Christian Living

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Larry Lilly's Letter Thursday July 26, 2007

I received a note the other day from a green persimmon sucking critic who suggested that I spend entirely too much time insisting that in this life we can and should have at least a modicum of victory in our life. I insist that with Christ I am tougher than the tough things of life, and I attempt to teach this truth to the people the Lord has placed under my watch care as His under shepherd.

The Bible is abundant with promises along this line. John 10:10 is a good and much used verse that needs to be more emphasized in our day of rampant pessimism.

The Emperor of Southern writers, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature December 10, 1950, William Faulkner said, (I Know, he could have used some truth from John 10:10):

"I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

Prose such as the above makes me glaringly aware of my paucity in the use of the mother tongue.

Faulkner was in large measure responding to the near paralysis caused by fear of nuclear annihilation then gripping the Free World, and thus assured his listeners that men, created in the image of God are made for victory, made to prevail. Jesus Christ our savior prevailed over death, hell and the grave. He also prevailed over the sins that beset us mere humans. And thus, as Christ, we too can and should prevail through His power.

The last phrase in the earlier quote grips me and gives me the courage to believe that Jesus meant it when said, "Because I live ye shall live also" and understand a little of the importance of living the uncalloused life, of feeling, of caring, of sacrificing in name of Christ, of enduring sometimes horrible privation, and letting the compassion of Christ drive me on to shed light along life's path, to care enough to lighten a struggling pilgrim's load, to be a little savior, for that is what the name Christian conveyed to the dark, pagan world in which the term was coined. Christ in miniature is the ideal life for those of us who know Him personally.

We, who name His name, must overcome, must prevail over cold, calloused existing and began truly living out the will of Christ in our life and time.

Larry Lilly Copyright © 2007 Use with credit

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