Week 12 Sunday
Week 12 Sunday
In Quietness and Confidence
Proverbs 1:33; 3:23-26; Isaiah 30:15; 33:24
Last week we finished on the note of meeting today, today. This is sound psychology, for it gives us inward freedom from distraction. This is important, for all distraction is destruction. All the energies can be gathered up into constructive achievement and not frittered away with senseless worry.
Now step off and look at the situation in a detached way: “Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.” Today isn’t so bad; is it? It has its troubles, but they are bearable. Even at its worst, today is bearable. Said a youth who had lost both legs and both arms in the war, “Thank God, I’ve still my health and strength left!” And more, he had an unconquerable soul left. With such a soul, you can meet anything that belongs to today.
If the whole day seems too difficult, then divide it up into hours. You are meeting this hour now with your full resources. Pack it with God and God’s resources. Throw all your energies into meeting the enemies as they come one by one. Keep them segregated and fight them one at a time. And fight them, not by strained endeavor, but by quiet faith.
That leads to the next step: (9) Say over and over: “In quietness and confidence shall be my strength.” Note two things here—quietness and confidence. You must quiet everything in the presence of God. Still your being before God and drink in the quiet strength. Let God’s healing quiet get into every pore of your being, bathing the tired and restless nerve cells with healing.
But quietness alone will not be enough; confidence is necessary. Quietness is passive, and we must be passive to God; but confidence is active, and we must be active to God. Note the kind of activity, for confidence is con “with,” fideo “faith.” In other words, it is not an alone faith; it is a faith “with,” a faith with God’s faith. Your faith and God’s faith flow together, and hence can do anything.
My Lord, I begin to see that my poor faith alone is not all that is left to battle with life’s sorrows and troubles. I have my faith plus yours. And that “plus” is enough and more than enough. I will work life no longer on the unit principle but on the cooperative plan. I am no longer afraid—not with you. Amen.
Week 12 Monday
Faith in God’s Faith
Psalm 23
We did not quite finish the step of the inward repetition of the words “In quietness and confidence shall be my strength.” If confidence is having faith with God, then the Christian life is not lifting oneself by the bootstraps. It is linking our littleness with God’s greatness, our incompleteness with God’s completeness. It is doing what the little boy did when he offered his five loaves and two fishes to Christ. That multitude could not be fed without his cooperation, and the feeding couldn’t be done with his five loaves and fishes alone. He and Christ together did everything necessary (see John 6:1-14).
Very often, when I haven’t faith in my faith, I have to have faith in God’s faith. God makes me believe in myself and my possibilities when I simply can’t. I have to rise to God’s faith in me. A woman who was inwardly collapsed said to me, “Well, I have no faith of my own, but I do have faith in your faith.”
“Good,” I replied, “take faith in my faith as a first step, and then you will go on to something infinitely better, faith in God’s faith.” With faith in God’s faith you can do anything, anything that ought to be done.
There is a passage that touches your need. “For the Eternal your God . . . will not let you go” (Deut. 4:31 Moffatt). Faith is not merely your holding on to God; it is God holding on to you. God will not let you go!
As Walt Whitman puts it, “Not till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you.”* Then keep saying to your soul, “your strength is quiet faith” (Isa. 30:15 Moffatt).
Then repeat to your soul these words: “To say what ought to be cannot be is a brief and a complete statement of atheism.” It is. Say to yourself, “What ought to be can be, and I will make it so.” And you will. You will go beyond yourself.
One saint keeps repeating, “God is. God is here with me.” That creates confidence and faith.
O living Christ, I see that life is communion—a union with you. Not merely in the quiet segregated moments, but in the moments of stress and strain, and I now see I can be the happy warrior, for I am drawing heavily on your power and going forth in your confidence. I can actually do what I can’t. I thank you, I thank you. Amen.
* “To a Common Prostitute,” Leaves of Grass (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1902), 299.
Week 12 Tuesday
Surrendering Our Fears
Matthew 8:26; Luke 9:47-48; 1 John 4:17-18
We come now to the next step: (10) Surrender the thing you fear into the hands of God. Turn it right over to God and ask God to solve it with you. Fear is keeping things in your own hands; faith is turning them over into the hands of God—and leaving them there.
There was the case of Mrs. ___ (but how I dislike the word case, for she was a person suffering deeply). Sorrow and pain left her with an upset heart. She was in her bed for a year, and had various treatments. She came to a gathering some distance away and told me she was afraid she would die on the way, as her heart began behaving very badly indeed. Her uppermost thought was, “How expensive it will be to ship back my body to my home.” After a talk with her, I saw that anxiety and worry were causing the functional disturbance of the heart. The disturbance was not imaginary; it was very real, but caused by worry and fear. I got her to surrender the whole matter to God. She did. The strained lines on her face relaxed, and she began to act like a normal person. But let her tell the story:
Let me say that my body was not shipped home, but that I was very much alive, and scarcely tired when I reached home after a 550-mile drive in one day! And there has been no relapse since coming home. This recovery is so real; it is not neurotic, for my nerves are becoming steady, and my heart is beginning to act like a normal heart should. It is wonderful. . . . When the doctor saw me yesterday, he said: “Something has happened to you since you were here before. There is a transformation in you which is almost unbelievable. What is it?” When I told him, he said, “I know what you say is true, for you yourself are the proof of it.” And then he added, “What you have found is what 75 percent of our patients need more than medicine, for a great many of them would get well physically if they were well mentally and spiritually.”
My Lord, forgive me that I hold my worries, my troubles, my fears in my own incompetent hands and do not turn them over into your competent Hands. Just now I do turn them over to you. They are yours, not for an hour, but forever. And I accept my own release. I am grateful, so grateful. Amen.
Week 12 Wednesday
Getting Rid of Fears by Tasks
Romans 15:1-3; 1 Corinthians 15:57-58; Philippians 2:12-13
Now that you have turned over your fears and anxieties to God and have left them there, take the next step. (11) Deliberately take on yourself some task to help others. You have turned over your fears and anxieties to God, not to become a vacuum, but to have a heart that now has room and inward leisure for other people’s troubles. A Dr. Woodall tells of a woman who was an invalid with high blood pressure and other ailments. She was always thinking about herself and rarely ever talked of any subject other than her disease; she lay in bed and performed no household duties. Her husband was suddenly taken very ill and seemed to be on the point of death. Aroused by this danger, she got out of bed and helped to nurse her husband back to health. When she forgot her own ailments in her endeavor to help him, she got well. Health will come only in healthy activity.
John Wesley read while riding “with a slack rein.” He knew how to relax in his work; and how he did “work”! The slack rein was in order to have a tighter rein.
A watchmaker told a friend, in reply to his question as to why he kept his watches and clocks always running: “In order that they may be kept in better condition.” You and I are made for constructive activity, and health will come to us as a by-product. Don’t sit and talk about your ailments, or you’ll have more and more to talk about. We are told that frogs will not croak in running water, only in stagnant water. You will become a croaker, if your life is stagnant. Get into the stream of helpful activity, and you’ll cease croaking, and in the end you’ll not “croak” before your time!
You must learn to be passive before God and active before people. Take in from God as you live in the passive voice; then give out to others as you live in the active voice. These are the two heartbeats of your life: passive, active. You submit to God, but you don’t submit to anything else. Then you are creative and masterful.
O God, you are healing me in order to make me a center of healing. This precious gift I hold within my hand, not to gaze at in joyful reverence, but to pass it on. Freely I have received; help me freely give. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 12 Thursday
The Fear of Failure
Isaiah 55
With all our fears and anxieties surrendered to God and our energies committed to constructive helpfulness to others, we are now in a position to look these particular fears and worries in the face and render them innocuous by a straight gaze. (12) Look at your worst fears one by one. You now dare look at them, for you have already looked at Christ, and you know that all these fears have the footprint of the Son of God on the back of their necks. They are half defeated in him and are wholly defeated when you accept and act on the fact of their defeat.
(a) the fear of failure. A great many people go through life in bondage to success. They are in mortal dread of failure. Why should they be? Jesus cared little about success or failure. The story of Jesus is a story of apparent failure; rejected by his nation and crucified by the Romans, he ended on a cross. A faith that has a cross at its center cannot be a faith that worships success. I do not have to succeed; I have only to be true to the highest I know—success and failure are in the hands of God. On my way to India, I once said in England, “The romance of missions has gone for me. I know what I’m up against. If you should say to me that I go back to India to see nothing but frustration and failure and that I would see no more fruit whatever, I would reply: ‘That is an incident. I have the call of God to India, and to be true to that call is my one business; success and failure are not my business, to be true is.’” I made that statement one day in a meeting, and a minister came up and said: “All my life I’ve been in bondage to success; I’ve looked at everything from the success standpoint. You have released within me the greatest tension of my life. I have only to be true, thank God.”
“There is a lion in the way,” says fear. But when you walk straight up to the lion of fear, it turns out to be a mouse of fact. Suppose you should fail. Is that so terrible? Not to have tried is a worse failure.
My Lord, I’ve been afraid of failure. In fear of failure the self still lurks, afraid of what others will say. Forgive me that I’ve looked at the verdict of others, instead of at the verdict of your “Well done,” as through failure and success I’ve been true to you. O help me be true—I care for naught else. Amen.
Week 12 Friday
Further Fears to Be Conquered
Psalm 91; Isaiah 46:4; Acts 2:17
We have been looking at specific fears and anxieties. We take another: (b) the fear of losing the affections of a friend or loved one. To become anxious and worried about this is the quickest way to lose the affections of those we love; for it becomes difficult or impossible to love a person all inwardly tight with anxiety. That very anxiety blocks the passage of love. An anxious, worried person is unlovable. Some love may exist in spite of anxious tension; but anxiety is a strain on love. Therefore, when you become strained and anxious about the love of a loved one, you defeat your very purpose. So surrender that anxiety.
(c) fear of being dependent on others in old age. Why should you fear this? Your children were dependent on you; why would you fear being dependent on them? Life is so made that we grow by accepting responsibility for which there is no reward. Don’t deny your children that privilege of growth. Be the kind of person they would love to have to take care of. If it is fear of being taken care of by the state, then again, why should you be afraid? If you have been a good citizen and a useful member of society during your active life, contributing to the upbuilding of the state, then why shouldn’t the state take care of you when you are no longer able to work? There is no shame whatever in either being supported by your family or by the state if you have been a useful member of society.
(d) fear of the unknown future. Many live in dread of what is coming. Why should we? The unknown puts adventure into life. It gives us something to sharpen our souls on. The unexpected around the corner gives a sense of anticipation and surprise. Thank God for the unknown future. If we saw all the good things that are coming to us, we would sit down and degenerate. If we saw all the evil things, we would be paralyzed. How merciful God is to lift the curtain on today; and as we get strength today to meet tomorrow, then to lift the curtain on the morrow. We worship a considerate God.
O God, I know if I fear to lose the love of those who love me, I shall lose confidence—and confidence is conquest; so I shall lose the conquest. I am dependent on you, and you are dependent on us—help me not to be ashamed to be dependent on others. And as to the future—I meet it with a salutation and a song. Amen.
Week 12 Saturday
The Fear of Death
2 Corinthians 5:1-6; 2 Timothy 4:6-8; Hebrews 2:14-15
We come now to the greatest of all fears: (e) the fear of death. Many go through life spoiling it through fear of death. But why should we be afraid of death?
Some time ago I was being taken out to be hanged. On the way to the hanging my brother said to me, “It looks as though you’re not going to get out of this, doesn’t it?” To which I agreed. On the way we met the woman I was supposed to have murdered. “There,” I said, “I told you so—here is the woman.” We took her along.
A large crowd had gathered, and I said, “I told you I was innocent; there is the woman.”
But the crowd replied, “We’ve come here to see the minister hanged, and we’re going to go through with it.”
To which I replied, “You are doing an injustice, but I am not afraid to die.”
They were adamant; and I was taken to the scaffold, the black cap put over my head, and the rope around my neck, and I stood on the trapdoor. But just as the trap was about to be sprung—I woke up! Of course, I was glad to find myself in bed rather than on a scaffold, but there was a sense of inner exultation, even of joy. I said to myself, “Why, that wasn’t so bad, even at its worst! It couldn’t be much worse than that!”
Why should a Christian be afraid of death? To be afraid of that larger life is a species of atheism. Doubt of the future means doubt of the present. It means that the Master—who went down through death, and came up and said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die” (John 11:25 CEB)—is not dependable for the ultimate things, and therefore not for the immediate things. As the little bird on a twig of the tree, when the storm is about to twist it off its perch, might say, “All right; twist me off—I have another alternative—I have wings,” so we can say to death, “Twist me off my earthly perch—I have another alternative—I have immortality, God.” Nothing can shake that.
Real Christians live well, and they die well.
O God, when I have you, I have all—and more than all. No death can touch that fact, for you live amid earthly changes. So I too shall live on amid earthly changes—deathless. I am invulnerable—in you. Amen.