48 Sunday: Growth in Making the Home Christian; Monday: Growth in Appreciation; Tuesday: “Prompted by Her Mother”; Wednesday: The Lamp; Thursday: In the City and in the Home; Friday: Holding the Home Together; Saturday: “This Is a New People”
Week 49 Sunday: Cosmic Optimism; Monday: Failures; Tuesday: Dwelling in Tombs; Wednesday: “There Is No!”; Thursday: Kuchha or Puckha? Friday: “From Henceforth”; Saturday: An Inner Corrective
Week 50 Sunday: Stone That the Builders Rejected; Monday: We Look at Some Rejected Stones; Tuesday: The Love Motive: A Rejected Stone; Wednesday: The Kingdom of God: Another Rejected Stone; Thursday: The Kingdom of God Is Near; Friday: Redemption: A Rejected Stone; Saturday: The Realism of Jesus: A Rejected Stone
Week 51 Sunday: Our Central Need Met; Monday: The Modern Mood of Despair: Why? Tuesday: Made Narrow and Saved from Narrowness; Wednesday: Given Experience and Saved from Experience; Thursday: He Saves from Laziness; Friday: He Will Save His People; Saturday: “Your Hour”; “My Time”
Week 52 Sunday: “Amid All These Things”; Monday: “Conquerors”; Tuesday: “More”; Wednesday: Perpetual Parentage; Thursday: “More Than Conquerors”; Friday: The Basis of Being More Than Conquerors; Saturday: The Basis of Our Certainty
Special Meditations
Conclusion: The Fixed Abode; Christmas: The Sign Is a Babe
Publisher’s Preface
Publisher’s Preface
Abingdon Press is delighted to bring back into print Victorious Living. Originally published in 1936, Victorious Living was inspired by a letter E. Stanley Jones received from a reader of one of his earlier books. Victorious Living, his response, has touched the lives of people around the world.
For this edition, the publisher has made some minor revisions. The updates include spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and some language usage and references that would distract or confuse the reader. References to humanity, no longer expressed as men and mankind, have been updated. Some references to God have been recast to avoid masculine pronouns. In the prayers, thee, thou, and thine have been changed to you, your, and yours. The term African American is used in this edition. A major undertaking to provide source citations where none existed was often but not always successful. Every effort was made to retain E. Stanley Jones’s voice for today’s readers, so there have been very few changes to content or style.
The publisher acknowledges with gratitude the efforts of Dean Merrill to keep the works of E. Stanley Jones available to readers in recent years.
Foreword
Foreword
So Much the Better
I used to play racquetball three times a week. My favorite T-shirt bore these words: “The older I get, the better I was.” Aging is mostly another way of talking about “so much the worse.” For some special individuals, however, the more time passes “so much the better.” E. Stanley Jones is one of those few historical figures whose life and writings seem to get better—-more rewarding, more relevant, more magical—the more time passes.
E. Stanley Jones (1884–1973) was a Methodist missionary most known for indigenizing Christian faith in Hindu culture. A preacher, evangelist, and best-selling author who gave away all his royalties, Jones was a prolific writer and speaker who preached more than sixty thousand sermons, twenty thousand more than John Wesley himself. Jones was also an early human rights advocate both in India and in the USA.
Jones went to India in 1907 as a missionary when just twenty-three years old, and stayed there for fifty years. Very early in his career, Jones urged Indian Christians to remain within their culture. He was convinced that Christianity could be truly indigenous in every culture. For example, we translate “Logos” as “Word,” as in John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (emphasis added). But God doesn’t think in “words.” God’s original “word” for dirt is the dirt. God’s original “word” for flower is the flower. God’s original word for “water” is the water. God’s original “word” for wind is the wind.
God’s original “word” for Truth is Jesus. In Jones’s theology, God speaks the language of incarnation. Since there are no words outside of languages, if God spoke in “words,” what language does God speak? God speaks the language of love, the language each of us hears. And the mission of Jesus, helped by the missionary, is to speak Jesus in every language of the world.
The foundation of faith, Jones believed, was not the superiority of Christianity but the supremacy of Christ. When you think of E. Stanley Jones you think of one thing: Jesus. Jones didn’t talk or write about Christianity or about being a Christian. He was all about Jesus, or what he called the “treasure” of Jesus. The kingdom of God is not a geographic domain with set boundaries and settled decrees, but a set of relationships in which Christ is Sovereign.
In Jones’s theology, what made paradise paradise was not pearly gates or golden pavement. Not crystal fountains or jasper walls. Not endless buffets or perpetual Bible studies. Jesus makes paradise “paradise.” Jesus’ paradise calls all of us not to “settle down” in our dwellings or our religious systems or our routines, but to “settle in” to a new paradigm of living. In fact, Jesus leaves us more unsettled than settled, and Jones left his contemporaries unsettled with his non-goring of sacred cows. E. Stanley Jones’s Jesus takes us where we’ve never been, by paths we’d never take, even as he calls us to go further.
While Jesus is the head of the church, Jones insisted that he is not the church’s private property nor can he be held hostage by it. Jesus belongs to the world. Jones presented Jesus as a universal Christ, belonging to all cultures and races and the answer to all human need. In his first book, The Christ of the Indian Road (1925), Jones made this point clear with a threefold approach for the embodiment of Jesus in all cultures.
First, E. Stanley Jones held his lectures (not sermons) in public halls, a neutral ground for non-Christians. After a lecture he would reserve the next two hours for interactions with the audience, and would answer any question anyone chose to pose.
Second, Jones sponsored Round-Table Conferences at which he positioned himself as a learner and receiver, willing to be changed and open to conversion himself. At these Round-Table conversations, representatives of different faiths, including agnostics and atheists, would be invited to share what their faith or lack thereof meant to them in experience. “Tell us all what you have found through your faith,” Jones would sincerely ask. “What does it do for you in your everyday life?”
Third, Jones believed that each culture must write a fifth gospel—“the gospel according to. . . .” He symbolized the incarnation of faith in indigenous culture by taking a Sanskrit word and baptizing it for religious purposes. In Sanskrit, for example, Ashram means a place of withdrawal from the everyday world of work, or it can mean a place of intensified experience, including the most intense “experience” of all—PRAYER. In every Jones Ashram, Jesus became the guru or teacher.
E. Stanley Jones’s life and service in India brought him into contact, and ultimately into a close friendship, with Mahatma Gandhi. As Gandhi worked out his own version and vision of protest—both against the British rulers of his country and the divisive caste system of his own countrymen—Jones offered Gandhi the example of Jesus as a possible model to follow. Jones suggested to Gandhi that the gospel of the kingdom defined options of love and suffering as ways and means to the end of peace and justice. Gandhi is famous for his quotation “I would suggest, first, that all of you Christians . . . must begin to live
