Craig T. Owens

This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.

Bridging The Unbridgeable Gap

     When you read a book about life, life looks simple; but when you actually face the facts of life you find they do not come into the simple lines laid down in a book. An idea is like a searchlight, it lights up what it does and no more, while daylight reveals a hundred and one facts the searchlight had not taken into account. … To treat the Sermon on the Mount merely as an ideal is misleading. It is not an ideal, it is a statement of the working out of Jesus Christ’s disposition in actuality in the life of any man. … 

     No man is so labored as the man who has ideals which he cannot carry out. Jesus Christ says to such, “Come unto Me…and I will give you rest,” i.e., “I will ‘stay’ you, put something into you which will make the ideal and the actual one.” Without Jesus Christ there is an unbridgeable gap between the ideal and the actual; the only way out is a personal relationship to Him. The salvation of God not only saves a man from hell, but alters his actual life.

From Studies In The Sermon On The Mount

The words Jesus taught are more real than any other teaching anyplace. In another book, Chambers notes, “Jesus Christ’s view is that the Christian religion has been tried and abandoned, but never been tried and failed.” How true! 

But we cannot try to live out Christ’s words in our own strength. Trying to live this way will result in frustration and abandonment. Instead, Jesus reminds us that we are to be yoked to Him. We are to be as connected to Him as a branch is to its vine. The branch doesn’t beg and plead for the life-giving sap to flow into it, but simply as it abides it cannot help but receive all of the nutrients the vine supplies. 

So too with us as Christians. Don’t try to do Christian things—just abide in Jesus and you cannot help but have a new outlook, a new strength, and new fruit of the Spirit blossoming from your life!