The Secret
by Norman Grubb

I know no more illuminating truth for our generation than the heights and depths of the ‘mystery’ which Paul said he was commissioned to reveal to the Gentiles—“Christ in you.” An unveiling of the fact that I am inwardly “one’d” with Christ through the blood of His atonement, a realization that it is a fact, not a distant ideal, a bursting through of the suggestions of world and flesh and Devil that there is still a gulf or distance between us; this opens wide the gates for the flood tides of conscious enablement. All power is mine if He is my life; all guidance is mine if His mind indwells mine; all authority is mine if I share His throne as a king and command deliverances according to His instructions to me (Mark 11:22-24).

I ought to fulfil the task given me. God expects me to. I have no excuses for failure. God has not given me the spirit of fear, but of love, power and sanity. We are set in our day and generation to be overcomers, not to sail through calm seas, but to walk on storms, to replace need with supply, to transform aspiration into realization. The language of defeatism, fear, lack, weakness is not to be in our vocabulary. “Let us go up at once and possess it, for we are well able to overcome it. As for these giants, they are bread for us,” we say with sturdy Caleb. We are to act as the men of faith of old; we are to visualize our goal in clear outline; we are to take it for granted that we shall reach it, for have we not both the commission and anointing of God? We are to lay our plans, build our organizations, produce our written and verbal pronouncements, pray our prayers, do our work, not as those who will fail and fall by the way, but as those who will finish the work we have been sent to do, as did our Lord and Saviour.

Our own goal is clear. We have made it plain in these pages, and in the attaining of it we have endeavoured to put these great truths into practice, and have found God’s seal on them beyond our powers of description or words of adequate praise. Inwardly there has been the calm of a life at rest in the family life of our farflung brotherhood; there has been a new grasp and understanding of the principles of open, happy fellowship, freeing us from internal strife to engage the true enemy of souls; outwardly in the battle there has been the conscious enduement which turns the contradiction of sinners, the oppositions of Satan, the stresses of pioneer life or financial need, into the fuel for triumphant faith.

Mistakes there have been. Many things might have been done better. It is of the Lord’s mercy that He uses such as us, and we would always be open to the checks and warnings of the Spirit whether directly or by other members of the Body. Still, as Jack Harrison wrote after C.T. Studd’s death, words with which we closed his life story, “God enabling us, we shall go on!”

The goal is clear before us—the adequate occupation of all those areas in which we already have a footing, the building of churches of Christ in them until the natives themselves can assume full responsibility, and the entry into any other such unevangelized areas not being worked by other missions. By God’s grace we keep that and nothing less ever before us as not only our responsibility but as the task for which we are “well able” in Christ.

My prayer is that through these pages some of you, my readers, as a personal responsibility may also be commissioned to take this preaching of the Gospel to all who have never yet heard it. To others of you God may speak in another way: He may open your eyes to your resources in Christ and may be telling you to see to it that the same kind of works of the Spirit take place in your sphere. To you also comes, as to us, the word of the prophet of old, “The people that do know their God shall be strong and do exploits.”

One fundamental fact remains to be stated. There is a background to the manifestation of the mighty works of God through a human channel. Underlying resurrection is death. Paul to possess all things had nothing; to make many rich was poor; to be powerful and wise had become foolish and weak; to be re-made had been broken. To share the intimate fellowship of a Saviour he went the way of saviourhood, “suffered the loss of all things,” “became conformable to death.” We know and can employ through the Spirit the powers of the world to come in the measure that we have died out to enslavement to the possessions, glories, ways of this world. It is a real death, as prelude to a real new life. The Lord Christ made some strange statements, such as that it costs some an eye or limb to enter the Kingdom, that a disciple must forsake all, must “hate” loved ones, possessions, life. By this He meant that such an one must pass through fires in which the selfish claims of natural loves and the selfish hold on the “good things” of life, not to speak of the bad, must be burnt out to make room for the influx of supernatural grace, vision and resources. Holy and hidden mystery—that through the Cross is power, through the Cross glory, through the Cross joy, through the Cross fruitfulness.

God grant that we may be of this company of the abundant life, with a gaiety that is irrepressible, an attraction that is irresistible (through ourselves to Him), an adventurousness, an optimism and a courage that strike the deep chords of human nature; yet withal with a purity, intensity, meekness and altruism which are not of this world, but are a sweet savour of Christ, both of life unto life and death unto death. These are they who in every generation “turn the world upside down” and make preparation for the glorious day of Christ’s personal appearing. Even so come, Lord Jesus.

–from After C.T. Studd by Norman Grubb