The Secret of Victorious Living

Romans 8:28
“And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God…”

I read a sermon this afternoon, given by Harry Emerson Fosdick and published in print in the early 1930s, entitled The Secret of Victorious Living. Now I'm excited to read more of his sermons!
Here I have copied some excerpts of the sermon so you can get the gist of it without reading the whole thing. ^_^

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If all things are to work together for good in any man’s life he must have within him a spiritual contribution of personal religion, a creative faith.

Is life worth living? Most people seem to think that a question about the cosmos. No, my friends, that is a question about the inside attitude of you and me.

Nobody ever finds life worth living. One always has to make it worth living. All the people to whom life has been abundantly worth living have made it so by an interior, creative, spiritual contribution of their own, and such people commonly are not in fortunate circumstance.

Recently I had a letter from… a business man, apparently with no academic or theoretical interests, but wishing this question answered: Was he a thing mechanistically predetermined or was he a creative person who might control his life and circumstance? He wanted to know, and as one felt his urgency one saw that life had him in a corner where it was important to know. Life has many of us in that corner and whenever our minds face such a situation they begin tricking us. For when we are making a success and everything is going fortunately, we tend to believe in freedom and to think ourselves responsible actors, but when we are failing and desperate difficulties oppress us, we tend to think that we are being preyed upon by fate and that life is victimizing us. When we enjoy prosperity, we are doing it; when we suffer adversity, something is being done to us.

At no time in a man’s life, however, does he so deeply need to believe that he is a free, creative person as when he is in trouble. In that situation, a life like Paul’s sings. Put him in a difficult place, as in prison with the Praetorian guard over him, and listen as he writes to his friends in Philippi, ‘I would have you know, brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the progress of the gospel’ Put him in a desperate place and he still knows that he is free to do something about it. He can make almost anything work together for good.

Stop being a fatalist. When we bounce a ball against a wall it returns in a predetermined direction; that is mechanistic reaction. But we do not need to behave like that. When life puts something up to us we need not react; we can respond. That is different. That takes our spiritual contribution in.

What do you suppose Paul had in mind when he described that response as loving God? Certainly he was not thinking of devotion to any far-off deity. He was walking in the deeper levels of the New Testament – ‘God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him’; ‘that ye may be filled unto all the fullness of God.; He was thinking of the inner deeps of personal religion, where faith gives life meaning and purpose, where character is unified and organized, integrated and directed, so that we find things worth living for and adequate resources to live by, and at last can say with Browning, ‘Who keeps one end in view makes all things serve.’ In our capacity to make that spiritual response to life our freedom lies.

Finally, in this truth lies the practical answer to one of life’s most puzzling facts – its appalling impartiality. Ecclesiastes, the most pessimistic book in the Old Testament, puts it: ‘All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked. …This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that there is one event unto all.’ So it looks. Birth and death, joy and sorrow, sickness and health, love and loss, happiness and tragedy – no respecters of persons – come to each regardless of his character and his response. All things come alike to all.

On Calvary three crosses stood; on one a thief profane and blasphemous, on another a thief ashamed and penitent, on the third the Christ. Strange world where three characters so diverse hang on the same Calvary! All things come alike to all. This world is not run right, a man says. A shipwreck drowns in indiscriminate ruin good and evil alike; when a hurricane wrecks a village the churches and the schools fare no better than the brothels; an economic disaster engulfs the honest man and the crook, and death on the same day falls on some knightly servant of the common good and on some old philanderer who has dragged his miserable life across fourscore years. All things come alike to all.

I wonder weather Paul had in mind that statement of Ecclesiastes when he hurled his challenge back, ‘To them that love God all things work together for good.’ In one sense they both are true. As Jesus said in his parable, one man builds a house on sand and another on rock and then the same thing happens to both – the rains descend and the floods come and the winds bow. At that stage Ecclesiastes is correct. In the end one house has gone. Things do not come out alike to all. Some souls go to pieces; some souls have something in them so that all things work together for good.

All things will happen to us – life and death, joy and sorrow, romance and loss, friendship and bereavement, happiness and tragedy – all things. And while, to be sure, since each of us must come to journey’s end, some circumstances will be final, for the most part what all things do to us will depend on what they find in us.