The Overcoming Life, and Other SermonsMoody, Dwight Lyman
Religion
The Overcoming Life, and Other Sermons
Moody, Dwight Lyman
Evangelistic sermons; Evangelistic work; Sermons, American
Christianity isn't worth a snap of your finger if it doesn't
straighten out your character. I have got tired of all mere gush and
sentiment. If people can't tell when you are telling the truth, there
is something radically wrong, and you had better straighten it out
right away. Now, are you ready to do it? Bring yourself to it whether
you want to or not. Do you find someone who has been offended by
something you have done? Go right to them and tell them you are sorry.
You say you are not to blame. Never mind, go right to them, and tell
them you are sorry. I have had to do it a good many times. An
impulsive man like myself has to do it often, but I sleep all the
sweeter at night when I get things straightened out. Confession never
fails to bring a blessing. I have sometimes had to get off the
platform and go down and ask a man's forgiveness before I could go on
preaching. A Christian man ought to be a gentleman every time; but if
he is not, and he finds he has wounded or hurt someone, he ought to go
and straighten it out at once. You know there are a great many people
who want just Christianity enough to make them respectable. They don't
think about this overcoming life that gets the victory all the time.
They have their blue days and their cross days, and the children say,
"Mother is cross to-day, and you will have to be very careful."
We don't want any of these touchy blue days; these ups and downs. If
we are overcoming, that is the effect our life is going to have on
others, they will have confidence in our Christianity. The reason that
many a man has no power, is that there is some cursed sin covered up.
There will not be a drop of dew until that sin is brought to light.
Get right inside. Then we can go out like giants and conquer the world
if everything is right within.
Paul says that we are to be sound in faith, in patience, and in love.
If a man is unsound in his faith, the clergy take the ecclesiastical
sword and cut him off at once. But he may be ever so unsound in
charity, in patience, and nothing is said about that. We must be sound
in faith, in love, and in patience if we are to be true to God.
How delightful it is to meet a man who can control his temper! It is
said of Wilberforce that a friend once found him in the greatest
agitation, looking for a dispatch he had mislaid, for which one of the
royal family was waiting. Just then, as if to make it still more
trying, a disturbance was heard in the nursery.
"Now," thought the friend, "surely his temper will give way."
The thought had hardly passed through his mind when Wilberforce turned
to him and said:
"What a blessing it is to hear those dear children! Only think what a
relief, among other hurries, to hear their voices and know they are
well."
Covetousness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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