Breaking the Colt With Love

Breaking the Colt With Love

by Genevieve Parkhurst

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

Fearful camps are wonderful things, but no religious organization is effective unless it lifts Jesus up. It has been said that the prayer meeting is the heart pulse of the church. And so it might be said of any religious group, the extent to which we pray is the measure of our greatness. For truly it is not by might or by power, but by the Spirit of God that great things are accomplished.

And when we as mortal beings can get ourselves out of the way and allow the Spirit to flow through, then is Christ honored and then are great things brought to pass. In all of your striving for spiritual growth, remember to take a walk with Jesus every day. Take a walk with Jesus. Let’s take a walk with Jesus this morning. It’s only in this way that we can have our littleness washed out and replaced by the greatness of God Himself.

We come into the presence of God. We yield ourselves to Him in conversion. We are made over by His Spirit. This experience may come in your life in a gradual way until you accept Christ, when a child or a youth. Or it may come as a revolutionary thing when you are older and have committed great sins.

But whatever be the case, there is a time in the life of every Christian when he has definitely accepted Christ as his personal Savior. It’s something like breaking a colt, you know. There are two ways to break a colt. One is to love it when it’s little and running by its mother’s side. And to pet it and love it and let it know that you love it. And when it’s very young, to put a rope around its neck and lead it with that rope and pet its neck and rub its nose until the colt knows that that rope is a part of your understanding and your care for it. And then when it gets a little bit older, put a blanket on its back so that it isn’t afraid of something on its back. Tie a rope around the blanket or a strap so that it isn’t afraid of a strap around its body. And gently and gradually lead that colt into the place where it is subservient to your desire. Where it follows you all over the yard. Where it comes to you for a nibble of a carrot. Where the colt feels that you love it and it responds to your love. And then when it’s older and you put a bridle on, it may gnaw it a bit for a little bit, but it soon accepts the bridle because you put the bridle on.

And then when it’s strong enough, you get on its back for a few minutes. And it may prance around a little bit, but probably it won’t because it loves you and it knows that you love it. And the breaking of that colt is such a gradual thing, such a loving thing, such a gentle thing, such a natural thing between a man who loves a colt and a colt who loves a man, that the colt can’t say just what day it was broken. But it comes to the place that to do the will of the master who loves it is its supreme desire. A horse loves to do the will of a loving master.

And it seems to me that a horse just gets a thrill out of doing what the master wants done. Then there’s another way to break a colt. Let it run in the pasture and be wild until it’s two and a half or three years old. And then catch it up and by main strength and cruelty, beat it and whip it until you have beaten it into subjection to your will. Until you can ride it and make it do.

There are two ways of breaking colts. There are two ways of becoming submissive to the will of God. It doesn’t matter just in what way you have become surrendered to the will of the Father. The main thing is that you are surrendered.

And it’s a very interesting thing that the colt who has known nothing but love and who has always responded to the will of the master doesn’t break training. Because it’s ingrained in the very… Shall we say the subconscious mind of a colt? Maybe horses don’t have subconscious minds. But then we might say that. It’s just ingrained in the very character of the colt as it grows up. It knows nothing else. Sometimes horses who have been broken with great cruelty break training. They’ll say he breaks training. What does he do? He reverts back to something that was in him before he became subject to the will of the master who rules him.

But the main thing is that we are subject to the Master. That we love Him. That we desire to do His will. That’s the main thing for us. And if we are to keep that will of the Master uppermost, in our life, we must keep our training.

It’s necessary to take a walk with Jesus every day, if you’re going to abide in His presence and have His love abiding in your heart. Take a walk with Jesus every day. Open your mind to His attitudes. I like what Grace said this morning of the be attitudes. Those attitudes which outline what we are. The things which we be. Those be attitudes.

Expose your mind to the attitudes of Christ. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. Somehow we have to open our minds every morning to the mind of Christ. Because there’s something in man that is not in accord with the will of God. And as long as we are in this world, it is possible for us to slip away. For our minds and our spirits to become dulled. And that very fine, keen sensitivity which we once had to become dull.

Oh, it’s so necessary to keep the keen edge of our spiritual life. And we can do it only by association with Jesus. If you go without prayer for a while, you will find that you’re just running on momentum.

Like the great violinist who said, “If I go without practice one day, I can tell it. If I go without practice two days, my accompanist can tell it. And if I go without it three days, my audience can tell it.”

So it is if we go without conscious abiding in the presence of Christ, we can tell it. And if we continue, pretty soon the people with whom we associate can tell it. And they’ll begin to wonder if something has gone amiss with us.

Take a walk with Jesus. Every day. If you would keep your sensitivity and if you would keep the glow in your soul. At the very beginning of this camp, it seems to me very important that we shall start out with Christ Jesus at the center of everything.

The reality of the presence of Jesus Christ has made it possible for us to be here. We would not be Christians if it were not for Christ. We would not have churches if it were not for Christ. We would not hold a CFO camp if it were not for Christ. Then let’s make Christ central in all of our thinking and in all of our doing. Let’s keep Him central in our attitudes, in our thoughts. Let’s lift Him up above everything else.

And so long as Christ is central in our lives and our thinking, then all of our plannings will flow smoothly, and everything which we shall do shall be a blessing to us and to those who come in our midst. Let’s begin every day by taking a walk with Jesus. Let’s try to see Him.

Let’s try to see Him in His beauty, in the beauty of the earth. Wasn’t it beautiful this morning just at sunrise? Perfectly gorgeous, these hot summer days when the morning is just breaking, the purple morning dawns, and the dew is on the grass, and the birds are singing, to see God in His beauty. The beauty of God. The beauty of holiness. And all of the attributes of God are beautiful attributes. Then let’s see Jesus in His strength.

Sometimes we have had a tendency to make a weakling out of Jesus, and He never was. We must see Jesus in His tremendous strength. The power of Him, the might of Him, the strength of Him. The strength of Jesus is great enough to challenge the strongest man who ever lived. He was a strong man. He worked with His hands, His hard, calloused, carpenter hands.

They were not pale and soft. They were the hands of a workman. History tells us that when Jesus was about 17 years old, Joseph died. And Jesus went into the carpenter shop and did the work of the carpenter shop until He was 33, making the living for the family. Jesus, hard, calloused hands. Hard, calloused hands. Hands that knew what it was to work long hours. Jesus who knew what it was to give good measure for a day’s work. Jesus who stood strong and tall among men. Jesus who walked in the fields and who slept under the sky.

Jesus who lived in the open. He lived in the open. He loved the open. And about every so often, it becomes necessary for religion to be taken out of a sanctuary and taken out into the open again. We have a tendency to bring our religion in and to make it sanctimonious and to close it up and to shut people away from it. And every so often, God has to break this thing open and take religion once more out into the open air and the fields and the sunshine. Anything that stays out of the sunshine too long is in danger. And that might be true of our religion as well.

You remember when the children of Israel was walking through the wilderness and they wanted some definite place where they could worship and God allowed them to make the Ark of the Covenant? And this sacred Ark of the Covenant. And this sacred Ark was carried on the shoulders of the people and put in a tabernacle when the people stopped. And this became such a holy place that only the high priest could go into the Holy of Holies and worship God. And while the high priest was inside, the people, the common people, stood outside in awe and wonder, listening to the tinkle of the bells on the hems of the priest’s garments, which told them the priests were busy about the rites of worship. And when the priest came out of the tabernacle again into the presence of the people, a great shout was lifted. The people responded. The people responded. But that’s as far as the common people could go.

But Jesus changed that. He said to the woman of Samaria who asked Him, “Where is the place to worship?” “The time is coming and now is when you will not have to go to Jerusalem to worship. But you may worship the Father in spirit and in truth.”

That’s the way Jesus intends us to worship, every man. Coming to the Father in spirit and in truth. Lifting up his soul unto God. And when Jesus hung on the cross, at the hour when the darkness settled over the earth and there was a great clap of thunder and lightning, the veil of the temple which covered this Holy of Holies, which only the priests could approach, that veil was split in two.

King James Version says it was rent in twain. I like the Standard Revised Version better. It was split in two. And pulled back. And there the Holy of Holies was exposed to all of the people who walked by. Anybody could look at the Holy of Holies.

That’s what Jesus has done for us. He has made God approachable for every man. Every man may come to God. We do not need a high priest to go into a holy place for us. Jesus is the high priest for us.

So let us see Jesus in His holiness. God made man. God who became man and walked the earth for us. God who understood all of the faults and the frailties and the temptations that human flesh is heir to.

Christ Jesus. Who understood us. And yet in His holiness was one with the Father. God who defended us the Father. And can lift us unto the Father. And make the perfect bridge between humanity and God. That is Jesus. Christ Jesus. Let us see Him today in His holiness.

John tells us that in the beginning was the Word, or the creative principle. The divine idea. And that Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. That is Jesus the Christ. In the beginning, before creation was, before God said, “Let there be light,” Christ the Son was with the Father. Let’s see Jesus in His holiness. And let’s see Jesus in His power.

Jesus said, “All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth.” All power. And yet, notice how sparingly He used that power. Not once did He ever use it for His own comfort, vindication, or glory. After He had fasted for forty days and nights in the wilderness, and the tempter came and said, “You can turn these stones into bread. There’s nobody up here to see You. You’d just as well have a good meal.”

Sometimes that’s when the temptations come to us the most subtly. There’s nobody around to see you. Nobody will know that you’ve done this, you know. You’d just as well do this time. Nobody will know it. That’s the most subtle sort of temptation. Who’s gonna know it? Nobody here to tell on you. You’d just as well turn these into bread and have a good meal before you go down into the valley.

But Jesus answered the tempter with a passage of Scripture, saying, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” God, not once in His life, did He ever use this great power for His own comfort.

And never did He use it for His vindication. Constantly there were those who were trying to trap Him, to get Him in a corner. He was harangued continually by the little people who tried to trap Him. Have you ever been pushed into a corner and felt the irritation rising into it until you felt you’d just burst if it didn’t stop? I sometimes wonder if He felt that. Surely did, because it says He was tempted in all points, like as we are, yet without sin, and yet without blowing up.

How we’re tempted to blow up sometimes when we’re pushed, and we say, “Don’t push me around.” There were those who were always pushing Him around. He must have gotten terribly exasperated with it. And yet He never used this divine power to vindicate Himself.

Isn’t that marvelous? And we don’t have to vindicate ourselves. How often we are tempted to vindicate ourselves. We don’t have to. We can just let Christ vindicate us, if we’re worthy. And if we’re not worthy, we just take our vindication.

But if we have truly lived in Him, we can release everything that needs to be vindicated and just turn it over to Him and let Him take care of it. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I will repay.” In other words, don’t worry about having to explain all of this. Just go on. Sweetly and graciously. Taking a walk with Jesus. Following His God.

Rest in Him. Let’s see Jesus in His power. His tremendous power. Every man wants to be powerful. I suppose that is the consuming desire of every man, is to be strong, is to be powerful. And every man, woman, and child wants to be important.

Psychologists and psychiatrists tell us that this is the greatest consuming urge of the human race after the age urge for self-preservation. It’s the desire to be important. We want to be somebody. We want people to recognize us. We want to be looked upon as having some intelligence. We want an important place somewhere. In our church, or in our lodge, or in some sort of organization. And how we do aspire to places of importance.

Jesus had the importance of the eternal God who created the universe. And yet He made Himself of no reputation. Isn’t that a sentence for you to chew on? He made Himself of no reputation. When oftentimes we just give our very souls for some place of reputation. People do sell their souls. Not Christian people. But there are people in the world who sell themselves out for a place of reputation. A place of high standing.

But Jesus made Himself of no reputation. He was able to do this because of His tremendous strength. The greatest strength in the world is the strength of poise. And that greatest poise was demonstrated by Jesus in the night of His accusation and betrayal.

This night is the most potent example of poise and of strength that has ever been penned. Jesus. Who could pass the wine and the bread and say, “This night one of you will betray Me.” And have the poise not to point out Judas.

Not to make him ridiculous even in this hour before his fellows. How important it is to save a man’s face. The Orientals can teach us something in regard to saving face. Above all things, they must save the face. We so often give a man a tongue lashing and tell him off and put him in his place. But Jesus saved the face of even Judas.

And when Peter did… Made the declaration that he would stand by Him, though all men forsook Him, Jesus calmly said, “Before the cock crow, you will deny me Christ.” As calmly as that. And then when they arose and went out into the garden and He dropped on His knees and sweat drops of blood because of the agony, the conflict between the mortal and the divine.

Knowing that He had come for this purpose. And yet He was so human that He suffered the agonies that any man would suffer, knowing that crucifixion was just over the hill. And in that agony, when His disciples fell asleep and could not watch with Him the hour, He said, “Can’t you watch with Me an hour?” And then seeing their weakness. He was as kind with him as a mother would have been with a child who fell asleep. He said, “Sleep on now. Take your rest. The spirit is willing. The flesh is weak.” You really meant, too, your spirit was willing. Oh, what greatness of understanding. What power it took to do that sort of thing. He didn’t criticize them at all. Sleep on. Take your rest. Your spirit is willing.

Such power. Such strength. And then when He was taken before Caiaphas and before Pilate and dragged back and forth that horrible night, spat upon and lashed. See His poise. As He stands there, unflinching, and opened not His mouth.

That is the superlative degree of power, of poise, and of strength. The Chinese have a saying that the man who loses his temper in an argument is the man who has lost the argument. The man who keeps his temper wins. And the man who keeps his poise is the winner. The man who flies into a rage and goes to fighting is lost. That isn’t strength when one loses one’s temper. One is devoid of real strength because he’s lost his poise. We see real strength exemplified in Jesus this terrible night of accusation and trial. Perfect poise. Perfect composure. Going here and there, dragged back and forth. And when they asked Him, “Are You the Christ?” He said, “You said it.”

Such poise. When we want to look at real strength, let us look at this picture. This is the supreme strength of manhood. We’re just beginning to catch a glimpse of it. And we’re just beginning to know that there is a power which man can generate inside of himself. For all power comes from within and from God above. There is a power one can generate within himself which goes out and changes situations.

A little Hindu by the name of Mahatma Gandhi got the idea. He got it from the Sermon on the Mount. The things that Jesus had said. And the way Jesus had lived. And he began to set this great power in motion among his followers. The power of non-resistance.

And he made a tremendous discovery as he was leading his people in non-resistance. He discovered that if the people could keep from fighting back when they were beaten, that they would overcome their oppressors. But if they could love them while they were being beaten, they set in motion a tremendous spiritual power that simply tore the adversary to pieces.

That’s a tremendous truth. If you can love them while they beat you, you will set in motion a tremendous power of the Spirit, which is their complete undoing. That’s a thing that Jesus exemplified before us. And we’re just now catching the truth of it, just a little glimpse, now and again. Did you ever experience a little bit of it? Did you ever scream and yell and fight at somebody who didn’t fight back? And just too calmly and patiently stood your blast of anger and made no retort? If you ever did, I’ll warrant you got madder and madder and madder and madder and madder on the inside until you were ready to burst. You do. You just can’t help it. It’s what it does. It’s like a boomerang. It goes out and… It hits right back at you. And you send out another barrage and it goes… You get it again. And the longer you send the barrages, the more surely they come right back and the sword enters your own heart.

That is the power of a loving spirit. A non-resisting spirit. Jesus knew it. He taught it. He exemplified it. And He said that peace should come on earth through goodwill among men. Goodwill. That’s the heart of non-resisting. Goodwill. Just love them while they beat you. That’s goodwill.

And that brings peace. I’ve made this tremendous discovery that the people who have the power to hurt me are my equals or my superiors. Chew on it. Take an inventory. Little people can’t hurt me. A three-year-old child may say something unkind to me, but it doesn’t hurt me. It’s just a three-year-old. Don’t you know? A three-year-old can’t hurt you. He may yell something bad, but you just pass on. It doesn’t bother you. It’s just a three-year-old child, and you put it right there. Now, a three-year-old can hurt a five-year-old terribly. And the five-year-old will go yelling, “Mama, he did this to me.”

But a three-year-old doesn’t hurt a 25-year-old. Because the 25-year-old just understands that it’s a little child. When anybody hurts your feelings, take an inventory. How big are you? In the spirit. Are you a three-year-old, too? And if we be lost in Him, we’re not on a five-year-old’s level.

Jesus looked down from the cross and said, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” And if we be lost in Christ, we can look at lots of people, and with compassion, as we would say for a three-year-old child having a tantrum, “Father, forgive that one. They just don’t know what they’re up to. They don’t understand the forces that are causing them to do this. Forgive them. They just don’t know.”

And when we are lost in Christ and lifted up in Him, we can forgive because it’s His understanding that shines through us. And our little self is not being hurt because we are clothed in His presence and His love.

Probably, if we would just think of that once in a while, it would help us a lot. Once I was terribly hurt by a woman, terribly hurt by a woman, and when I began to analyze it, I found out she had more degrees than I had.

She had more money than I had. She had more of everything but the love of God. And then I began to take stock of myself, and I decided that that stock was running a little bit low in me or I would not have allowed myself to be hurt by her.

We can all have an infinite supply of the love of God. And you need none of you be bankrupt there. You can have so much of the love of God that it just flows out and washes over the hurts and the thing that comes out towards you to hurt you, and the love of God can cover all bitterness and wash away all of the hurts of life. I wonder if there’s anybody here who doesn’t have a problem.

Anybody here who doesn’t have any problems at all? Hold up your hand. Well, we’re in one accord, aren’t we? Indeed, we are. The only person in the world who doesn’t have a problem is a person of no intelligence whatsoever.

Just the little utter morons in institutions, they don’t have any problems. But people who have minds have problems because the solving of the problems is the way in which we develop. God gives us our problems and we can grow on them. That’s what they’re for, to develop our muscles spiritually, to make strong personalities. Bless your problem. It’s a good thing to have. If you didn’t have this one, you’d have another one. Maybe it’d be worse. So just give thanks for your problem. It’s an opportunity to manifest the grace of God and the power of God in your life and in your affairs.

But as long as we have problems, we can take those problems to Jesus and let His love shine on them. And the love has a way of melting the hurt in problems. The problems aren’t always solved, but the keen hurt in it is melted by the love of Christ.

I have a very crude illustration that I like to use once in a while, a way in which I like to let the sunshine of God’s love flow over me and to melt me and cleanse me because about every so often, you know, I have to go over my house and clean it up. There’s a dust that gets over things and there’s lint that gets under the bed and sometimes I wonder, where on earth does all this come from? Did you women ever wonder that too? I just wonder where all that lint shakes off of, where all the dust comes from. Every so often, we have to go through a cleaning process. Every so often, I have to go through the drawers of my desk. They get in a terrible littered state and I have to straighten things up and throw things away. A wastebasket’s a splendid thing to have around the house. And every so often, I need to go over my life and go through a right, good inventory and take stock of what I have in the cabinet drawers of my mind and my emotions and use a wastebasket and throw a lot of things away. Things have a way of sticking to us that we don’t need. We need to get rid of them.

Turn them loose. And way back in the Old Testament, the Lord told Moses, if anything got mildewed, to take it out in the sun. That’s a wonderful recipe for cleaning. And often, when I clean house, I carry the bedding and put it all out on the clothesline while I’m cleaning the bedroom and cleaning out the closet. You do too? Gets a good sunning. Sometimes I feel like I need a right, good sunning. And I just take myself like an old-style suitcase without any pockets or partitions and just throw myself open. Is there anything on earth that’s more open than an old-style suitcase with just two sides? I don’t know of anything. It can just blare open on the bed, you know, when you open it up. There it is, open, exposed. And then you take that old suitcase and toss it out on the grass and let the sun shine in it when it comes up in the morning and let the sun shine straight down into it when it’s overhead at noon and sun out all the cracks and the corners and the crevices and leave it there until the afternoon sun shines into it. And in the late afternoon you pick up that old suitcase and take it in and it smells sweet.

It’s had a good sunning. It’s not musty. Sometimes we ourselves need to open ourselves to the light of God and expose every crack and cranny of our minds and of our emotions, of our thoughts, our desires, our intentions, our purposes, and let the sunlight of God pour into us and clean out some of the mildew. It’s kind of like the dust and the dirt. Where does it come from? But every so often we find that there’s some of it gathered in our souls.

Something has crept in. We didn’t intend for it to. We were so busy. We were so busy about this, that, and the other. We didn’t have a time to take a walk with Jesus last week. And we find there’s some must and some mold and some mildew. And decked up down in the corner, there’s some false ambition and some prejudice and some pride.

And we need to open ourselves to the light of God for His cleansing. Let’s open ourselves for the light of God’s cleansing this morning as we turn our eyes upon Jesus. Upon Jesus in His strength, of His holiness, of His power, and of His poise. And then let us think of Jesus in His gentleness and quietness.

There is great strength in gentleness, great men are gentle men. And the greater a man becomes, the more gentle he becomes, the less ruthless, the less hard and belligerent. Oh, the gentleness of Jesus. With the strength which simply stops our heart as we look at Him that terrible night of crucifixion, and yet with the gentleness which would take a child and set it in the midst of His disciples and say, “Except you become as a child.”

Non-grasping, simple, gentle. Oh, the gentleness of the Master. How great is gentleness. What wonderful things are accomplished by gentleness. It’s like the very life of God that causes growth in a grain of corn. How silent, how gentle is the growing process. And a grain of corn falls into the earth and very silently, very gently, very gradually, the little seed of life begins to swell, the grain of corn is burst, and the little shoot comes silently out of the darkness into the light.

All greatness has its root in silence, the stillness of God. “Be still and know that I am God.” And we think of the prophet who went into the mountains and he saw an earthquake as he looked for God, but God was not in the earthquake. He saw a great wind, but God was not in the wind. And after all of these tempestuous things had passed by, there was a still, small voice, or as one translation puts it, the voice of a gentle stillness.

And there was God in the voice of a gentle stillness. If we are to know God, we must find Him in the stillness of our own hearts. It’s good to listen to sermons and to lectures. It’s profitable to take instruction from others. But those who know God best are those who wait long periods of time in stillness before Him, for that’s when God speaks to us in the stillness. When we come into direct communication with Him, “Be still and know that I am God.” “They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings of eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and faint not.” Wait, I say, on the Lord.

Oh, let us wait on the Lord in these days in this camp. Let us look to Jesus. Let us gaze at Him until He shall be able to look deep into our very hearts and to implant there the impression of His likeness upon our soul.

That’s what this camp is for. Let’s keep Jesus central. We are all where we are spiritually because of Christ Jesus. Where would Starr Daily be if it were not for Christ Jesus? And Starr knows what Christ Jesus has meant to him.

And as I have heard him year after year speak of the power of love, and Starr is never as powerful as he is when he talks of love. A great man who can rise to the gentleness of love and there reach his supreme quality of greatness. The love of Christ constrains us. I wouldn’t be anything if it weren’t for Christ. None of us can claim anything for ourselves.

We’re all just the sinners saved by grace. There are no righteous people except the self-righteous and they are the least righteous. So we’re all humble sinners lifting up hands of gratitude to the saving grace of God through Christ Jesus.

That’s our joy. And as Paul said, God forbid that I should glory in anything except the cross of Jesus Christ. And if Paul with all of his training and his education and his fine background could say that, how much more can you and I say it? God forbid that I should glory in anything except the redemptive cross of Jesus Christ.

Shall we pray? Our blessed Christ Jesus, we pray that we may see Thee this day at the very beginning of this camp and that we may hold Thee uppermost in our minds throughout all of this camp and that the theme of this whole camp shall be Jesus Christ and His great redemptive love for humanity.

Help us, O Christ, to keep Thee in this center. Let nothing else come into that center but just Thy own self and Thy love. Help us to see Thee in every message. Help us to see Thee in every activity as Thou dost unfold to us wholeness of life, for Thou hast said, “I am come that they might have life and have it abundantly.” All of this camp is for the bringing about of abundant life through Christ Jesus. So, Jesus, help us to see Thee and Thee only, high and lifted up above every man and everything.

Help us to walk with Thee every morning, to wait in Thy presence every night until Thou can stamp the image of Thy likeness upon our humble hearts, for we pray it in Thy precious name. Amen.