The Secret to the Christian Life (June 1986)

What is the secret to the Christian life? Is there a possibility that we have overlooked the main point? There’s been an awful lot written throughout the ages on the secret to living the Christian life. You could fill a library with the books, but that’s not all. You have also had a lot of teaching. You read some books. And you had a lot of preaching as to what the secret to the Christian life is. Now, I have been intrigued by the different answers to that question, especially in my lifetime. What were you told the secret to the Christian life was? How can you live the Christian life? How can you live the victorious Christian life? And we’ve heard about the exchange life. We’ve heard about the deeper Christian life. We’ve heard about the crucified life. All sorts of different approaches to how to live this wonderful, victorious life, or even how to survive from day to day.

What did you hear? What did you get told? I’m going to tell you what I got told, and let’s see if we can match these two and see if there’s a similarity. I think these are the things most common. By the way, I’ve asked a lot of people this in my day, and I’ve heard a lot of different answers. Some of them have been astonishing. But the basics, I think, are if you’re going to be a Christian and you wish to live the victorious Christian life, successful, survival, whatever you wish to call it, you must pray, read your Bible, and go to church. I would say those are the three big ones. Stop sinning. That’s funny. And then we add some more. Tithe. Witness. And then from that point on, it depends on which group you’re running around with. If you’re charismatic, Pentecostal, or whatever the term is today, speak in tongues, be baptized in the Holy Spirit according to that doctrine, which is to speak in tongues. Or maybe if you belong to the other group, you’d say, ‘Don’t ever speak in tongues. That’s the worst thing that could happen to you.’

Then there are those who branch out from this and do talk about such things as the abiding life, the exchanged life, the crucified life, living by the anointing; sometimes you will hear that. And then sometimes you get into the scary ones: submit to the elders in your church no matter what they tell you; oh, it gets really spooky from there. Some of the things that I have been told about what to do to live the Christian life I don’t think I’d even want to go into them, but most of those become very legalistic, such as don’t dress a certain way, do dress a certain way, talk a certain way, don’t talk a certain way, and long, long, long lines of dos and don’ts. I’m going to tell you my favorite story about dos and don’ts.

There was this, this is a true story, by the way, it happened in my own hometown. There was this preacher who preached aggressively against high heels. And so all the ladies in the church definitely wanted to give up high heels because they didn’t really want to sin. So they went to the pastor’s wife, and they said, ‘How low should a heel be before it is no longer sin?’ So she went to her husband. She put on a series of different shoes. They got lower and lower, and they got down with a tape measure and finally came up with a measurement: that if a heel was no taller than such and such, then it would be all right. It would not be sin. Higher than that was sin. You could measure sin by the amount of a heel on the backside of a shoe. If you belong to a group of Christians like that, I have a suggestion. Leave. That’s dangerous territory. It was for freedom we were set free.

Anyway, what is the secret to the Christian life? Is the secret to the Christian life contained in these different elements: pray, read your Bible, and so on and so forth? I would like to now shoot some sacred cows; I’m going to take everything on that list and bring it into question. We’ll start with prayer. Prayer. Just what do you mean by prayer? Do I mean my concept of prayer today, and do I take that and interpose that on what the first-century Christians did? Surely to goodness, they did not pray the way most of us pray. Most Christians, if they are honest, will tell you that their prayer life is very unsuccessful, but they also feel very, very guilty because they’ve always been told that prayer is the secret to the Christian life. Now, I’m going to tell you what you and I both know, but I would like to ask you to admit it. This is what happens when you pray.

You come to the Lord, let’s say early in the morning, because you were told to come early in the morning, and you start to pray, and the first thing that happens is that after a minute or two, you’ve run out of anything to say. Secondly, having nothing more to say, you try to listen, don’t hear a thing, and then the third thing that happens is your mind begins to wander. Now confess it, it’s true, and then finally the ultimate abomination, the final and ultimate desecration of your prayer life: you fall sound asleep. Now, is that not true? And I’d add one more. When you first started praying, you had this awful sense of unworthiness. Now that’s most Christians’ experience in prayer, and I know there are exceptions, but I’m not talking to the exceptions. I’m not an exceptional Christian; I’m the ordinary Christian. Listen to anything I say here today, there is some fella in this world who has made all of these successful in his life. He prays every morning and gets great joy out of it. The Bible is never dull to him, and on we go. He is just always witnesses, everything like that. You know what I think about that fellow? I think he ought to be outlawed. He puts all of us under condemnation, but he is the exception.

I am speaking to you, assuming that you’re like me, pretty fragile, pretty frail. At best, the Christian life is a major challenge. Well, let’s talk about Bible study. I do not question for a moment the need for you and me to be in Scripture, and the more the better, especially if it’s life and not legalism. If you’re looking there for food and not for something to bind yourself, or even worse, to put somebody else in bondage. But dear Christian, there is no question in my mind that we must never tie the secret to the Christian life to reading the New Testament. And the reason is very simple. There are too many people in this world who cannot read. I have listened to, I don’t know how many, as many as you have, more than you have perhaps, messages brought about studying the Bible every day. This has become almost cultish to the point that it is virtually a test of fellowship that if you do not do this, you just have every reason to believe that you are not only not a Christian, but worse than most unbelievers, because you profess to be a Christian. History will not back the image of all Christians reading the Bible and thereby becoming very pious, victorious believers. It’s not there.

Throughout human history, the vast majority of the people on this earth could not read. Now, when a person who is really staunchly adamantly, almost viciously demanding that you read the Bible every day, when he hears those statistics, he backs off and says, ‘Yes, but we have the scripture today, and we should use it.’ I agree 100%, but he has just changed his position. His position a moment ago was this: it is an absolute necessity, and without reading your Bible, you cannot be an acceptable believer in the eyes of Almighty God. If that’s true, then every illiterate believer who has ever lived has, in some way, been a second-class Christian. I’d like to go over the simple facts with you. Historical, unmovable facts.

Language, written, evolved in civilization agonizingly slow and extremely complex. And it wasn’t until really about 200 years before the Lord came that Greek began to become a language written, to the point that it could be used, and that it had settled down. Its matrix had been set. And even Hebrew, and scholars will call it New Hebrew, was just becoming something written that could be used in daily commerce. Now, there had been Hebrew for a long, long time, but for it to be in an expression that was not so complex, but could actually be used, was relatively new.

Now, you also face the problem that most of the people who lived in the days of the Lord Jesus and in Jerusalem, and these are historical facts, that area did not know the Hebrew that was read in the synagogue. In the synagogue, there was a ritual that was performed. The scripture was read in old Hebrew, and it was then read, and nobody had the foggiest idea of what was being read. It was like hearing Latin in a Catholic church and you not know Latin. Then it would be read in the Aramaic.

And most of the people were simply illiterate. In the Greek world, illiteracy was running somewhere between 97-99%. It is difficult for us today in a literate world to really comprehend that reading was a skill like being a nuclear physicist would be today. How many astrobiologists are there? How many nuclear physicists are there? How many people who are experts in making of these incredibly small computer parts out on the cutting edge of it? Those men talk to one another in languages you and I cannot comprehend. A skill in the first century was writing. It was something few people had. Memorization was very high in the arts. You were taught by rote what to do and how to do it. You did not have to read, nor did you need to read. Reading was something you hired a person to do. And incredibly, there were people who could read but could not write. And there were people who did writing, but reading what they wrote was not part of their profession. You hired an accountant to write for you. You hired a human being to read a letter that might be sent to you. It was a small skill.