Your hand is withered so that you cannot hand out a tract?  May not your real trouble be that you are ashamed of Christ?  Christ commands, "Stretch forth thine hand." You know your trouble is not in your hand.  Through your hand, God seeks to touch your heart.  To you, it spells death--death to self.  But your Saviour accepts no compromise.  He says, "This do and thou shalt live." This do and you will be surprised at the strength He will pour through your poor withered hand.  It may come as a surprise to some that we are just here giving a scriptural New Testament application to the Old Testament principle of law.  The phrase, "This do and thou shalt live," really means, "This death and thou shalt live." Christ has always been and is, "the end (the object or aim) of the law for righteousness to everyone that believeth." But space forbids enlargement upon this theme.

You cannot testify before that person or in that society?  The Saviour says, "This do and thou shalt live." Your poor withered tongue will have to be stretched out in testimony right there.  You complain, "I'd rather die than do it." Do both.  This death and thou shalt live.  Dare to go forth, even with your poor withered tongue and "confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus." You will thereby overcome the devil by the word of your testimony.  But the best blessing will be that self will die in the process.  Satan will lose his hold when self embraces the Cross.

Your foot is lame; you cannot walk in obedience to Christ?  You cannot go where He says to go?  You complain, "Anywhere but there, Lord." Yet He holds you to it.  Self could go other places; that's the reason you say, Anywhere but there.  Christ must dethrone self.  Your impotence in the face of His command is plain disobedience.  He crosses your will through your foot.  He says, "Stand upon thy feet." Another, far more lame than you ever were, was found "walking, and leaping, and praising God," after obedience to an impossible command.  Your lameness will be cured, when you come under Christ.  Call Him not LORD unless you obey His commands.  Submit yourself, and say with Paul, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." You will go forth walking and talking and leaping and singing that the will of God is sweet.  The tongue of the dumb shall sing.  Aye, more, "then shall the lame man leap as an hart."

In the face of these vital, principles of the Cross, it seems rather pathetic and painful that a leading voice in orthodoxy should relegate the sublime Beatitudes of Jesus to the millennia] age in order to avoid that which is so ungrateful to the fleshly self-life: "Will not the exalted demands of the Sermon on the Mount be more easily obeyed when earthly conditions are changed, as they will be?" Such a question is painful, to say the least.  Should the early Christians, then, have denied the faith, until the demand of confessing Christ before men could "be more easily obeyed"?  Should they have endured the lion's gory mane?  Perhaps they should have waited until the millennial age when "the lion shall cat straw like the ox!"

The Saviour knew that it was through these very impossibles which He commanded, that He would "cross" the selfish human will, and bring the will of God to be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Did Christ not climax that blessed list of Beatitudes with this very thought: "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven." The purpose of the Cross of Christ, as all His teaching, was to set self aside and to bring our hearts and wills into harmony with God.  The whole of redemption is to save man from himself and from his wicked pride and self-exaltation.  It is the power of the Cross to work in us the blessed will of God.  "Such a claim does the Cross lay upon our hearts that, though our deepest attachments be violated, and what we love more than anything else in the universe, namely, 'self,' be crucified, we give our consent.  We cry out: "Spare nothing, O God, in me that would keep me from merging my life with thine in an everlasting union of love.' Here lies the supreme glory of the Cross, and the reason why it is, as Paul says, 'the power of God and the wisdom of God." It disposes us to die to "self." That is why it saves.  It gets the consent of our wills that we be detached from ourselves and attached to God.  Any other kind of salvation would necessarily be fictitious" (Huegel).
Regardless, therefore, of the conditions or difficulties you face in life, see in each one "a chance to die." For die, to yourself, you must if you would live unto God.  Your wishes have been crossed? your likes and dislikes disregarded, your wisdom discredited, your sensibilities provoked, your opinions ridiculed?  You have been falsely accused and your name has been cast out as evil?  Take any or all of these up, as your cross, and see, in