The Ultimate Reality
Like a fiddle with one string, I still write about this reality, which I boldly call Total Truth. My “textbook,” my authority, has always been solely the Bible, and still is–the Bible inwardly illuminated and made the sole key to life by the Holy Spirit; just as Jesus said, “The words I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.”
I call this book YES, I AM because I would not write it if it were not, by great grace, a personally experienced reality to me, even as it is to many others of you. For as Jesus said, “We speak what we do know and testify to what we have seen.”
I sought in my earlier years, as a missionary in the Congo with C.T. Studd, the key to what I call Total Living–complete satisfaction, complete enabling–and the Holy Spirit turned that key in the lock for me in a crisis of faith which became, though often with stumbling steps, my inner knowing of this “mystery” word of Paul’s.
From that time the inner knowing has increased and stabilized through the years, until I could “teach others also” and was better able to define what Paul, Peter, James, and John explain in their letters. This has been the sole heartbeat of my books.
There is a joy unspeakable and full of glory, a peace that passeth understanding, and an all-sufficiency in all things by which we are able to abound unto every good work. Though we are always only the earthen vessels in which “the excellency of the power is of God, and not of us,” there is a reigning in life by Christ, a bearing of the good fruit of the Spirit, an overcoming in all things. There is a self-release from bondage into liberty, an overflowing of the rivers of the Spirit, and a counting and experiencing of temptations and trials as “all joy”
instead of miseries to be avoided or endured. Because all is centered in the one Reality, our Lord Jesus Christ–crucified, risen, ascended, who now lives His life in His body members–we experience life as adventure, zest, thrill, and gaiety at the heart of a desperate seriousness. Immersed in meeting the needs of others, travailing in birth until Christ is formed in them as in us, we are privileged to bear about in our bodies the dying of the Lord Jesus, so that “death works in us, but life in you.”
