Mastery

A group of ordinary people were mastered by the risen Christ moving into them in the Holy Spirit; and thus mastered, they moved out to master their circumstances and their relationships into a miniature Kingdom of God. It is Mastery, within and without…

To find the secret of mastery, you need a Master. You cannot say to yourself: “Come now, I will be masterful.” You will not be masterful — you will be silly — or obnoxious. To be masterful, you must get in touch with the resources of a Master, one who is inherently masterful and who knows how and is willing and ready to impart, to those who accept his ways, his own mastery.

The Christian way is centered in such a Master. Jesus Christ was the most masterful Person this planet has ever seen. He walked into time and quietly divided it into before and after — B.C. and A.D. He walked into the realm of thought and altered all our conceptions about God and life and destiny. He walked into our moral conceptions and codes, and now we are good or bad according to whether we embody His spirit or not. He walked into our sundered relations with God and healed them by His cross. He walked into the chaos of human relationships and projected a Kingdom which is destined to gather all our chaos into cosmos, to be the goal and end of human history. He walked into our moral weakness and sin and imparted to the defeated and collapsed a moral and spiritual mastery which made them go out and impart to humanity such a stimulus that a movement was begun which is destined to change the world. The Master mastered men into masterfulness.

That sounds like a strong-man stunt. It wasn’t. It was all done quietly, unobtrusively, and effortlessly. Men quietly got in touch with Him, imbibed His secret, and found themselves doing things they couldn’t do, thinking thoughts they couldn’t think, and loving people they couldn’t love. They were a surprise to themselves and others. It was no clenched-teeth type of mastery — it was as gentle and quiet as the dawn-and as effective, awakening the slumbering world to light and life. Mastery is primarily caught, not taught.

Mastery is gained by contact with the Master. In contact with Him we learn the same effortless striving, the same easy accomplishment, the same serene effectiveness.