Jesus Christ lifted our fear by giving us the capacity to face things that happen to us and to make something out of them. In Mastery , E. Stanley Jones shows us how to attain the moral and spiritual mastery that came to the disciples on the Day of Pentecost. He demonstrates that mastery of living comes not by being tense and anxious, but by being receptive to the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. In daily inspirational readings, affirmations, and prayers for one full year, Jones offers us guidance in mastering our lives.guidance in mastering our lives. Called "the world's greatest missionary evangelist" by Time magazine in 1938, E. Stanley Jones (1884-1973) spent 70 years presenting Jesus Christ as the universal Son of Man without the trappings of Western culture. His message had a life-changing impact on the millions of people who heard him speak or read his books. Mastery The Art Of Mastering Life By E. Stanley Jones Abingdon Press Copyright © 2017 ABINGDON PRESS All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-5018-4963-3 CHAPTER 1 Week 1 Sunday The Master Philippians 2:9-11 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 — BC and AD. 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 that 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 that 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 people into masterfulness. That sounds like a strong-man stunt. It wasn't. It was all done quietly, unobtrusively, and effortlessly. People 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. O Lord, as we begin this quest for mastery, save our feet from bypaths and help us to walk the Way — Your Way. Amen. AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I will know mastery to the degree that I know the Master. Week 1 Monday The Master Imparts His Mastery Luke 24:45-49 We come now to study how ordinary people got in touch with extraordinary power and did extraordinary things beyond their power of accomplishment. This account of the divine reinforcement is found in the "Acts of the Apostles," or as it has been called, "The Acts of the Holy Spirit through the Apostles." And yet that too is scarcely accurate; for the movement, as we shall see, transcended the apostles, was given over into the hands of a lay group that went beyond the apostles and went on sometimes in spite of the apostles. The movement used whatever instruments were at hand and sensitive to the spirit and goal of this amazing redemption. The Acts of the Apostles is the bridge between the Gospels and the Epistles. Without it there is a vacuum. How did the Christianity of Jesus become the Christianity of Paul? The Acts tells us. It is the transition from the Jesus of history to the Christ of experience, the transition from the localized Teacher to the universal Transformer. In the Acts the ideas of Jesus became flesh; they became incarnate in a group; they walked. And they not only walked, they ran; they danced along life's way; they sang; they shouted; they laid healing hands on the souls, the minds, the bodies, of people and made them whole, every whit whole. And in the process they quietly laid the mines of thought and idea that blew existing civilizations to pieces and turned the world upside down and laid the foundations of a New Order, the kingdom of God. This description comes in retrospect. At the time the movement seemed a local tempest in a teapot instead of a clea