“He brought me forth also into a large place” (Psalm 18:19).

YOU observe that we have here a testimony, not a promise. God actually had done this thing for David. He was a shepherd lad; obscure, conscious but dimly if at all of his own capacities; shut up to the small things and small thoughts of a young rustic. Then God began to work in his life, stimulating him with great promises, leading him into great ventures, beating him with the hammer of adversity till the crude ore of him was turned into tempered steel; but all the while breaking shackles, tearing away enmeshing nets, lifting the wings of his soul, filling him with divine in-breathings, expanding, enlarging, disenthralling him; until at last David came to the consciousness that he was a free man and in a large place.

He could stand with lifted head, strong young arms outflung, upraised chest breathing deep the free, ample air, a man at home in the universe. I repeat it, David is testifying here, not theorizing. He had found it so. Upon which I remark:

THE REAL CHRISTIAN LIFE IS LARGE

It is the men who are living without God who are living in a small and narrow place. There is no more shameless lie afloat among men than that the Christian life is a narrow life, and that the life that does not subject itself to the will of God is a high, free thing. We are all, I believe, passionate lovers of liberty. We seek room; we want a place in which we may expand and broaden out.

A great many young people of today have a fancy that to come into the will of God is to come into narrowness. It is Satan’s lie. But let us not blame the devil overmuch. He never could have got his lie believed if so many of God’s people had not made “religion” a poor negative thing: a system of “don’t” and of outward observance. It was to intensely “religious” people—in this sense—that Christ spoke His great word, “If the Son, therefore, shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” He came to preach deliverance to the captive of formalism no less than to the captive of sin. The gospel is a call out of littleness, out of pettiness, out of insignificant things, to the breadth and sweep of great thoughts and forces, and to the wide horizon of limitless possibilities…

THE SECRET OF THE LARGER LIFE

If now you ask me how all this larger Christian life may be lived, I shall venture three suggestions:

1. Put your life under the great law of exclusion by preoccupation.

Keep littleness out by being with greatness. There was no place in Christ for mean things. It was not that Christ refused small cares, drudgeries, duties. It was that He accepted them and was filled with the joy of doing them.

2. Live your Christian life in the sense of its great verities.

You are children and heirs of God by faith in Jesus Christ. Say every day, “I am a child of God.” I defy circumstances to narrow and dwarf the life that is lifted by the consciousness of divine sonship and divine fellowship.

“The larger Christian life is independent of circumstances.”

There drifted into my house once a human wreck. He had been the editor of a great daily newspaper, and was a man of rare gifts. It was the old story; little by little the drink habit had fastened upon him and had dragged him down to a living hell. I could not tell him to “assert his manhood;” he had none. I had a better gospel than that. I told him that he could be born again; that he could become a partaker of the divine nature, and a son and heir of God. He fell upon his knees. “My God!” he cried. “Can a dog like me become God’s son?” And he poured out his heart, giving himself away to Christ. I shall never forget his transfigured face, nor the singular solemnity and loftiness of his bearing as he took my hand and said: “I am a child of God.”

Get out under the stars on a clear night, and look over your estate. The stars are yours and Christ’s. Know that as a child of God you are greater than any possible estate, and you will not wash pans, plow and reap any less thoroughly, but you will do these things royally, like a king or queen. Remember, you are of the family of God.

A poor saint went into a very aristocratic church in a strange place. “I believe,” said the usher rather dubiously, “that I do not know you.” “Do you know the Lord Jesus Christ?” asked the poor saint. “Oh, yes.” “Well,” said the poor man, “I am a poor brother of His.”

3. Be a vital part of Christ’s work.

“The field is the world.” Your field is the world. Keep your sympathies worldwide. If your heart is in China or Africa or Central America, and with the work there, it is just the same as if you were there, wherever your body may happen to be.

At the Student Volunteer Convention in Cleveland they had [William] Carey’s cobbler’s hammer. It was better worth seeing than the crown jewels in the Tower. No scepter in Christendom is so venerable as that hammer. It is as if it came out of the shop in Nazareth, almost. Carey beat hobnails into peasants’ shoes with that hammer; beat sturdily and well. But, as one thinks of him, the narrow walls of his cobbler’s stall fall away, and his humble bench changes to the likeness of a throne, and one sees a pierced hand hold over his head the diadem of righteousness.

For that cobbler, bowed over his daily task, was sweeping the darkened continents into his yearning, and holding a world up in prayer to God.

“Enlarge the place of your tent,
And let them stretch out the curtains of your dwellings;
Do not spare;
Lengthen your cords,
And strengthen your stakes.
For you shall expand to the right and to the left” (Isaiah 54:2).

An excerpt from The New Life in Christ Jesus, by C.I. Scofield. chapter 5. Chicago: THE BIBLE INSTITUTE COLPORTAGE ASSOCIATION, 1915.