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The Friend on the Road and Other Studies in the Gospels: Chapter 13 - The Simplification of Life

By John Henry Jowett


      "Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."--Matt. xix. 14.

      SIMPLICITY is one of the great characteristics of the supreme life as taught and revealed by Jesus Christ our Lord. He was always seeking to lead people back from the impoverished life in which the currents are sluggish, and the arteries are hardened, and all the movements are stiff and formal. He would constrain us back into the realm of vital freedom where life is liquid and musical, and where intercourse is natural and unconventional. "Except ye turn, and become as little children!" That was a tone of warning, as that indeed is the line of promise. If our life is to be wholesome and progressive we must repeatedly turn from the age of stone, which comes with the years, to the plastic and unexhausted susceptibility of a little child.

      Lord Morley has somewhere said that simplification is the keynote of the Reformation. It pierced behind the artificial and conventional to the natural man and natural life. But this is surely true of every healthy revolution: its movement is from the complicated to the single, from the technical to the vital, from the merely traditional to the original springs. Its tendency is from palsied age to the little child.

      Crises continually arise which compel us to get rid of exhausting encumbrances. We have become overburdened with the multiplication of harness. It is not always the ordinary load of life which crushes us; it is the increasingly heavy and complicated means which we have devised to draw it. Our yoke is more galling than our burden; the harness is more harassing than the load. The complications increase with the years. Society becomes a steel network of hard artificial bonds, instead of remaining a sweet, elastic and lovely fellowship. Prayer becomes fossilised. Theology grows arid and technical. Public worship becomes mere church-going, as tedious as the making of conventional social calls. "She has God on her visiting list!" Think of the formality and artificiality which hide behind that vivid phrase! Everything grows hard and unelastic in the conventional drip, drip of a petrifying formality.

      And so there is imperative need of crises and revolutions which will compel us to seek a simplification of life and thought and feeling, and which will make us turn again and become as a little child. And may not this be one of the deep secrets of the time through which we are passing, and may not this divine simplification be one of its glorious issues? Things were becoming fearfully stiff and conventional. Now we are going to become more natural, which will mean more fraternal, more genially accessible to one another, more reverently hospitable to our Lord. We are going to learn of Him, and in meekness and lowliness we shall find that our yoke is easy and our burden is light.

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See Also:
   Chapter 1 - Critics and Surgeons
   Chapter 2 - The Challenge of the Closed Door
   Chapter 3 - How the Best Things Become Ours
   Chapter 4 - Sixpennyworth of Miracle
   Chapter 5 - The Peace of the Larger Life
   Chapter 6 - Education by Contagion
   Chapter 7 - The Tares Among the Wheat
   Chapter 8 - Things New and Old
   Chapter 9 - The Buoyancy of Faith
   Chapter 10 - Sound the Great Recall
   Chapter 11 - The Bright Cloud
   Chapter 12 - Mercy and Obligation
   Chapter 13 - The Simplification of Life
   Chapter 14 - Life's Perilous Heats
   Chapter 15 - Feverishness
   Chapter 16 - The Truly Sensational Life
   Chapter 17 - The Dominant Passion
   Chapter 18 - Doing the Impossible
   Chapter 19 - The Life I Should Live
   Chapter 20 - The Blessing and Discipline of Retirement
   Chapter 21 - Endless Possibilities
   Chapter 22 - The Price of Liberty
   Chapter 23 - The Dynamics of Expulsion
   Chapter 24 - Evils That Never Arrive
   Chapter 25 - Returning in Power
   Chapter 26 - The Old Tackle and the New Presence
   Chapter 27 - The Noble Dissatisfaction
   Chapter 28 - The Malady of Not Wanting
   Chapter 29 - Sentimentaltsm
   Chapter 30 - The Pedantic Conscience
   Chapter 31 - A Receiver of Wrecks
   Chapter 32 - The Supreme Test
   Chapter 33 - Fainting
   Chapter 34 - Doing the Impossible
   Chapter 35 - Divine Visitations
   Chapter 36 - Self-Possession
   Chapter 37 - The Treacherous Kiss
   Chapter 38 - The Friend on the Road
   Chapter 39 - Dull Scholars
   Chapter 40 - The Unknown Christ
   Chapter 41 - The Worst and the Best
   Chapter 42 - Increase and Decrease
   Chapter 43 - Hating the Light
   Chapter 44 - Heroic Goodness
   Chapter 45 - Living Words
   Chapter 46 - The Last Bridge
   Chapter 47 - The Ministry of Infusion
   Chapter 48 - Breaking the Awful Silence
   Chapter 49 - Preparing for the Miracle
   Chapter 50 - The Inner Door
   Chapter 51 - The Revelation in the After Days
   Chapter 52 - The Troubled Heart
   Chapter 53 - The Gift of Peace
   Chapter 54 - Settling Down in Christ
   Chapter 55 - The Joy of the Lord
   Chapter 56 - The Joy of Christian Life
   Chapter 57 - The Sense of Mission
   Chapter 58 - Living at Second Hand
   Chapter 59 - The Great Act of Receiving

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