This is an extract from a "provocative pamphlett" by Frank Hunting many years ago.See about Frank Hunting on this blog.
THE
TOUGHEST BATTLE GROUND OF ALL
Most Christians would say that it is hardest to be
Christian at home than anywhere else. We can be nice outside but nasty at home,
we can be gay with others but gloomy at home, we can be courteous to friends
but catty to loved ones, we can save up all our growls for home consumption and
all our laughter for outside consumption. Many of us feel that if we really are
Christian at home then we are Christian. For us it is harder to be Christian at
home than anywhere else.The standard we ought to accept for ourselves at home--and indeed everywhere--is the standard of Jesus. Jesus was absolutely loving, absolutely pure, absolutely unselfish, absolutely honest. Let us make the standard of His life the standard of our lives. We may never get quite there. We may never be able to say at the end of any week or even of any day, "I have been absolutely loving today" or "I have been absolutely unselfish", but we can keep growing towards these standards, and we can increasingly see how far short we are falling--and we can do something about our short comings.
Common faults (are they not sins?) we have are self-sympathy, critical and negative thoughts and words, resentments, all sorts of selfishness, and often assuming or demanding that other people in the home have a right to do certain things for us.
Some people have found that they needed to take the four absolutes and use them to cheek over their lives. If they have been honest and have not dodged they
have been staggered at the numerous ways they are selfish, or dishonest, or unloving. Now it is one thing to discover all the ways one may be impure in thought or word, or dishonest, or unloving, or unselfish; it is another thing to be set free from these things. There is only one way that I know of. It is to take what we are to Jesus.
He breaks the power of cancelled sin. He makes it possible that sin shall not have dominion over us. There is no sin in your life nor mine that Jesus cannot deliver us from. When you and I have temper there, is usually some self, the cause of the temper we will not die to, or there is something we will not call sin and yield to Jesus.
Jesus' formula for getting free from besetting sin is amazingly simple when you are resolute enough and humble enough and honest enough to work it. It is this, "If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin." 1 John 1:7. "If we walk in the light as He is in the light." There is no darkness with God, none whatever. There must be none in us. All darkness in us is sin and all sin produces darkness. There are several things which me can do about the sin in our lives. We can refuse to admit it is sin. People for instance won't admit that their shyness or self-consciousness, or their resentment or their prayerlessness is sin. We excuse our shyness by saying it is our temperament to be shy, failing to see the pride and self lying behind shyness. We excuse things like our prayerlessness by saying we are too busy, we haven't time for long praying. We have the time but we give it to less important things. We blame others for our temper, saying they provoke us. We blame the way others have treated us for our resentment or hurt feelings. And in this way we dodge the fact that they are sin.
But if we are humble enough, and honest enough to admit they are sin--and then take them to Jesus for Him to cleanse us of them, "the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin." I know, for I am a sinner who has been set free from the power of sins which I thought would have dominion over me till the day I died. There is however one thing we must do. We must repent of our sins. That means we hate the sin in us as God hates it. Why do men stagnate or die spiritually? Because they cease repenting. Some of us have learnt that we need to go to God throughout the day repenting of the self, and the sin in the self, which all sorts of circumstances and reaction to people bring out in us. Always when we truly repent God gives us a fresh start, we are cleansed from that sin through the blood of Jesus, we walk in the light with God.
Jesus is a victorious Saviour. This is not a lovely theory to be admired or preached upon. It is a fact to be enjoyed by people like us. Jesus is to abide in, us. He lives in us and through us. Sin is the one thing which breaks our relationship of abiding in Jesus. So either we die to the sin that is within us or the sin will kill the life of Christ within us. My choice is that the sin shall die. So, it is Jesus within us that makes us unselfish. We have no love, but Jesus is all love. We shall love if He is abiding in us. We have no trouble with any of the things a Christian ought to be if Jesus has made His home in our hearts through faith. (See Ephesians 3:14-21).
Jesus is declared to be "the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world" John 1:29. This becomes an actual experience as we actually admit our sin, repent of it, and ask Jesus to cleanse us of it. The big problems in our homes is to be loving, unselfish, to eradicate in ourselves all the things that cause disharmony. We
must not look at the things in others which cause friction or trouble, but at what in ourselves causes friction. The test comes: Will we sincerely look or ask God to show us, what in us causes disharmony, what in us is selfish, what in us is unloving. Will we admit it, will we repent of it, will We ask Jesus to take it from us?
One of the hardest things most of us ever do is to say, "I was wrong, will you forgive me." "I am sorry, it was my fault." Yet if we do repent, if we genuinely want to be free from our share of the disrupting things in our home a real change will always be working, and the love and joy Jesus brings will be filling our homes.
Graduated from the Federal College of the Bible in 1933. After graduating, he served the churches at Blackburn and Prahran, Victoria. then followed three years as Youth Director for our New South Wales churches. On the expiration of that term he served the church at Ann St., Brisbane for a period, and has been with the Dawson St. church, Ballarat, Victoria, for the past eight years.
Provocative Pamphlet, No. 33,
September, 1957
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