1. A Serious Call

It is entirely possible to be a Christian in name, and even to be quite careful about one's prayers and one's churchgoing, while living a religion that is really only half-hearted — comfortable, respectable, nominal, and undemanding, touching the surface of life but never disturbing its depths. This is a danger in every age, and perhaps especially where the faith is old and familiar and costs little socially to profess. It is the danger of a religion that has become a habit rather than a life.

In 1729 William Law wrote a book that confronted this comfortable, nominal Christianity with unusual force and directness, and its very title carries its whole message: A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. Law's central conviction was at once simple and deeply searching. God does not call His people, he insisted, to a casual, part-time, Sunday-only religion, but to a serious and wholehearted life of devotion — to belong to Him entirely, and to live for Him not on Sundays and at prayer times only, but in the whole ordinary substance of everyday life. It is a call very much worth hearing afresh in our own day, for it is fatally easy to drift, almost without noticing, into a faith that costs us little, changes us less, and slowly hardens into mere religious routine. Law will not let us rest there.

2. What Devotion Really Is

Law began his book by asking a simple question — what a truly devout person actually is — and his answer quietly overturns the assumption most people carry. A devout person, he said, is not merely one who prays a great deal, or who is much occupied with religious exercises — though of course such a person will certainly pray, and pray earnestly. To reduce devotion to the time we spend in prayer is to miss its real meaning entirely.

A devout person, Law taught, is rather one who lives the whole of life unto God: who takes his entire life — his daily work, his ordinary pleasures, his time, his money, his conversation, his plans — and deliberately orders every part of it to please and honor God. Devotion, in other words, is not something confined to prayer times or shut up within the walls of a church building; it is the whole shape and direction of a life that has been turned Godward. This is a far larger and more demanding thing than most of us mean by the word. True religion, on this account, is not one carefully kept compartment of a person's life, however sincere that compartment may be; it is the entire life itself, every hour of it, offered up and lived for the glory of God. That is what it means to be devout.

3. The Inconsistency Law Exposed

From this understanding, Law pressed home a single uncomfortable point that has stung and searched his readers for three full centuries, and searches us still. Many Christians, he observed with painful accuracy, are genuinely strict and diligent in their prayers and their worship — no one could fault their Sunday devotion — and yet live all the rest of their lives — their work, their spending, their leisure, their speech, their ambitions — very much as the unbelieving world around them does, with scarcely any reference to God at all. They are devout in the closet and worldly in the street.

And Law asked the plain, obvious, uncomfortable question that such a life invites: why be so careful to be devout in the hour of prayer, but so careless everywhere else? Why serve God diligently for one hour on Sunday and then live the other hundred-and-sixty-seven hours of the week almost exactly as though He did not exist? It is, when we look at it honestly, a plain and glaring inconsistency, and Law would not let his readers look away from it. His logic is simple and hard to escape: if God is worth serving carefully at all, in the closet, then He is worth serving in everything, everywhere. Real devotion refuses to carve life up into a "religious" part that belongs to God and a much larger "secular" part that we quietly keep for ourselves; it knows, and lives as though it knows, that all of life, and all that we are and have, belongs wholly to Him.

4. Living to Please God in Everything

Here we come to the intensely practical heart of the whole matter. The devout Christian, Law teaches, learns to carry one single question into every corner and department of life — into his work and his money, his leisure and his speech, his plans and his relationships and his rest: how may I do this very thing in a way that pleases God and honors Him? That one question, honestly asked and honestly answered, quietly transforms everything it touches.

For when that question is truly brought to bear, the most ordinary and unremarkable things of daily life become a kind of worship offered to God. This is exactly the Scripture's own teaching, not Law's invention: "whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God," and again, "whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus." Notice that this is not a matter of piling a heavy new load of extra religious tasks on top of an already full and tiring life — as though devotion meant simply doing more. It is something better: it is the transforming of the whole of the life we already have, so that our eating and our working and our resting and our speaking are all quietly done unto God. Ordinary life, deliberately offered up to Him, becomes holy — not because the tasks change, but because the heart and aim behind them do. The humblest work, done for God, is sacred.

5. Devotion and Holiness Together

Law joined devotion and holiness together in his title and throughout his book, and he was right to, for the two truly belong together and cannot finally be separated. To be holy is to be set apart for God, and to be increasingly conformed to His own character — turning away, deliberately and daily, from sin and worldliness, and growing up into godliness, into love, into humility, into patience, and into every grace that was in Christ. Devotion without this pursuit of holiness would be hollow; holiness without devotion would be cold.

And this is emphatically not the joyless legalism that some readers fear when they hear such a serious call — a grim, anxious, rule-bound keeping of religious regulations to earn approval. Law's aim was the very opposite. It is a life truly and gladly given over to God, and it is precisely there, in that glad self-giving, and nowhere else, that a soul at last finds its real joy, its true rest, and its deepest purpose. Law's whole burden, from beginning to end, was to call the comfortable, nominal Christian higher and further up — to stop settling for a thin, undemanding, Sunday faith that satisfies neither God nor the soul, and to begin taking God, and the whole life He graciously calls us to, with the seriousness that so great a God deserves. It is a call not to misery but to the only life large enough to satisfy a soul made for God.

6. The Cost, the Joy, and the Grace

We should be honest, as Law was, that such serious devotion genuinely costs something, and it is no kindness to pretend otherwise. It means denying ourselves; ordering our time, our money, and our pleasures by God's will rather than by our own preference; steadily resisting the constant, gentle, downward pull of the world around us; and refusing to be content any longer with a comfortable, surface religion that asks little of us. There is a real cross in it. Yet it is, in the end, the only life truly worthy of so great a God, and truly worthy of a soul that was made by Him and for Him; and — this is the great surprise — far from robbing us of happiness, it turns out to be the very path to it. For we were made to love and serve God, and it is only in this wholehearted devotion, and never in half-heartedness, that the restless soul finally finds its rest. A half-hearted religion, in the end, satisfies no one — not God, and not us.

But one thing must be said clearly and unmistakably at the last, lest Law's bracing call be badly misheard and turned into a burden the gospel never meant it to be. This devotion is not a way of earning God's favor or purchasing His acceptance by the strength of our own effort — that would be mere legalism, and it is emphatically not the gospel of grace. Rather, the whole devout life flows out of grace already received. Having been freely and fully saved by grace through faith in Christ, apart from our works, we then give ourselves wholly to God in grateful, answering love — and we are enabled to do even that only by His own Spirit at work within us. The devout life, rightly understood, is therefore not grim, anxious striving to win what we do not have, but glad and restful surrender of ourselves to the God who already loves us — Christ living His life in us, and we living ours for Him. So take your faith seriously, as Law urges; give God not a corner or a compartment of your life but the whole of it; and lean, the entire time, wholly on His grace to live it.

Take Law’s serious call to heart, then, but take it together with the gospel of grace, or it will only crush you. God does ask for the whole of your life — not merely a Sunday corner of it, but all your work, your money, your hours, and your words — and He deserves nothing less than all of it. Yet He asks it not as a hard master demanding payment for His favor, but as a Father who has already given you everything in Christ. So give Him the whole of your life, gladly and without reserve; and give it not to purchase a love you do not yet have, but in grateful answer to a love that is already fully and freely yours. That is the devout life in a sentence: everything laid at His feet, and grace underneath it all.

7. Taking It to Heart

1. The Most-Loved Devotional Book

For some six hundred years, Christians of every kind and country have turned to a small book by Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, and found their souls fed and searched by it; after the Bible, it is among the most widely read Christian books ever written, treasured by simple believers and great scholars alike. That alone should make us pause and listen, for a book does not hold the church's love for six centuries by accident.

Its theme is at once wonderfully simple and deeply searching. The Christian life, à Kempis says, is the imitation of Christ — the following of Jesus, not merely in an outward profession of faith or a set of correct opinions, but in the whole inner life: in His humility, His self-denial, and His love. The book takes its keynote from the Lord's own words, "He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness," and calls us to follow not only Christ's teaching but His very life and character. It is one thing to admire Christ, or to argue rightly about Him; it is another, and the true thing, to follow Him — to let His humility become our humility, His obedience our obedience, His love our love. That is the whole aim of the book, and of the devout life it describes.

2. Inward Religion, Not Outward Show

The great emphasis of the book, from its very opening pages, is that true religion is a matter of the heart and the inner life, and not of outward learning, ceremony, or reputation. This was a bracing word in à Kempis's day, when learning was much prized, and it is no less needed in ours. He had no scorn for knowledge in itself, but he insisted, plainly and repeatedly, that a humble and holy life matters far more than a clever or learned one.

He would rather, he famously said, actually feel sorrow for his sin than merely be able to define what sorrow for sin is — for a man may know all the right words and still have an untouched heart. What finally matters, à Kempis presses, is not how much a person knows, nor how impressive he appears to others, nor how correct his religious performance, but what he truly is before God on the inside, where no one else can see. And so the book gently but persistently turns us away from a religion that is all surface — all appearance, talk, and outward form, however respectable — and inward, to the actual state of the heart, where God alone reads the truth of us. This is a message the pastor especially needs, who can so easily be busy with the outward work of religion while his own inner life with God quietly withers.

3. Humility, the Foundation

To this inner life, à Kempis returns again and again to one grace above all others: humility. He calls us to know ourselves truly — our real weakness, our sin, our lowliness — and not to think highly of ourselves, but to be genuinely willing even to be unknown, overlooked, and little regarded by others. Pride, he warns over and over, is the great enemy of the soul, the thing that closes it against God and shuts out His grace; but humility opens the soul wide to receive all that God longs to give. He calls it the highest wisdom to think little of oneself and to esteem others — a wisdom the world knows nothing of.

A word of care here: this humility is not self-hatred, and à Kempis does not mean us to despise or loathe the very souls God loves and Christ died to save — and that includes our own. It is, rather, a freeing truthfulness before a loving God — to see ourselves honestly, weakness and sin and all, without flattery and without despair, and at the very same time to rest our whole hope wholly on His grace. The two belong together and grow together. True humility and the joy of grace are not enemies but friends; a soul that is genuinely lowly before God, claiming nothing of its own, is a soul finally at peace, because it has stopped the exhausting work of defending and exalting itself and has learned simply to receive.

4. Self-Denial and the Cross

To follow Christ, à Kempis teaches, is also to take up the cross after Him, for the servant is not above his Master. This means denying oneself — learning to master one's own passions and cravings rather than being helplessly ruled by them, saying a firm no to self-will, and bearing hardship and suffering patiently for Christ's sake rather than fleeing all discomfort. The book speaks much of this steady overcoming of the self, and famously of the "royal road of the holy cross," the path that every follower of Christ, without exception, must walk if he would follow at all.

It is not a gloomy or morbid message, though it is certainly a serious one, and it cuts against everything in us that seeks only comfort and ease. For the way of self-denial, hard as it truly is, turns out to be the very way that leads to life — to a real freedom from the tyranny of our own restless desires, which are the harshest of masters, and to a deep and settled peace that the self-indulgent, forever chasing the next satisfaction, never find. The paradox at the heart of the gospel holds here as everywhere: it is in losing our life that we find it, and in taking up the cross that we discover, to our surprise, that His yoke is easy and His burden light. Self-denial is not the enemy of joy; misruled self is.

5. The Vanity of the World, the Weight of the Eternal

à Kempis also calls us, plainly and repeatedly, to hold this passing world with a loose and open hand. Its honors, its pleasures, and its riches are, in the end, a fleeting "vanity" — here today and gone tomorrow, unable either to satisfy the soul that grasps them or to follow us one step into eternity. Echoing the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, he says that all is vanity except to love God and to serve Him only; everything else, however glittering, slips through the fingers.

This is not a bitter or ungrateful contempt for the good world God made and called good, nor a call to gloom; it is rather a clear-eyed, sober refusal to set the heart's whole weight on what simply cannot last or satisfy. There is all the difference between using and enjoying the world as God's gift, and setting our hearts on it as our treasure. When a Christian learns to weigh the fleeting honestly against the eternal — the few short years of this life against the endless ages to come, the passing pleasures against the joy set before us — and to fix the heart deliberately on God and the things that abide, then the grip of the world begins to loosen its hold, and the soul is set free to love and to pursue what truly and finally matters. The person who has settled where his treasure is has settled where his heart will be.

6. Communion with Christ — and Grace

Yet the deepest and sweetest note of the whole book is not self-denial at all, but friendship — the soul's intimate, personal communion with Christ Himself. This is what keeps the Imitation from ever becoming a cold manual of self-improvement. à Kempis writes of Jesus as the soul's truest friend, its abiding comfort, and its deepest delight, in whom alone the heart finds a consolation that no created thing on earth can give; and the later parts of the book become tender, unhurried conversations between the seeking soul and its Lord. This is the very heart of the whole devout life: it is not, in the end, the keeping of a discipline or the mastering of a technique, but a walk with a Person — with Jesus, loved and known and enjoyed.

And here the grace of the gospel must be allowed to have the last word, lest all this earnest talk of following, denying, and humbling quietly become a heavy and crushing burden. This whole inner life is not, finally, our own achievement or the fruit of our own striving; it is Christ's own work within us. We follow, we deny ourselves, and we grow humble only by His grace at work in us, and it is He who first draws near and gives Himself freely to the soul that seeks Him. So do cultivate the inner life with all diligence — humility, dying daily to self, a loose hold on this passing world, and above all a daily, personal walk with Christ — but do it leaning, from first to last, wholly and restfully on His grace, and not on the strength of your own devotion. The imitation of Christ begins and ends as a gift.

Let us take this ancient book to heart, then, not as one more thing to admire from a distance, but as a mirror and a summons. Its question to each of us is quiet and searching: beneath all our knowing and talking and church-going, is there a real inner life with God at all? Do we follow Christ only in what others can see, or also in the hidden places of the heart, where He alone looks? À Kempis will not let us hide in the outward. He calls us inward — to the humility, the self-denial, the loosened hold on the world, and above all the friendship with Christ that together make up the real and hidden life of devotion.

And he will not let us despair, either, once we have leaned wholly on grace. For this whole inner life, from first to last, is Christ’s own work in the willing soul; He gives Himself freely to those who seek Him, and He faithfully carries on what He begins. So do not merely read about the imitation of Christ — begin it, today, in one small and hidden way, leaning the whole weight of your soul on His grace. He who calls you to follow will Himself enable the following. Begin, however haltingly, and you will find Him already at your side, for the road of the imitation of Christ is not one He asks us to walk alone — it is a road He Himself walks with us, step by step, every mile of the long way home.

7. Taking It to Heart

1. "Lord, Teach Us to Pray"

Prayer stands at the very heart of a living Christian faith; it is the breath of the soul, the appointed way in which we actually speak with the living God. And yet, of all the duties of the Christian life, few are found harder or more often neglected. Many sincere and genuine believers struggle with prayer, find their minds wandering, feel their words running dry, and quietly conclude that they scarcely know how to pray at all. If that is your experience, you are in good and holy company, and there is no shame in it.

It is a great comfort, then, to remember that the first disciples felt just the same way. They had watched Jesus pray — had seen something in His communion with the Father that they knew they lacked — and so they came to Him with a simple, honest request: "Lord, teach us to pray." Andrew Murray took that very request as the doorway into his book, With Christ in the School of Prayer, in which he leads us, lesson by lesson, to learn to pray from Jesus Himself — who is at once our patient teacher in prayer and our perfect example of it. Prayer, Murray reminds us again and again, is not something we are simply born knowing; it is something we must learn, as the disciples learned it. And the good news at the very start is this: the Lord Jesus is entirely willing to be our teacher, and He is a patient one.

2. Prayer Is Communion with the Father

The first thing the Master teaches His pupils is what prayer most deeply and truly is. It is not, at bottom, a technique to be mastered, nor a religious duty to be discharged and checked off, nor a set of correct words to be recited; it is, before it is anything else, a relationship — the speaking of a beloved child with his own Father in heaven. This is the foundation of everything.

When Jesus taught His disciples to pray, He did not teach them to begin with a formula or a title of distant majesty, but with a word of nearness: "Our Father." All true prayer flows out of this astonishing reality — that through Christ we have actually become the children of God, and may therefore come freely to a Father who loves to hear us and delights to give good gifts to His children. This one truth changes the whole character of prayer. It is lifted from a heavy, anxious burden into a wonderful and undeserved privilege — the open door of access to God Himself, standing always ajar. Murray dwells much, and rightly, on this childlike intimacy and confidence, for it is the very thing most of us lack. We come to God in prayer not as nervous strangers begging at a locked gate, uncertain of our welcome, but as dearly loved children coming to a Father who is genuinely glad to see us come, and who was waiting for us. Grasp that, and prayer is transformed.

3. Praying in Jesus' Name

The Master also teaches us the solid ground on which we may come to the Father with such remarkable confidence, for our boldness rests not on ourselves but on Christ. Jesus gave a great and repeated promise: "Whatever you ask the Father in My name, He will give you," and again, "whatever you ask in My name, that I will do." These are staggering promises, and everything hangs on rightly understanding that little phrase, "in My name."

To pray "in Jesus' name" is emphatically not a magic formula to be tacked onto the end of our requests to give them power, as though the words themselves worked something. It means, rather, to pray in living union with Christ — coming to the Father not on the ground of our own standing at all, but on the ground of Christ's own merit and His mediation on our behalf, and asking in harmony with His will and His character, as those who represent Him and seek His honor. To ask in His name is to ask for what He would ask, and because He has opened the way. Here is the great secret of the boldness of all Christian prayer, and the reason a sinner may approach a holy God at all: we do not come on the strength of our own worthiness, which is exactly nothing and could never gain us entrance, but through the Son, who by His cross has opened the new and living way. We come to the Father through Jesus — and because of Jesus, we may come with our heads up.

4. Praying in Faith

Prayer, the Master teaches, is also to be joined with faith, for it honors God to trust Him. "Whatever things you ask when you pray," He said, "believe that you receive them, and you will have them." Murray presses this believing prayer upon us throughout his book — coming to God in real, active trust of His promises and His power, honestly expecting Him to hear and to answer, rather than praying with a doubting, half-hearted, going-through-the-motions heart that secretly expects nothing at all to happen. Such unbelieving prayer, Murray warns, dishonors the God we claim to be asking.

A word of balance here: this is decidedly not the popular notion that faith is a kind of formula or spiritual technique which guarantees that we shall infallibly get whatever we happen to want, if only we believe hard enough. That is a distortion, and it breaks tender hearts. True believing prayer trusts God's wisdom and His will, not merely the strength of our own desires. Our Father, who loves us perfectly, always answers according to what is truly and eternally good for us — and so He may answer very differently than we asked, or in His own better time rather than ours, or by giving a wiser gift than the one we thought we needed. Faith does not presume to dictate to God or command Him; it trusts Him. So we ask boldly and expectantly, laying our real desires before Him without hesitation — and then we rest, genuinely rest, in the goodness and wisdom of the One who cannot fail to do what is best for His children, even when His best is not what we first asked.

5. Persevering Prayer

Then the Master teaches us, plainly and by story, not to give up. Jesus told the parable of the man who kept knocking at his friend's door at midnight until at last he was answered, and the parable of the widow who simply would not stop coming to the unjust judge until he acted, and He drew the lesson from them both as plainly as could be: that "men always ought to pray and not lose heart." Prayer, He teaches, is not always answered at once, and we are not to conclude from delay that God has said no.

So Murray teaches us persevering, patient, importunate prayer — the kind of prayer that keeps on asking, keeps on seeking, and keeps on knocking, and does not faint or fall silent when the answer is delayed for days or months or years. This is a crucial lesson, for many give up just before the answer comes. God's delays, we slowly learn, are not the same thing as God's denials. Often He withholds the answer for a time not because He is unwilling, but on purpose — in order to deepen our desire, to test and thereby strengthen our faith, to loosen our grip on lesser things, and above all to draw us nearer to Himself; and the very perseverance He calls for is part of how He does that deeper work in us while we wait. The waiting is not wasted. So we are not to grow weary and quit, but to hold on in prayer, trusting the Father's timing as well as His heart.

6. A Life of Prayer, Helped by the Spirit

Finally, the Master would have prayer become not a mere occasional exercise, squeezed in at the edges of a busy life, but the very atmosphere of a whole life lived toward God. Murray links prayer closely and inseparably to abiding in Christ, for Jesus said, "If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you." A truly praying life is not a bolt-on habit; it flows naturally out of a life united to Christ and feeding daily on His Word. The Word and prayer belong together and nourish each other, for in the Word God speaks His mind to us, and in prayer we answer and speak our hearts to Him; neglect the one and the other soon withers.

And we do not carry this praying life in our own strength, which is a great mercy, for we could not. The Holy Spirit Himself helps us in our weakness, and intercedes within us with groanings too deep for words, even when we do not know what we ought to pray; we are told to pray "in the Spirit," and the sobering, liberating truth is that even our desire to pray at all, and our feeble ability to do it, are themselves gifts of His grace. So take heart, and simply come. Prayer is learned only by praying — in the Master's school, over a lifetime, through many dry and many sweet seasons — and not by reading about it. Do not be discouraged by your weakness, by your wandering mind, or by prayers that seem to go unanswered; only keep coming. The Father truly delights to hear you, the Son is your advocate who ever lives to intercede, and the Spirit Himself helps you pray. Come to the Father, then, in Jesus' name, in faith, with perseverance, abiding in Christ — and go on, all your life, learning to pray from the Master Himself.

So do not stay outside the school of prayer, discouraged and hanging back because you feel you cannot pray. That very sense of need is exactly what first brought the disciples to Jesus, and it is welcome. Come in, and begin — today, however weakly and haltingly — to learn from the Master Himself. He is entirely willing to teach you, His Father delights to hear you, and His Spirit stands ready to help you pray. No one who simply keeps coming to this school ever goes away untaught.

7. Taking It to Heart

1. The Reality of the Fight

It comes as a genuine surprise to many new believers that becoming a Christian does not put an end to the struggle with sin. They had perhaps expected that conversion would settle the matter once and for all; instead they find the old temptations still pressing, the old failures still recurring, and they wonder whether something has gone wrong. Nothing has. Conversion is a true and radical new birth, but indwelling sin remains in the believer, and the Scripture is entirely honest about the resulting conflict: the flesh wars against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, so that we do not always do the good we would.

The apostle Paul himself described this inner battle vividly and personally, confessing the war he felt within his own members. And both Thomas à Kempis and William Law, whom we have been reading in this course, speak a great deal about this same steady overcoming of the self and its unruly desires; it is one of their central themes. So the believer must simply expect to fight, and expect to fight for a lifetime. This is normal, healthy Christian experience — not a sign that something has gone wrong, nor evidence of a defective conversion. Indeed, the very presence of the battle is not the mark of a failed Christian but of a living one, for the dead do not struggle. The real question before us, then, is not whether we must fight sin — every honest believer already knows that we must — but how sin is actually to be overcome.

2. Not by Willpower Alone — but by Grace

And here, at the very outset, we must begin with the one truth that changes everything, or we will fight the whole long battle in entirely the wrong strength and wonder why we keep losing. We do not overcome sin by our own willpower. This must be said plainly, because it is the mistake almost everyone makes first. Anyone who has seriously tried knows how quickly mere resolutions, gritted teeth, and grim self-effort collapse under real temptation; the will alone is simply not strong enough to master the sin that indwells us.

Victory over sin is, from first to last, the work of grace — of God Himself working powerfully within us. "It is God who works in you," Paul says, "both to will and to do for His good pleasure" — even the wanting and the doing are His gift. And the great promise stands firm over the whole struggle: "Sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace." Notice: the reason sin will not finally rule us is grace, not our own effort. The battle is entirely real, and we do truly fight it with everything in us; but we fight it in the strength that God Himself supplies, and not in our own. This single truth guards us, all at once, from two ruinous errors that wreck many Christians: the despair of those who try hard in their own power, keep failing, and conclude they are hopeless; and the pride of those who imagine they could ever conquer their sin by themselves. Grace humbles the proud and lifts up the despairing at the same moment.

3. Putting Sin to Death

Grace, however, does not make us passive; that is a serious misunderstanding. It makes us active, but active in the right way and in the right strength. The Scripture plainly calls us to put sin to death, and it puts the responsibility squarely on us: "If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live," and again, "put to death your members which are on the earth." This old and vital word, mortification, means dealing with sin decisively and firmly, rather than gently and half-heartedly negotiating with it.

To put sin to death means refusing to tolerate, feed, pet, or excuse a sin any longer, but instead deliberately starving it, saying a firm and repeated no to it, and cutting off the occasions and situations that stir it up and give it strength. It is not enough to wish a sin gone; we must actively wage war on it. This is exactly what à Kempis means by his steady "overcoming of the self," and what Law means by "self-denial" — the daily, practical refusal of what is wrong. But now notice the crucial three words that change the whole character of the work: we put sin to death "by the Spirit." So mortification turns out not to be white-knuckled willpower after all, dressed up in religious language; it is the Holy Spirit's own power actively at work within a believer who is himself, in dependence on that Spirit, resolutely and daily refusing his sin. We work hard; but it is God who works in us as we do.

4. Putting On Christ

Overcoming sin, though, is never merely a matter of saying no, of subtraction and denial alone. The negative must always be joined to a positive, or else the swept and empty house, as Jesus warned, is soon reoccupied by something worse. A merely negative religion of "don't" cannot hold; the heart must be filled, not just emptied. So the Scripture everywhere pairs the putting off with a putting on: "put off... the old man... and put on the new man," and again, "put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh."

This is deeply practical and full of hope. We overcome a particular sin most surely not by staring at it, obsessing over it, and fighting it in the abstract — which often only fixes our attention more firmly on it — but by replacing it: by deliberately cultivating the opposite grace, by filling the heart and the hours with Christ and with what is good and true, and by walking in the Spirit. For the promise is wonderfully positive: if we walk in the Spirit, we "shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh." Holiness, in other words, grows chiefly and most naturally as we actively pursue Christ Himself — His fellowship, His Word, His likeness — and not merely as we grimly battle sin on its own terms. The surest way to drive out darkness from a room is not to fight the darkness, but to let in the light. Fill the heart with Christ, and there is less and less room for sin.

5. The Means Grace Uses

God's grace, though it is entirely His gift, ordinarily works through appointed means, and these He graciously gives us precisely so that we will use them. They are not optional extras but the very channels of grace. There is, first, the Word: "Your word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against You" — Scripture cleanses the soul, warns it of danger, and strengthens it against sin. There is prayer: "Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation" — in it we ask God for the strength and the deliverance we simply cannot supply ourselves.

There is watchfulness: staying alert to the approach of temptation, deliberately keeping away from what we know from experience inflames us, and guarding the heart above all else, for "out of it spring the issues of life"; here à Kempis gives especially wise and practical counsel, urging us to resist a temptation at its very first beginning, while it is still small and weak, rather than after it has been welcomed in and grown strong. And there is faith: actively trusting Christ's power and His promises, and reckoning ourselves to be truly joined to Him in His death and His risen life, for "this is the victory that has overcome the world — our faith." These means are not machinery that works automatically by itself, apart from the heart; they are the ordinary channels through which the living grace of God flows to the fighting, dependent soul. Neglect them, and we cut ourselves off from the supply; use them in faith, and grace flows.

6. Perseverance, Hope, and Grace from First to Last

This fight is genuinely lifelong, and it is only honest to admit that it includes real failures and fresh repentance along the way; no believer fights it flawlessly. But we do not give up, and we do not lie down defeated. When we fall — and we will fall — we do not lie there in the mud of despair as though all were lost; we repent, we receive again the full and free grace and complete forgiveness God has promised — "if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins" — and we get up and fight on. Falling is not the end; staying down is.

And here is the truth that steadies the whole struggle and takes the terror out of it: we are not fighting for a victory that is still hanging in doubt, uncertain of the outcome, but from a victory that Christ has already fully won. Sin is an already-defeated enemy; its dominion and its right to rule over us were broken decisively at the cross and the empty tomb. More than that, there is sure hope set before us, for God most certainly will finish what He has begun: one day, without fail, we shall be made completely and forever free from sin itself. "He who has begun a good work in you will complete it." So the whole battle, from beginning to end, is bracketed and held on every side by grace — we are saved by grace, empowered for the fight by grace, forgiven and restored by grace every time we fall, and one day perfected by grace at the last. Do not fight, then, in despair, as though defeat were certain; nor in mere self-reliance, as though the outcome depended on your strength; and do not, on the other hand, excuse or make peace with your sin. Take sin seriously and fight it hard — by the Spirit, in the Word, in prayer, in watchfulness, by faith, and above all by pursuing Christ Himself — but do all of it resting on grace, not straining to earn a favor that is already fully yours in Christ. He within you is your strength, His finished work is your firm ground, and His Spirit is your power. Fight the good fight, then — in His strength, and to the end.

7. Taking It to Heart

1. The Race That Must Be Finished

Among the many pictures Scripture gives us of the Christian life, one of the most searching and sobering is the picture of a race. "Let us run with endurance," says the letter to the Hebrews, "the race that is set before us." It is a fitting image, for the whole point of a race is that it is won not by a strong and impressive start, but by a faithful finish; the runner who begins fastest but drops out halfway wins nothing at all.

This brings us to the last great question of the practical Christian life, and in some ways the hardest of them all: not how to begin the race well — many begin well — but how to keep going, how to persevere in faith and in devotion, not merely for a bright season or a few zealous years, but over the whole long course of an entire life, right to the end. For it is a plain and genuinely sobering fact, which we dare not ignore, that many people begin the Christian life with real and evident zeal, and then, somewhere along the way, quietly grow weary, or cool, or drift, or fall away, and do not finish. The call of the gospel is never merely to make a good start; it is to endure faithfully all the way to the end. The crown is for those who finish.

2. The Long Road: Dryness, Temptation, Hardship

Perseverance is needed precisely because the road is genuinely long, and a great deal of it is genuinely hard; if it were short and easy, no endurance would be required. There will be seasons of real spiritual dryness, when God seems distant and silent, and prayer and devotion feel dull, dry, and lifeless, a duty rather than a delight. There will be temptation, and the same old sins to be fought again and again, long after we thought them behind us. There will be suffering, disappointment, opposition, and simple bone-tiredness. Thomas à Kempis writes with great and comforting honesty about exactly these times of dryness and desolation — those seasons when the felt sense of God's comfort and presence is quietly withdrawn — and he counsels us to be patient and faithful right through them, holding on steadily and trusting that consolation will return in God's own good time, as surely it will.

A word of care here: such dry, dark seasons are a completely normal part of the journey for nearly every believer, and they are not, in themselves, a sign that God is displeased with you, or that you have done something wrong, or that your faith has somehow failed. Even the most faithful and mature believers pass through them; they are part of the road, not a detour off it. The call in the dry times is not to panic, to force emotions you do not feel, or to sink into despair, but simply to keep walking faithfully in the way you already know to be right, trusting the God who has not moved an inch even when your feelings have swung wildly. Feelings come and go; He remains. The Christian, in short, must be inwardly ready for the long haul — for the whole marathon, and not only for the first bright, easy flush of joy at the starting line.

3. Looking to Jesus

How, then, do we actually endure to the end? First, and above everything else, by looking steadily to Jesus. The very same passage that calls us to run the race also tells us plainly where to fix our eyes as we run it: "looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross." Everything depends on where the runner is looking.

We keep our gaze fixed on Christ — on His own example, for He Himself endured to the very end and did not turn back; on Christ as our forerunner, who has already run this exact road ahead of us and reached the finish, so that we follow where He has gone; and on Christ as the very goal and prize we are running toward, the One we shall see at the end. And we remember, as we run, His finished work on our behalf, and the settled fact that we are truly and permanently joined to Him. Here is the deep secret of all endurance, and it is worth learning well: endurance comes not from staring anxiously at our own small and failing strength, nor at the daunting length of the road still ahead, both of which will stop us cold — but from keeping Christ Himself always and steadily in view. The runner who spends the race watching his own tired, aching legs will surely slow and stop; but the one who keeps his eyes lifted and fixed on the finish line, and on the Lord who waits there, runs on when he has nothing left. We run by looking at Him.

4. Not Growing Weary — the Promise of Harvest

To the weary runner, and we all grow weary, the Scripture speaks a word that is at once tender and bracing, comfort and command together: "Let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart." Here is a promise made precisely for the moment when strength is spent. The great temptation, when the fruit of our labor is slow and hidden, when we cannot see any result, and when our own strength feels utterly used up, is simply to grow weary and quietly give up — to stop doing the good because it seems to accomplish nothing.

But here is a solid promise on which the whole weight of a tired soul may safely rest: the harvest will come — surely, in its own due season — if only we do not quit before it arrives. The reaping is guaranteed; only the timing is hidden. So we keep on, deliberately trusting God's timing rather than demanding our own, and refusing to measure the true worth of the work by what our eyes can see in this present, discouraging moment. Perseverance, when you strip it down to its core, is really nothing more mysterious than faith that simply keeps going — faith that goes on doing the good and sowing the seed, believing the promise of harvest even when the field looks bare. The farmer does not dig up the seed because he cannot yet see the crop; he waits, and the harvest comes.

5. The Means of Perseverance

It matters greatly, too, to understand how God actually keeps His people persevering, for He does not keep us by some bare, mysterious force acting on us from a distance, but through ordinary appointed means — and those means He gives us precisely so that we will keep on using them. He keeps us as we feed regularly on His Word, and as we pray, and go on praying, without fainting. And crucially, He keeps us through the fellowship, the accountability, and the encouragement of other believers — which is exactly why the Scripture so urgently presses us: "let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another." We were never meant to run this race alone.

He keeps us, further, at His table, and He keeps us by the steady hope of what lies ahead. We persevere, then, not by somehow summoning up a heroic reserve of willpower from within ourselves — which will fail us — but simply by keeping ourselves in the way of grace, staying close to Christ through these ordinary, humble, appointed channels He has given. And it is worth saying very plainly, because it accounts for so many sad falls: cutting ourselves off from these very things — drifting away from the Word, letting prayer die, forsaking the gathered people of God because we are busy or hurt or cooling — is precisely how many a soul begins, quietly and gradually and almost unnoticed, to drift away and not finish. Guard the means, and the means will help guard you.

6. Kept by God, and the Finish

And now we come to the deepest comfort of all, which must be allowed to have the last word over the whole subject and the whole course. Our final perseverance does not rest, in the end, upon the strength of our grip on God — which is often weak, and trembling, and faltering — but upon the far greater strength of His grip on us, which never weakens. "He who has begun a good work in you," Paul says with confidence, "will complete it." Christ "is able to keep you from stumbling." We are "kept by the power of God through faith." We are held fast. This glorious truth does not for a moment make our own watching and praying and pressing on unnecessary — for those very things are the ordinary means through which God keeps us, and He keeps us in the way, not apart from it — but it does mean that we may run the whole long race in settled confidence rather than in anxiety, knowing surely that the One who called us to Himself is entirely faithful, and will not, in the end, let us go or lose us.

And the finish itself is sure, and it is glorious beyond telling. Paul could say at the very end of his own race, with quiet triumph, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness." And that very same hope — of seeing Christ face to face at last, of being forever with Him, of receiving the crown He Himself gives to all who love His appearing — is set before every ordinary believer without exception, and it is meant to sustain us through the whole long course, however hard. We do not run in vain, and we do not run toward nothing. So this course ends exactly where the Christian life itself is actually lived out day by day: in a whole-life devotion to God, lived inwardly in the humble imitation of Christ, sustained daily by prayer, fighting sin steadily by grace, and persevering faithfully all the way to the end. And every single part of it, from first to last, is finally Christ's own life lived out in us, by His grace. Run, then, with endurance — devoted, prayerful, fighting sin, feeding on grace, and always, always looking to Jesus — and finish the race set before you. He who called you will surely keep you, and He who began the good work in you will, without fail, complete it.

7. Taking It to Heart