Bank On Him

True enjoyment is not in what I do... 

• but in my relationships. 
• If a man is true to God, 
• everything between birth and death will work out on the line of joy. 

If I bank on what I do, 

• whether it is good or bad, 
• I am off the track; 
• the one thing that matters is personal relationship.

What, then, am I to do in my ordinary active life? 

• It is not a question of making it easy 
• for those who come after me, 
• but of what I am to do 
• in the spell between birth and death.

According to My Lord’s teaching, 

• I have to base my life on my relationship to God 
• and live according to that relationship 
• with the simple gaiety of a child.

If I apply the Sermon on the Mount... 

• to my ideas of individual and national life
• I shall find how I ignore what My Lord teaches. 
• Wherever Christianity comes straight home to me, 
• I ignore it; 
• when it gets at others, I preach it for all I am worth.

The general history of Christianity is that it has been tried... 

• and abandoned 
• because it is found to be difficult; 
• but wherever it has been tried and honorably gone on with, 
• it has never failed.

When I study Hebrew wisdom... 

• I see how terrifically far we have degenerated away from God 
• and from confidence in God. 
• Nowadays the almighty microbe has blotted God out of His heaven.

When I come to the “soup” I am in just now, 

• the catastrophic earthquake that is blasting the whole globe to bits, 
• all I can do is to put on bandages 
• and borrow opportunist exploitive phrases. 

According to Hebrew Wisdom, 

• the thing to do is to bank on my faith in God, 
• and where my duty lies do it with courage 
• “and damn the consequences.”

When in doubt physically, dare; 

• when in moral doubt, stop; 
• when in spiritual doubt, pray; 
• and when in personal doubt, 
• be guided by my life with God. 

Base all on God, 

• and slowly and surely the actual life will be educated 
• along the particular line of my relationship to Him.

So I made up my mind...

• that there’s nothing better for us men and women 
• than to have a good time in whatever we do—that’s our lot. 
• Who knows if there’s anything else to life?
• Ecclesiastes 3:22 The Message

Adapted Excerpt From

Shade of His Hand

Oswald Chambers