| The Glory of the Common Life |
Chapter 14 |
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Look at Christ’s own life. We know how narrow it was in its early conditions. He was brought up in peasant village, without opportunities for education, for social improvement, for training for life. When we think of the bare circumstances in which Jesus grew up, we wonder how his life developed into such beauty, such nobleness, such marvelous strength.
The secret was in himself. The grace of God was in him. At the end he said, “I have overcome the world.” He always lived victoriously. His earthly circumstances were narrow, but no narrowness from without could cramp or dwarf or stunt his glorious spirit. The narrowness never entered his soul! His spirit was free in the hardest days of his earthly life as it was in heaven’s glory before he came to the earth. He found in the Nazareth home, with all its limitations, room enough in which to grow into the most glorious manhood the world have ever known. We need not say that it was the divine within him that enabled him to triumph over hindrances and disregard limitations. He met human life just as we all must meet it. Temptation and struggle were as real to him as they are to us. He showed us how we may overcome the world.
Whatever our conditions may be, however bare, hard, and invincible they may seem to be, Christ can enable us to live in them just as he lived in his barer, harder conditions, and to come out at length into a wide place. We are not clay, dust. We have in us an immortal life which ought to be unconquerable. We should laugh at our limited conditions; they cannot bind or limit us. Some one, or perhaps it was a bird or a squirrel, dropped an acorn in the crevice of a great rock. It sank down and was imprisoned in the heart of the stone. But moisture from heaven’s clouds reached it, and it grew. It must die in its dark prison, you would have said. No; it grew and burst the mighty rock asunder and became a great oak tree. So we should grow in the severest conditions, and then we shall come out into a wide place.
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