His Will--My Meat

E. Stanley Jones was a missionary, a theologian, and a prolific writer. In his devotional book Victorious Living he shows how the will of God is the sustenance of our very life:

"Nothing exalts the soul, gives it a sheer sense of buoyancy and victory so much as the fact that we are being used to change the lives of other people. This is a necessary and integral part of victorious living. Without it victorious living will remain an unfulfilled dream. The battle of life is won not by the defensive, but by the offensive. The will of God is redemptive, and when we feed upon that will, we too shall become redemptive.

"Jesus said to Him the will of God was meat, it was something that fed Him, sustained Him, something that He lived by. Now, to some of us the will of God is medicine. It is something to be taken now and again to straighten us out. It is bitter, but it is needed to get rid of our ills. This view of the will of God is very common--it is something to be accepted, with a sigh. The will of God is to be borne. When death and calamity visit us, we say, 'Thy will be done'--it is a medicine, and bitter too.

"To some the will of God is more like sweets at the end of a meal--something to round off life, and give it taste. But you don't live by sweets. Nor do such people live by the will of God--the will of God is the occasional. It gives life its flavor, but not its food.

"But to Jesus the will of God was neither medicine nor sweets, it was meat--the thing that sustained Him. This implies that we are made for the will of God as the body is made for food. It fits our moral and spiritual make up. Everything else is poison--this is food. I live as I live by the will of God--I wither and die as I live by some other will, particularly my own.

". . . in South America there are leaves of a tree which, if eaten, take away all appetite; one no longer cares for food; but it is a drug and not a food. Anything that apparently satisfies you, outside the will of God, is a drug.

"But the will of God is food--real food. When a man is feeding on that, he is adequate for anything, afraid of nothing. He feels that at the center of his being he has resources, sustenance, a re-enforcement, Life not his own, and he lives by that very Life. Victorious living is the natural, normal outcome of that Fact. He is immovably fixed in God, and immeasurably fed by God.

"There is nothing that sustains a man like the fact that he knows that the universe backs his will when he acts. Is it any wonder that we share that same sense of exalted joy Jesus had on this occasion?"