And, softly, now, when you get to the end of telling what you know, listen quietly, don’t go to digging into books for something to tell your class or the meeting or the crowd.  Don’t do that.  Books have their place, good books, but it’s always a sharply secondary place, or third, or lower down yet.  Poor crowd that must be fed on retailed books worked over!  Don’t do that. Know more. Know Jesus better.  Trust Him more fully.  Risk more on following where He clearly leads.  Then you can tell more and better.

Sometimes I’m asked, “How can I have more faith?” Well, not by thinking about your faith.  Not by books or definitions chiefly, however they may help some.  I can tell you how:  Follow where the Master’s quiet voice is clearly calling. Go where it is plain to you that that pierced hand is leading.

“Ah! but the way is a bit narrow,” you think.  “And it’s steep.  There are sharp-edged stones under foot.  And those bushes are growing rank on both sides narrowing the path.  And thorns scratch and hurt and sting.  This other road where I am now—­this is a good Christian road.  My Christian brothers are here.  I’d rather stay here.”

And so you stay.  You don’t say “no” to the calling voice.  You simply act “no.”  No wonder you get confused and tangled.  It’s only in the path of following clear leading that there comes sweetest peace, with no nagging doubts and mental confusion.  There only will you have more faith, know more of Him, touch with whom is the realest faith.  And so only will the witness be told out to the crowd on the street of your life, of the power and satisfying peace of this Jesus.

This is the witnessing we’re sent to do.  And the crowds crowd to listen, when it’s given.  This is the way the Witness did.  He followed the clear Father-voice, though the road led straight across the regular roads through thorn hedges and thick underbrush.  Should not the servant tread it still?

The word that John uses here underneath our English word witness is the word from which our English word martyr comes.  And martyr has come to mean one who gives his life clear out in a violent way for the truth he believes.  But, do you know, that is easy.  “Easy?” You say, “Surely not, you’re certainly wrong there.”  No, you are right.  It is not easy.  To face a storm of lead, or feel the sharp-edged blade, or yield to the eating flame,—­that is never easy.

But this is what I mean.  There’s the heroic in it, and that helps.  You brace yourself for it.  The terrible crisis comes.  You pull together and pray and resolutely, desperately, face it.  A little while, and it’s over.  You’ve been true in the sharp crisis.  You have taken a place with the noble army of martyrs.  And we who hear of it have a martyr’s halo about your head.

But there’s something immensely harder to do.  Without making a whit less than it is the splendid courage of martyrdom, there’s something that takes immensely more courage, and a deeper longer-seasoned heroism, and that is to be a living martyr, to bear the simple true witness tactfully but clearly, when it takes the very life of your life to do it, though it doesn’t take your bodily life in a violent way.