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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadQuiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Power: 12. Five Essentials
TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Power (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 12. Five Essentials
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Five Essentials
If you will stop a while to think into it you will find that a rightly rounded Christian life has five essential characteristics. I mean essential in the same sense in the way light is essential to the eye. The eye's seeing depends wholly on light. If it does not see light, by and by, it cannot see light. The ear that hears no sound loses the power to hear sound. Light is essential to the healthful eye: sound to the ear: air to the lungs: blood to the heart. Just as real are five things essential to a strong healthful Christian life.
The second of these is a heart-love for the old Book of God. Not reading it as a duty—taking a chapter at night because you feel you must. I do not mean that just now. But reading it because you love to; as you would a love letter or a letter from home. Thinking about it as the writer of the one hundred and nineteenth psalm did. Listen to him for a moment in that one psalm, talking about this book: "I delight," "I will delight," "My delight"—in all nine times. "I love," "Oh how I love," "I do love," "Consider how I love," "I love exceedingly," again nine times in all. "I have longed," "My eyes fail," "My soul breaketh," speaking of the intensity of his desire to get alone with the book. "Sweeter than honey," "As great spoil," "As much as all riches," "Better than thousands of gold," "Above gold, yea, above fine gold." And all that packed into less than two leaves. Do you love this Book like that? Would you like to? Wait a moment.
The third essential is right habits of prayer. Living a veritable life of prayer. Making prayer the chief part not alone of your life, but of your service. Having answers to prayer as a constant experience. Being like the young man in a conference in India, who said, "I used to pray three times a day: Now I pray only once a day, and that is all day." Feet busy all the day, hands ceaselessly active, head full of matters of business, but the heart never out of communication with Him. Has prayer become to you like that? Would you have it so? Wait a moment.
The fourth essential is a pure, earnest, unselfish life. Our lives are the strongest part of us—or the weakest. A man knows the least of the influence of his own life. Life is not mere length of time but the daily web of character we unconsciously weave. Our thoughts, imaginations, purposes, motives, love, will, are the under threads; our words, tone of voice, looks, acts, habits are the upper threads; and the passing moment is the shuttle, swiftly, ceaselessly, relentlessly, weaving those threads into a web, and that web is life. It is woven, not by our wishing or willing, but irresistibly, unavoidably, woven by what we are, moment by moment, hour after hour. What is your life weaving out? Is it attractive because of the power in it of His presence? Would you have it so? Would you know the secret of a life marked by the strange beauty of humility, and fragrant with the odor of His presence? Wait just a moment.
The fifth essential is a passion for winning others one by one to the Lord Jesus. A passion, I say. I may use no weaker word than that. A passion burning with the steady flame of anthracite. A passion for winning; not driving, nor dragging, but drawing men. I am not talking about preachers just now as preachers, but about every one of us. Do you know the peculiar delight there is in winning the fellow by your side, the girl in your social circle, to Jesus Christ! No? Ah, you have missed half your life! Would you have such an intense passion as that, thrilling your heart, and inspiring your life, and know how to do it skillfully and tactfully?
Let me tell you with my heart that the secret not only of this, but of all four of these essentials I have named, lies in the first one which I have not yet named, and grows out of it. Given the first, the others will follow as day follows the rising sun.
What is the first great essential? It is this—the unrestrained, unhindered, controlling presence in the heart of the Holy Spirit. It is allowing Jesus' other Self, the Holy Spirit, to take full possession and maintain a loving but absolute monopoly of all your powers.