The Life of Faith 489
duties connected with that position. We revolt because in those duties
we do not find the pleasure we seek. But our life is not for pleasure;
why do we therefore look for it again? The path of feeling bids us
neglect our duty; the path of faith calls us not to forsake our duty to
friends or foes. If we are united with God in every detail of living,
we shall know what are our tasks and how we should properly fulfill
them,
In the Work of GodTo deny the life of emotion and live by faith completely is one of
the basic requirements for serving God. An emotional believer is
useless in God’s hand. He who walks by feeling knows how to enjoy
pleasure but not how to work for God. He has not yet attained the
status of a worker, since he lives for himself and not for God. Living
for the Lord is the prerequisite to working for Him.
A Christian must realize the way of faith before he can be a useful
instrument to God and actually perform His work. Otherwise his aim
in life is pleasure. He works for the sake of feeling and for that
reason he will stop working. His heart is brimming with self-love. If
he is placed by the Lord in a field of labor filled with physical and
emotional suffering he begins to pity himself and finally gives up.
But even as the work of the Lord Jesus was that of the cross, exactly
so is the work of a Christian to be. What pleasure is there in such
work? Except Christians utterly commit their emotion and their heart
of self-love to death, God can hardly find any real workers.
Today the Lord needs men to be His followers who shall trail Him
to the end. Too many saints labor for the Lord when the task is
prosperous, is suited to their interest, or does not imperil their
feeling; but how quickly they retreat should the cross come upon
them and require them to die and give them no help except to lay
hold of God by faith. We know that if a work is veritably
accomplished by God there cannot but be results. Yet supposing one