Living the Life of Self-Surrender

1902

There will come to every manly man times in his life when he will see that there is something which is legitimately his, something which he has a right to, something which nobody can blame him if he takes and enjoys to the fullest, and yet something by whose voluntary and uncompelled surrender he can help his fellow man and aid the work of Christ and make the world better.

Then will come that man's trial. If he fails and cannot make the sacrifice, nobody will blame him; he will simply sink into the great multitude of honorable, respectable, self-indulgent people who take the comfortable things which everybody says they are entitled to, and live their easy life without a question.

But if he is of better stuff, and makes the renunciation of comfort for a higher work, then he goes up and stands humbly, but really, with Jesus Christ. He enters into the other range, that other sort of life where Jesus Christ lived. He is perfectly satisfied with that higher life. He does not envy, he does not grudge, the self-indulgent lives which he has left behind. He does not count up what he has lost; he does not ask whether he is happier or less happy than he would have been if he had kept what everybody said he had a right to keep.

It is not a question of happiness with him at all, but gradually, without his seeking it, he finds that the soul of the happiness which he has left behind him is in him still. Like fountains of sweet water in the sea it rises up and keeps him a living soul. He has left the world's pleasures and its privileges only to draw nearer to its necessities, which are its real life. So what he gave he keeps a thousand fold in this present time, and eternity is still before him, in the end everlasting life. — Phillips Brooks.