Week 6 Sunday
Week 6 Sunday
Cultivation
Ephesians 4:11-16; Colossians 2:6-7; 1 John 1:7
You have now taken the preliminary steps in beginning the Christian way. Remember it is a way, and not merely a decision once made. A Christian is one who is responding to all the meanings he or she finds in Christ. Those meanings will unfold as you respond to them, but only as you respond to them. Those meanings will become meaningless unless you respond.
So many start well, but soon the glory fades, and they settle down to respectable mediocrity, without the spark of contagion. This often happens in the minister. One pulpit I have seen has a fire extinguisher fastened underneath. The precautions are probably unnecessary. No fire would break out in that pulpit! The life was not contagious. I remember one man’s prayer, “O God, grant that if any spark of divine grace has been kindled in this meeting, water that spark.” Many of our sparks have been dampened out of existence, put out by mere neglect.
If conversion (through gestation and birth) is the first law of the spiritual life, then cultivation is the second law, the growth and flowering phases of the spiritual life. The way to fight disease germs is to raise the tone of health in the total organism, and the fact of health throws off the germs as they come; they are expelled by health. When disease germs do get a footing, then nature sends up the temperature into fever in order to get rid of the germs.
Professor William James speaks of religion as “dull habit” or “acute fever.”* If religion is going to be an acute fever, burning up disease germs in the process, you will have to cultivate it.
I went into a radio station and noticed that the room was marked off into portions: “Live End”; “Semi-live End”; “Dead End.” You and I can live in the live end of the Christian faith, the semi-live end, or the dead end.
If we are going to be a plus sign and not a minus sign, we shall have to face all enemies and down them by taking hold of the resources of God.
O God, I have begun this way. I am all eagerness to continue. This new life has the feel of the real and the eternal upon it. I would therefore cultivate my spiritual health so that it will have enough and to spare. Lead on; I follow—follow with the consent of all my being. Amen.
* The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, 1936), 8.
Week 6 Monday
Segregating Our Enemies
Matthew 15:19-20; Galatians 5:19-21; 2 Timothy 3:2-5
We come now to the stage where we must examine specifically some of the mental and spiritual disease germs that throw disruption and disease into human living. There is a “par” life, but many of us are living below par; and when we do, disease germs rush in and gain a footing. We must now try to segregate those disease germs, so that we can deal with them intelligently and effectively.
When I wrote Is the Kingdom of God Realism? I segregated four enemies of the human personality: resentments, anger, and hate; fear, worry, and anxiety; self-centeredness; a sense of guilt. In the subsequent discussions it was found that while these four are basic enemies, the list must be added to by other major enemies. In the weeks of study, discussion, spiritual quest in our Ashrams in America, we finally fixed upon fifteen major enemies. Under them were grouped lesser enemies, but these fifteen were the seed enemies:
(1) A lack of faith in and loyalty to Something beyond oneself, a Something that gives ultimate meaning, coherence, and goal to life; (2) self-centeredness;(3) anger, resentments, hate; (4) fear, worry, anxiety; (5) a sense of unresolved guilt; (6) negativism and inferiority attitudes; (7) undisciplined desires; (8) insincerity, conscious and unconscious; (9) divided loyalties; (10) unbalanced virtues; (11) ignorance and lack of judgment; (12) physical disharmony; (13) an unchristian social order; (14) lack of a total life discipline; (15) lack of a positive, outgoing love.
Please do not think that these enemies are merely spiritual, throwing disruption only into the soul; they are enemies of the total life, causing physical disease, mental disruption, and spiritual disharmony and decay. They attack the total person. They may begin in one portion, but in the end they extend their effects to all.
O God, I thank you that I see my enemies. I have brought the hidden ones into the light. They are many, and they attack me in subtle, unseen ways. But I am not dismayed. If sin abounds, your grace abounds much more. In that confidence I face them all, expecting you to give me nerve and courage and strength to down them one by one, or perhaps all at once. Amen.
Week 6 Tuesday
You Are Made for Loyalty to God
Matthew 9:20-22; Mark 10:51-52; Romans 8:11
We now take up these fifteen enemies and face them one by one. The first is one that we have been dealing with in our preliminary study: the lack of faith in and loyalty to Something beyond oneself, a Something that gives ultimate meaning, coherence, and goal to life. We, of course, believe that Something is a Someone: God.
But whether or not you believe that “Something beyond oneself” is God, the basic necessity is the same. In order to be well, in order to be the kind of person you ought to be, you must believe in something beyond yourself and be loyal to it. Why? The answer is that you are made that way, structurally made that way. That way is stamped into your being. Is that the statement of a minister, who is, therefore, prejudiced? All right, then take the statement of Carl Jung, who certainly was not prejudiced in religious direction.
Dr. Jung (to a patient): “You are suffering from loss of faith in God and in a future life.”
Patient: “But, Dr. Jung, do you believe these doctrines are true?”
Dr. Jung: “That is no business of mine. I am a doctor, not a priest. I can only tell you that if you recover your faith you will get well. If you don’t, you won’t.”*
Why did this famous psychiatrist say that? For the simple reason that he had found by experience that life works that way. Life needs something outside the self to fasten its love and loyalty to, or it will break down. I deal with hundreds of cases myself. The last one was an intelligent woman with a lovely family of four and a faithful husband. Because her husband would not go to church with her, she gave up going herself, gradually lost her faith in God, then lost interest in her family, then nervously broke, and has been in the hands of the doctors for months. There is nothing wrong with her except that when God faded out, the meaning dropped out of life, and the whole of life sagged with it, with resultant nerve collapse. She has now found God again and, with God, the basis of health. After she found God, she slept that very night without a sleeping draught, the first time for months.
O God, can my lungs do without air, my eyes do without light, my heart do without love, my aesthetic nature do without beauty, my conscience do without truth? No more can I do without you, you Life of my life, you Soul of my soul. I belong to you as glove to hand. Amen.
* Published source unknown.
Week 6 Wednesday
Substitutes for God
Ephesians 2:12-22
If faith in and loyalty to Something beyond oneself—Something that will give ultimate meaning, coherence, and goal to life—is necessary to health, then may it not be that faith in anything beyond oneself may be a substitute for God? Art, music, patriotism, causes of various kinds—will these not take the place of God? Why is God necessary?
There is no doubt whatever that all these interests will help to lift you out of yourself and are thereby real helps, but they do not ultimately hit the spot. For the last portion of the statement is important: “a Something that gives ultimate meaning, coherence, and goal to life.” Do the things mentioned as substitutes give ultimate meaning, coherence, and goal? They may give local and temporary meanings to portions of life, and may therefore give local and temporary coherence to life, but if they lack “total meaning” and “ultimate goal,” then the meaning and the coherence drop to pieces. None of these things give ultimate meaning and goal to life, except God; therefore only God can make life cohere. Paul says of Christ, “In him all things hold together [cohere]” (Col. 1:17). They do, for God is ultimate Being, the human life of God.
Everything less than God will let you down. Émile Coué introduced the method of autosuggestion, of saying to yourself, “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” This is good, but not good enough, for Coué died of a broken heart because the newspapers of the world and people in general made fun of his method. He could not stand that poking of fun. His own method should have made him able to stay strong in spite of his detractors. But he couldn’t take it on the chin and get up smiling. His lifting-himself-with-his-bootstrap method failed him. It wasn’t rooted in eternal reality; hence it let him down in the pinch.*
As a friend started on a world speaking tour, a very wise old lady said, “Give them nothing less than God.” Anything less than God will let you down.
O God, only those rooted in you, the Eternal, can stand up under life. They can take it. I, too, would be able to take it. Then let all my being be rooted in you—my thoughts rooted in your thoughts, my emotions rooted in your love, my will rooted in your will. Then shall I live. Amen.
* Source for this information is unknown.
Week 6 Thursday
Beginning the Practice of the Presence of God
Luke 15:1-10; Ephesians 2:8; Hebrews 11:1
A little girl was dying of meningitis. She asked, “Where is God?” When told that God was in the room, she replied, “Then how do I find him?” There are many answers to that question.
(1) You do not have to find God; you have to allow God to find you. If the New Testament teaches us anything, it teaches us not merely man’s search for God but also God’s search for man.
Up vistaed hopes I sped; . . .
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”*
You must put yourself in the way of being found by God—that is, stop running away.
(2) Turn toward God in an attitude of expectancy. Faith is expectancy.
(3) Act as though God is, and is with you, and with you now.
(4) Set up little habits that will express that fact. Renowned missionary Dr. Frank Laubach suggests several, including: walking on the inside of the pavement with the suggestion that your Divine Companion is walking on the curb side; leaving a vacant chair at the table as a symbol of the Invisible Presence in it.
(5) Order your day on the basis of a Divine partnership in it.
(6) Play the Game of Minutes: See how many times an hour you can think of God. Count the minutes you were successful.
(7) Take some time off during the day to quiet your heart in God’s presence: “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10).
(8) As you take a breath, say to yourself: “As this physical breath I am taking in is cleansing the blood in my lungs from all impurities, so the breath of God, when I take it within my whole being, purifies my inner life.”
O God, I now begin the practice of living in you—I am actually practicing the presence of God. Be in all things great and small. And the small things become great, and the great things become possible. How wonderful to live on this cooperative plan! Amen.
* From Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven (Portland, Me.: Thomas B. Mosher, 1911), 3.
Week 6 Friday
Get the Center Right
Hebrews 3:7-15
You have to relate yourself to four worlds: (1) yourself; (2) things; (3) other people; (4) God. Until you relate yourself to God in fellowship and obedience, none of the other three relationships will come out right. You will be out of sorts with yourself, with things, and with others, until you get the center right. When you get the center right, the circumference takes care of itself. Said a wife concerning her husband, “He has a brilliant mind, but he will not rest in the Eternal.” Hence he was restless with himself, with things, with his fellow beings.
The chapel steeple of a great university, where the minister is humanistic, has a weather vane on it instead of a cross, symbolic of the fact that people point in every direction, turned by the winds of circumstance, until they have a faith in and a committal to God. That gives an unchanging steadiness to life.
Then why is it that people do not rest in God? Because they try to rest in something else. They love God with the top of their minds but not with the bottom of their souls. Something else holds the bottom of their affections. That deep affection then decides their thinking, for people think more with their emotions than with their minds. The affections draw reasons to themselves as a magnet draws iron filings.
People lose faith in God not so much by honest doubt as by dishonest sin. A brilliant headmaster talked beautifully about faith in God; and he had it. Then his faith changed. He gave a commencement address and shocked everybody by saying, “Christianity is outworn; it has lost its hold on the world.” At the bottom of that decay of faith was a decay of morals. He had begun to keep a mistress. He was dismissed in disgrace. The mind had tried to find reasons to justify the emotions.
After one of my meetings, a banker walked the floor all night, and his daughter wept the long night through. Both had sin in their lives and would not rest in the Eternal. Hence their restlessness.
O God, I cannot rest until I rest in you. I am made for you, as the eye is made for light; so I cannot find my peace except in your will. Your will is my peace. Oh, let me settle down in you. Let the wandering, restless needle of my affections at last rest in you, Polestar of my life. I do, I do at last rest in you. Amen.
Week 6 Saturday
Having Our Being in God
Hebrews 4:16; 6:9-12; 10:39
Life is a restless, disrupted thing until we give ourselves to Something beyond ourselves, until we obey Something ultimate, and obey it supremely. Science corroborates that. A doctor said to me, “If three quarters of my patients found God, they would be well.” A psychiatrist in Hollywood, who is paid handsomely by his disrupted patients of filmdom, said to a friend, “Most of my patients do not need me; they need a mourner’s bench; they need God.”
This being true, then, why do not more of us find God and live by God? Here is one reason: The harboring of moral wrong makes God unreal. We will know as much of God as we are willing to put into practice, and no more.
Another reason is a lack of appropriating faith. Paul says, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). We do live and move in God, for God is the inescapable. We can deny God only with the very powers God gives us. We must perforce live and move in God even when throttling God in our lives. And yet we do not “have our being” in God. We live on surface roots; the taproot has not gone down into God. We do not have our very being in God. We fail to appropriate God’s amazing resources. And we fail because we do not take. And yet nothing is simpler.
Jesus says, “You believe—believe in God and also in me” (John 14:1 Moffatt). Note, “You believe.” Belief is the habit of your life; you have to believe in order to live. If you should start a day without faith, you wouldn’t eat your breakfast in the morning, for you wouldn’t be quite sure it wasn’t poisoned; the eating would be an act of faith in the cook. You wouldn’t go to the university because you wouldn’t be quite sure the professor would be there; the going would be an act of faith in your teacher. All day long you exercise faith. You live by it. Life would be paralyzed without it. Now then, says Jesus, “You believe—believe in God.” Since you do believe, then believe in the highest: God. Why expend your faith on lesser things and refuse to give it to the highest?
O God, I see that faith is not some extraneous thing introduced from without. I must live by it or not live at all. Then I take this everyday necessity of life and fasten it upon you, source of my very life. From this moment, I not only live and move in you, I have my being in you as well. I will draw my very life from you. Amen.