Conclusion

Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you. 1 PETER 5:7

Fourteen chapters can make it look as though Hannah Whitall Smith taught a great many things. She taught one thing twice: once from our side and once from God’s. From our side, the Christian life is a handing over. We give God the whole case — ourselves first, then everything else — and we believe He has taken it, and we keep our will on His side whatever our feelings are doing. From God’s side, the handing over is safe because of who He is. He is the Potter who knows His work, the Shepherd who does not lose His sheep, the Father with a mother’s heart, the good Housekeeper of a world that looks like a wreck, the God whose love is unselfish, and in the end simply the God who is enough. Man’s part is to trust; God’s part is to work; and He can be trusted to work because He is good.

She called her discovery a secret only because it had so long been hidden from her. It was not hidden by God. It was an open secret, lying on every page of Scripture, waiting for someone to believe it.

The danger of this book

A book about rest carries a peculiar risk. The reader may turn Hannah’s teaching into a new technique — the right way to surrender, the right formula to repeat, the right experience to seek — and then anxiously check whether it has worked. That would bring back through the kitchen door the very self-effort she spent her life showing out of the front. She saw the danger herself. She went forward at camp meetings again and again, seeking a blessing that never came in the form she expected, and learned at last that the truth was the blessing. She did not need an experience; she needed to know that God is good.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

So the plainest counsel is the one given in the other volumes of this series. Go back to the chapter that made you least comfortable, not the one you liked best. Take its application points and live with them for a month. Then take another. Hannah measured teaching by what it did on a wet Monday, and so should we.

Two things to carry

First, hand it over and leave it there. Whatever you have been carrying in the wagon — a temper, a child, a fear, a failure, your own unmanageable self — give it to God in plain words. When it comes back, and it will, give it again without scolding yourself. That habit, practised for years, is most of what she meant by the life hid with Christ in God.

Second, look at God more than at yourself. Nearly every difficulty she addressed, from doubt to discouragement to morbid self-examination, came back in the end to the direction of our gaze. We see what we look at. Take ten looks at Christ for every look at self, and then take fewer looks at self.

Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith. HEBREWS 12:2

A last word about her

We have been honest about the places where she must be read with care. She sometimes wrote as though feelings could simply be ignored, and as though doubt and discouragement were always the devil’s work; people who grieve or struggle with depression need a gentler word. She held and proclaimed a hope of universal restoration that goes beyond what Scripture teaches, and she admitted that her zeal for it was not always Christ-like. She moved in circles where emotion and impressions were prized, and though she warned against their excesses more wisely than most, the movement she helped to lead was not free of them. And the public ministry she shared with her husband ended in 1875 in a painful collapse, followed over the years by his loss of faith.

None of this has been raised to diminish her. It has been raised because her own teaching requires it. A message whose whole point is that we have nothing in ourselves, and everything in God, cannot be commended by pretending its messenger was an exception. She would have been the first to say so. She called her great discovery not an attainment but a discovery: she did not become a better woman, she said; she found out that Christ was a better Saviour.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:7

She outlived four of her children, her husband’s faith and her own public reputation, and she ended her life in a wheelchair, in pain, and cheerful. She wrote that she could leave the whole universe in God’s care without fear that anything would go wrong when she was gone. That is the best argument for her teaching: not that it spared her trouble, but that it held her in it.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Return to the page you wrote at the start of this book about what you think God is like. What would you change now?

2. Choose the one chapter that made you least comfortable, and work its application points for a month.

3. Hand over, in plain words, the burden you have carried longest. When it returns, hand it over again.

4. Practise the ten looks: before you examine yourself, spend time considering what God is like.

5. Read one of her own books through slowly, with the Bible open, weighing what she says.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have read about Your goodness, and I am capable of turning even that into one more thing to strive for.

Keep me from it. I do not want a technique; I want You.

I hand myself over, and I leave myself with You. Be my Shepherd, my Father, my Comforter and my portion.

And when my strength fails and my hopes are disappointed, as hers were, hold me still, and let me find that You are enough. Amen.