Solomon's Porch: The Joy of Life

We gain our point of distress or of joy 

• by the way we use or misuse our twenty-four hours.

If we make our life a muddle, 

• it is to a large extent because 
• we have not discerned the great underlying relationship to God.

There is always a point where I have the power to choose. 

• I have no power to choose whether or not I will take the consequences of my choice; 
• no power to say whether or not I will be born; 
• no power to choose my “cage”; 
• but within the cage I have power 
• to choose which perch I will sit on.

The most painful and most crushing thing to a man or woman is unrequited love. 

• In summing up the attitude of men to Himself, 
• God says that that is the way men treat Him, 
• they “un-requite” His love. 
• To most of us it is a matter of moonshine
•  whether Jesus Christ lived or died or did anything at all; 
• God has to “recommend” His love to us (see Romans 5:8). 

It is only when we come to our wits’ ends, 

• or reap a distress, 
• or feel the first twinge of damnation 
• and are knocked out of our complacent mental agility over things, 
• that we recognize the love of God.

Not one of these “times” are God’s times, they are our times. 

• For example, to call war either diabolical or Divine is nonsense; 
• war is human. 
• War is a conflict of wills, 
• not something that can be solved by law or philosophy. 

If you take what I want, you may talk till all’s blue,

• either I will hit you or you’ll hit me. 
• In the time between birth and death this conflict of wills will go on 
• until men by their relationship to God 
• receive the disposition of the Son of God, which is holiness.

Unless a man relates his disposition to God in between birth and death, 

• he will reap a heritage of distress for himself 
• and for those who come after him. 
• The man who is banked on a real relationship to a personal God 
• will reap not the distress that works death, but the joy of life.

Adapted Excerpt From

Shade of His Hand

Oswald Chambers