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    The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life: Personal, Practical, and Powerful--An Invitation to Live Life at Its Most Blessed
    The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life: Personal, Practical, and Powerful--An Invitation to Live Life at Its Most Blessed
    The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life: Personal, Practical, and Powerful--An Invitation to Live Life at Its Most Blessed
    Ebook129 pages2 hours

    The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life: Personal, Practical, and Powerful--An Invitation to Live Life at Its Most Blessed

    By Hannah Whitall Smith

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    About this ebook

    God intends for you to be happy and fulfilled—that’s the encouraging message of the nineteenth-century classic The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life. “Settle down on this one thing,” writes Hannah Whitall Smith, “that Jesus came to save you now, in this life, from the power and dominion of sin, and to make you more than conquerors through His power.” The exciting message of freedom—from the bondage of sin, to the life of Christ—is what has made The Christian’s Secret a favorite for more than a century. Smith’s masterwork is personal, practical, and powerful, and overflowing with substance for thought.

     

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarbour Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9781628363357
    The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life: Personal, Practical, and Powerful--An Invitation to Live Life at Its Most Blessed

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    Reviews for The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life

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    • 5/5
      This book is life-changing.
    • 4/5
      This spells out basic concepts of Christianity that are frequently forgotten/missed/misunderstood in all different Christian denominations. I studied theology, Bible, and Catholic apologetics for six years during school, and somehow the fundamental ideas that Hannah Whitall Smith articulates were completely lost to me. This book is valuable.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Great book and a good perspective on how to apply what God hopes we will gain by having a relationship with Him
    • 5/5
      This book is amazing - it bolstered my faith and inspired me to pursue an even deeper relationship with Jesus Christ.
    • 4/5
      This classic work on God's grace remains relevant to today's reader.

    Book preview

    The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life - Hannah Whitall Smith

    life."

    Part I

    THE LIFE

    1

    IS IT SCRIPTURAL?

    No thoughtful person can question the fact that, for the most part, the Christian life, as it is generally lived, is not entirely a happy life. A keen observer once said, You Christians seem to have a religion that makes you miserable. You are like a man with a headache. He does not want to get rid of his head, but it hurts him to keep it. You cannot expect outsiders to seek very earnestly for anything so uncomfortable. For the first time I saw that Christianity ought to make its possessors, not miserable, but happy. I asked the Lord to show me the secret of a happy Christian life. I will share this secret.

    In moments of illumination, God’s children feel that a life of rest and victory is their birthright.

    Remember the shout of triumph your soul gave when you first met the Lord Jesus and glimpsed His mighty saving power? How easy it seemed to be more than a conqueror through Him who loved you! Under the leadership of a captain who had never been foiled in battle, how could you dream of defeat?

    And yet, for many of you, how different your real experience has been! Your victories have been few and fleeting, your defeats many and disastrous. Christ is believed in, talked about, and served, but He is not known as the soul’s actual and very life, abiding there forever and revealing Himself there continually in His beauty. You have found Jesus as your Savior from the penalty of sin, but you have not found Him as your Savior from sin’s power. You have carefully studied the holy scriptures and have gathered much precious truth from them, which you hoped would feed and nourish your spiritual life. But in spite of it all, your soul is starving and dying within you, and you cry out in secret, again and again, for that bread and water of life that you see promised in the scriptures to all believers.

    Your early visions of triumph have seemed to grow dimmer and dimmer, and you have been forced to settle down to the conviction that the best you can expect from your religion is a life of alternate failure and victory, one hour sinning and the next repenting.

    But is this all? Had the Lord Jesus only this in His mind when He laid down His precious life to deliver you from your difficult and cruel bondage to sin? Was there a hidden reserve in each promise that was meant to deprive it of its complete fulfillment? Can we dream that the Savior, who was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, could possibly be satisfied with such Christian lives as fill the Church today? The Bible tells us that for this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8); and can we imagine for a moment that this is beyond His power and that He finds Himself unable to accomplish the thing He came to earth to do?

    In the very beginning, then, settle on this one thing: that Jesus came to save you, now, in this life, from the power and dominion of sin and to make you more than a conqueror through His power. If you doubt this, search your Bible and collect every announcement or declaration concerning the purposes of His death on the cross. His work is to deliver us from our sins, from our bondage, from our defilement; and not a hint is given anywhere that this deliverance was limited and partial.

    When the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and announced the coming birth of the Savior, he said, You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins (Matthew 1:21).

    When Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit at the birth of his son and prophesied, he declared that God had visited His people in order to fulfill the promise and oath He had made them, that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all the days of our life (Luke 1:74–75). When Peter was preaching in the porch of the temple to the wondering Jews, he said, To you first, God, having raised up his Servant Jesus, sent him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from your iniquities (Acts 3:26).

    When Paul told the Ephesian church the wondrous truth that Christ had so loved them as to give Himself for them, he went on to declare that His purpose in doing this was that he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that he might present her to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she might be holy and without blemish (Ephesians 5:26–27).

    When Paul was seeking to instruct Titus concerning the grace of God, he declared that the object of that grace was to teach us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in the present age (Titus 2:12). He then added the reason—that Christ gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous for good works (Titus 2:14).

    When Peter encouraged the Christians to whom he was writing to walk holy and Christlike, he told them that to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow His steps: ‘who committed no sin, nor was deceit found in His mouth’… who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed (1 Peter 2:21–22, 24).

    In Ephesians when Paul contrasted the walk suitable for a Christian with the walk of an unbeliever, he set before them the truth in Jesus as being this: That you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man, which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness (Ephesians 4:22–24).

    In Romans 6, Paul brought up the fact of our judicial death and resurrection with Christ as an unanswerable argument for our practical deliverance from sin. For a child of God to continue sinning is utterly foreign to the whole spirit and aim of the salvation of Jesus. He says, How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life…. Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away, that we should no longer be slaves of sin (Romans 6:2–4, 6).

    Sometimes we overlook the fact that there are far more references made to a present salvation from sin than a future salvation in heaven.

    Can we for a moment suppose that the holy God, who hates sin in the sinner, is willing to tolerate it in the Christian and that He has even arranged the plan of salvation in such a way as to make it impossible for those who are saved from the guilt of sin to find deliverance from its power?

    The redemption accomplished for us by our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary is a redemption from the power of sin as well as from its guilt. He is able to save to the uttermost all who come to God by Him.

    This isn’t a new doctrine in the Church; however, much of it may have been lost sight of by the present generation of believers. It is the same old story that has filled the daily lives of many saints of God with songs of triumph throughout all ages; and it is now being sounded forth again to the unspeakable joy of weary and burdened souls.

    Do not reject it until you have prayerfully searched the scriptures to see whether these things are indeed so. Ask God to open the eyes of your understanding by His Spirit that you may know what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which he worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places (Ephesians 1:19–20). And when you have begun to have some faint glimpses of this power, learn to look away utterly from your own weakness and trust Him to deliver you.

    2

    GOD’S SIDE AND MAN’S SIDE

    There are two very distinct sides to this subject. I refer of course to God’s side and man’s side; or, in other words, to God’s part in the work of sanctification and man’s part. These are very distinct and even contrasting, but they are not really contradictory, although to a casual observer they may appear so.

    In brief, man’s part is to trust, and God’s part is to work. There is certain work to accomplish. We are delivered from the power of sin and are made perfect in every good work to do the will of God. This real labor is worked in us and on us. Besetting sins are conquered, evil habits are overcome, wrong dispositions and feelings are rooted out, and holy tempers and emotions are birthed. A positive transformation takes place. So at least the Bible teaches.

    Most of us have tried to do it for ourselves at first and have grievously failed. Then we discover that we are unable to do it. But the Lord Jesus Christ has come on purpose to do it, and He will do it for all who put themselves wholly into His hands and trust Him without reserve.

    Plainly the believer can do nothing but trust, while the Lord, in whom he trusts, actually does the work entrusted to Him. Trusting and doing are certainly contrasted things, often indeed contradictory, but are they contradictory in this case? Obviously not, because it is two

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