be oftener on our lips than that in the old psalm: —
“Set a watch, O Lord, before ray mouth; Keep the door of my lips.”
The hasty word of an uncontrolled moment may leave sore wounding and pain in a gentle heart, may mar a sweet friendship, may set an innocent life on a career of evil. Then the hurt in him who speaks ungoverned words is scarcely less sore. The pain that quickly follows their utterance is terrible penalty for the sin. There is ofttimes a cost, too, in results, which is incalculable. Lives have been shadowed, down to their close, by words which fell in a single flash from unlocked lips. Moses was not the only man who has been shut out of a land of promise by reason of one unadvised word. It is better to suffer wrong in silence than to run the risk of speaking in the excitement of anger.
One writes: “A single word spoken under the influence of passion, or rashly and inconsiderately spoken, may prove a source of abiding pain and regret; but the suffering of an act of injustice, of wrong, or of unkindness, in a spirit of meekness and forbearance, never renders us unhappy. The remembrance of a sinful or even a hasty word is not infrequently the cause of very deep mortification. The reflection that our words betrayed a weakness, if not a lack of moral and spiritual balance, humiliates us. It is a wound to our self-respect, and the consciousness that the regret is now unavailing adds a sting to the pain. But in the feeling that in our exercise of the meekness and forbearance inspired by the love of Christ we went further than we were bound to go, is not often a cause of distress. In a calm review of the act we do not feel that we wronged ourselves by making too large a sacrifice, or that our failure to resent the injury and to attempt to retaliate was a mistake. Reason and conscience approve the course, and it is a source of satis faction and comfort.”
The lesson applies also to whatever in our environment makes life hard. Sometimes we find ourselves in places and conditions of living in which it seems impossible for us to grow into strength and beauty of character. This is true of many young people in the circumstances in which they are born, and in which they must grow up. They find about them the limitations of poverty. They cannot get the education they seem to need to fit them for anything better than the most ordinary career. They envy other young people who have so much better opportunities. But these limitations, which seem to make fine attainments impossible, ofttimes prove the very blessings through which nobleness is reached. Early hardship is the best school for training men. Not many of those who have risen to the best and truest success began in easy places.
Sometimes it is poor health that appears to make it impossible for one to live grandly, at least to do much in the world. But this is not an insuperable barrier. Many people who have been invalids all their life have grown into rare sweetness of spirit, and have lived in the world in a way to make it better, and to leave influences of blessing behind them when they went away. Many a “shut in” has made a narrow room and a chamber of pain the centre of a heavenly life, whose benedictions have gone far and wide. At least, there is no condition of health in which one cannot live victoriously in one’s spirit, if not physically. One can be brave, cheerful, accepting one’s limitations, praising God in sickness and in pain, sure always that what God wills is best, and that he who sings his little song of joy and praise in his prison is pleasing God and blessing the world.
“Let sunshine and gladness illumine thy face; ‘Twill help some one else to ‘keep sweet.’ Do troubles oppress thee? Let God be thy stay; ‘Tis easy to sigh, but ’tis better to pray; Thy sunshine will come in his own blessed way: So trustingly try to ’ keep sweet.’”
Sometimes that which makes life hard is in one’s own nature. Passions are strong; temper seems uncontrollable; the affections are imbittered so that meekness and gentleness appear to be impossible; or the disposition is soured so that one finds it hard to be loving and sweet. The fault may be in one’s early training, or the unhappy temper may be an inheritance. None of us come into the world saints, and ofttimes there are tendencies in one’s childhood home, or in one’s early years.
which give the wrong bias to the life. A few years later one awakes to find the nature misshapen, distorted, with the unlovely elements prominent and dominant.
Must one necessarily go through life to the end thus marred, with disposition spoiled, quick tempered, with appetites and passions uncontrollable? Not at all. In all these things we may be “more than conquerors through Him that loved us.” The grace of Christ can take the most unlovely life and change it into beauty. Saintliness is impossible to none, where the grace of God is allowed to work freely and thoroughly.
Many persons find in their own homes the greatest obstacle in the way of their becoming beautiful and gentle in life. Home ought to be the best place in the world in which to grow into Christlikeness. There all the influences should be inspiring and helpful. It ought to be easy to be sweet in home’s sacredness. Every thing good ought there to find encouragement and stimulus. All home training should be towards “whatsoever things are lovely.” Home should be life’s best school. What the conservatory is to the little plant or flower that finds warmth, good soil, and gentle culture there, growing into sweet loveliness, home should be to the young life that is born into it, and grows up within its doors. But not all home-life is ideal. Not in all homes is it easy to live sweetly and beautifully. Sometimes the atmosphere is unfriendly, cold, cheerless, chilling. It is hard to keep the heart gentle and kindly in the bitterness that creeps into home-life.
But no matter how sadly a home may fail in its love and helpfulness, how much there may be in it of sharpness and bitterness, it is the mission of a Christian always to be sweet, to seek to overcome the hardness, to live victoriously. This is possible, too, through the help of Christ.
These are only illustrations of this lesson. Many of us find ourselves in uncongenial conditions in which we must stay, at least for the time. But, whatever the circumstances, we may live Christianly. God will never allow us to be put in any place in which, through the help of his grace, we cannot be good and beautiful Christians. Limitations, if we rightly use them, only help to make our life more earnest, more beautiful. A writer calls attention to the fact that every musical string is musical because it is tied at both ends, and must vibrate in limited measure of distance. Cut the string, and let it fly loose, and it no more gives out musical notes. Its musicalness depends upon its limitations. So it is with many human lives; they become capable of giving out sweet notes only when they are compelled to move in restraint. The very hardness in their condition is that which brings out the best qualities in them, and produces the finest results in character and achievement.
This lesson applies also to experiences of misfortune, adversity, sorrow. Paul speaks of himself in one place as “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” His life could not be crushed, his joy could not be quenched, his songs could not be hushed. We must all meet trial in some form, but one need never be overwhelmed by it. Yet it is very important that we should learn to pass through our sorrow as Christians. Do we meet it victoriously? We cannot help weeping; Jesus wept, and tears are sacred when love for our friends and love for Christ mingle in them. But our tears must not be rebellious. “Thy will be done” must breathe through all our sob bings and cries, like the melody of a sweet song in a dark night of storm.
“Then sorrow whispered gently: ‘Take This burden up. Be not afraid; An hour is short. Thou scarce wilt wake To consciousness that I have laid My hand upon thee, when the hour Shall all have passed; and gladder then For the brief pain’s uplifting power, Thou shall but pity griefless men.’”
Sorrow hurts some lives. It imbitters them. It leaves them broken, disheartened, not caring more for life. But this is not the Christian way. We should accept sorrow, however it may come to us, as bringing with it a fragment of God’s sweet will for us, as bringing also some new revealing of divine love. We should meet it quietly, reverently, careful not to miss the blessing it brings to us. Then we should rise up again at once and go on with our work and duty. Some hands are left hanging down after grief has come. “I do not care any more for life,” men are sometimes heard to say. “I have no interest in my business, since my wife died. I want to give it all up.” But that is not victorious living. Sorrow absolves us from no duty, from no responsibility. Our work is not finished because our friend’s work is done. God’s plan for our life goes on, though for the life dearest to us it has ended. We dare not lose even a day for sorrow. We rise the morning after the funeral and find the old tasks waiting for us, clam oring for our coming, and must go forth at once to take them up. “Let us dry our tears and go on,” wrote a Christian man to his friend, after a sore bereavement. That is the true spirit.
We ought to live more earnestly than ever after grief has touched our heart. Our life has been enriched by the experience. Tears leave the soil of the heart more fertile. The experience of sorrow teaches us many lessons. We are wiser afterward, more thoughtful, better fitted to be guide and helper to others, prepared especially to be comforters of those whom, after our own experience, we find passing through affliction. Instead, therefore, of letting our hands hang down in despairing weakness, we should rise up quickly, fresh from our new anointing, and hasten on to the duty that waits for us.
Thus all Christian life should be victorious. We should never allow ourselves to be defeated in any experience that may come to us. With Christ to help us, we need never fail, but may ever be more than conquerors. Even the things that seem to be failures and defeats in our lives, through the love and grace of Christ — if only we are faithful — will prove in the end to be successes and victories. Many a good man fails in a worldly sense, and yet in the moral and spirit ual realm is more than conqueror. There is no real failure but in sin. Faithfulness to Christ is victory, even when all is lost.
“All things fulfil their purpose, low or high: There is no failure; death can never mar The least or greatest of the things that are;
Until our work is done, it matters not how nigh May be the night time that is never far, That long ere sunset lights the evening star,
That throws its still shadow up into the sky.
To-day shall end what yesterday begun;
What we are planning others yet may build;
The leaves may wither, but the tree shall grow; And though, at last, we leave our work undone,
Our life will not the less be all fulfilled;
Our work will all be even finished so.”