“Will you kneel down and just tell the Lord that you are robbing him, and that you intend to keep on robbing him?”
She shrank from such a thought, and she kneeled down and told her Lord that she would yield that one thing she was holding back, and that there was nothing that she was not willing to do that he wanted.
She arose with a radiant face, and as the days went on it developed that God did not want her to do the thing she was shrinking back from doing. A Christian may be kept out of victory because he says he would not be willing to go to the mission field, or send his sons to the mission field. God may not want him to go, but he can never have Victory as long as there is an unwillingness to do what God may want him to do. For this is doubting God and his love.
More Needed Than Surrender
But there are multitudes of Christians who are truly surrendered, holding nothing back, who do not have Victory. For the surrendered life is not necessarily the Victorious Life. Surrender is our part. The supernatural work of Victory is God’s part. God is doing his part as soon as we yield ourselves, and we get the benefit of it when we believe that fact. This is Victory by faith. “Faith does nothing. Faith believes that God is doing it all.” Faith is just believing the word of God. Those marvelous promises, or rather “facts” of God’s Grace which have been quoted above can only be received by the Christian who is holding nothing back from God. Then all the rest is God’s work.
Is he faithful? We have surrendered. Is our part then to believe that God will give us Victory? No, that is not faith. “Victory’s final secret,” as Mr. Trumbull has put it, is to believe that Christ is doing his part, that his Grace is sufficient, that we are free from the law of sin, that we are under Grace and not under law and that therefore sin is not having dominion over us, that he is meeting all our needs, but we are walking in the Spirit. This is “letting God.”
Will you not “let go, and let God?” Now?
If you do, you can say with Paul, not only as a truth of your position in Christ, but as the blessed truth of your experience: “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20).
What It Is Not
The Victorious Life is not a life free from temptation, but a life of victory over temptation. First Corinthians 10:13, with its “there is no temptation” is an absolute guarantee from God that victory over all temptations is possible; for he himself provides the way of escape. Jesus,—in his resurrection Life,—is the Way.