The phrase I've said most in life is this one: "Lord, You've got me." And I've meant it. And it works -- works gloriously. His yoke is easy and His burden is light. Why? Because He puts nothing on you? On the contrary, you come to Him and He will dump the world and its troubles into your heart. You begin to care. I came to Him all unsuspecting. I wanted salvation and found in taking it I wanted the salvation of the world. At eighty-three I'm taking more and more projects upon myself -- world projects. And the more I take on myself, the more I'm taken over by joy, by well-being, by inner excitement, by adventure, by growth, by life.
His yoke is easy because His yoke is my yearning. It gives me the very thing I'm made for -- creative activity. When I surrender to Him, it is the same surrender a wire, unattached and noncreative, makes when it surrenders to a dynamo: it throbs with light and power. The same surrender which paint makes when it surrenders to an artist: mere color becomes a living picture. The same surrender which ink makes when it surrenders to a writer: mere print becomes words that burn and bless and enlighten. When you surrender to Christ, you surrender to the most creative and dynamic Person on this or any other planet. You begin to be alive with His life, enlightened with His light, loving with His love. You have surrendered to creativity. Therefore His yoke is easy, for you are made by the Creator for creation.
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E. Stanley Jones (1884 - 1973)
Was a 20th-century Methodist Christian missionary and theologian. He is remembered chiefly for his interreligious lectures to the educated classes in India, thousands of which were held across the Indian subcontinent during the first decades of the 20th century. According to his and other contemporary reports, his friendship for the cause of Indian self-determination allowed him to become a friend of leaders of the up-and-coming Indian National Congress party. He spent much time with Mohandas K. Gandhi, and the Nehru family. Gandhi challenged Jones and, through Jones' writing, the thousands of Western missionaries working there during the last decades of the British Raj, to include greater respect for the mindset and strengths of the Indian character in their work.His work became interdenominational and world-wide. He helped to re-establish the Indian “Ashram” (or forest retreat) as a means of drawing men and women together for days at a time to study in depth their own spiritual natures and quest, and what the different faiths offered individuals. In 1930, along with a British missionary and Indian pastor and using the sound Christian missionary principle of indigenization. (God’s reconciliation to mankind through Jesus on the cross. He made Him visible as the Universal Son of Man who had come for all people. This opening up of nations to receiving Christ within their own framework marked a new approach in missions called "indigenization") Dr. Jones reconstituted the “Ashram” with Christian disciplines. This institution became known as the ”Christian Ashram.”