This Indescribable Rest
One day when Rosaline Goforth and her husband Jonathan were missionaries in China, she overheard two Chinese women talking about her. "Yes, she is a hard worker and-yes, she loves us; but, oh, what a temper she has!"
Then followed a full description of her character. Rosaline recognized that it was all so true that it left her humbled to the dust. She saw how useless it was for her to come to China to preach Christ but not live Christ! But how could she? Was it possible for her nature to ever be sweet and gentle?
She began to seek to be filled with the Spirit. They came home for furlough, and she attended a meeting in which the speaker spoke about victory over sin! His message gripped her. This was what she had hungered for all her life.
The speaker described an ordinary Christian life-sometimes on the mountain-top; then would come coldness and perhaps disobedience. That life, he assured them, was not the life God planned for His children. He described the higher life of power and rest in the Lord.
After his message, she quietly but definitely accepted Christ as her Savior from the power of sin as she had long before accepted Him as her Savior from the penalty of sin. On this she rested.
After his message, she quietly but definitely accepted Christ as her Savior from the power of sin as she had long before accepted Him as her Savior from the penalty of sin. On this she rested.
The next day as she was reading a book to her son, she came to the words, "At last I realized that Jesus Christ was actually and literally within me." She stopped, amazed.
"I saw at last the secret of victory--it was simply Jesus Christ himself-his own life lived out in the believer," she later said. "But the thought of victory was for the moment lost sight of in the inexpressible joy of realizing Christ's indwelling presence! Like a tired, worn-out wanderer finding home at last, I just rested in him." Years later when a friend asked her to sum up the result of this experience, she replied, "It can be all summed up in one word, 'Resting.'"
Thank You, Jesus, for the indescribable rest You give.
" Therefore, since a promise remains of entering His rest, let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it." (Hebrews 4:1).
