Week 14 Sunday
Week 14 Sunday
A Sense of Unresolved Guilt
Psalm 51:1-17
We have looked at four of the fifteen enemies of the personality: (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. We now continue: (5) a sense of unresolved guilt. A sense of unresolved guilt is destructive to harmonious personality.
The older evangelism threw a great deal of emphasis on guilt, but it was in large measure connected with what would happen to you after death. How would you be able to stand before God’s judgment?—you, a guilty soul! That emphasis ceased to appeal to the modern mind, and was discarded. But it is now coming back through psychology.
French theorist Ernest Renan said, “The twentieth century will spend a good deal of its time picking out of the wastebasket things which the nineteenth century threw into it.”* One of the things being picked out is just this necessity, that the inner nature be absolved from guilt. We cannot live with guilt, that is, truly live.
It must be acknowledged that a good many ideas in reference to guilt did have to be thrown into the wastebasket. They were false guilts that needlessly tormented many sincere people. A lot of false guilts were fastened on people; these needed to be shed. For example, we know now that sex feelings are not sin; they are a part of our normal, healthy life—everybody has them, saint and sinner. We also know that a normal self-love is right and natural; to act as if you had none is to end in hypocrisy. Every normal person has self-love and ought to have it. Many false guilts that tormented humanity have been shed, and should be shed.
The fear of having committed the “unpardonable sin” is usually a false fear, for the unpardonable sin of which Jesus spoke was saying that Jesus had “an unclean spirit,” that the Spirit within him—the Holy Spirit—was unclean. Seldom is that sin committed. Therefore, do not fear that you have committed the unpardonable sin.
O God, if I have built up within me false guilts that hide my real guilt, forgive me, for I want to be inwardly absolved from all haunting guilts that rob me of my confidence and power. Cleanse the depths, for I cannot live with guilt. I can live only with fellowship and reconciliation. Amen.
* Quoted in “Under the Reading Lamp,” Ottawa Citizen (Dec. 19, 1947): 32.
Week 14 Monday
Psychiatry Can Be Disruptive
John 1:17; 8:32; Romans 11:33; 1 Corinthians 8:1
We saw yesterday that many false guilts had to be discarded. The conscience can be taught to approve diametrically opposite things. I said to a traditional Hindu one day, “Suppose you broke caste, and no one would know it?”
“But I would know it, for my conscience would trouble me if I broke caste,” he replied. His conscience would trouble him if he broke caste, and mine would trouble me if I kept caste.
Conscience will stand guard over the values you put into your moral nature. It is important what value you put there. The conscience should be trained at the feet of Christ; only then is it a safe guide.
A word of warning must be uttered about psychiatrists who, finding persons at conflict with themselves—with ideals high and conduct low—try to unify the persons on the level of conduct, dismissing the whole world of moral ideals. This usually results in greater disruption—disunity—for a new conflict is introduced at the level of conduct. The moral world cannot be dismissed by a wave of the hand or by a slick phrase from a psychiatrist. Put out at the door, it will come back at the window.
One such psychiatrist, a very outstanding man, urges women who are nervous and upset to find “a boyfriend.” Some of these women, who had been given advice by this psychiatrist to practice adultery, came in great distress to a ministerial friend of mine. Through him they found God and are released and happy. The wife of this psychiatrist, divorced from him, because he naturally had acted on the advice he gave to others, came to this same friend, and she too found God and is radiant. The false advice given by this psychiatrist produced disunity in the personality, and broke up homes, his own included. The only possible level on which to be unified permanently is the level of your ideals. Everything else will let you down.
If you go to a psychiatrist, go to one who has a Christian background and outlook. Such psychiatrists are the salt of the earth and help many to release.
O God, my Lord, I see that amid all the ways of humanity you have a way—the way that is written into the nature of reality. Help me find that way that I may live, for I cannot fumble this business of living. Time is too short and living too serious. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 14 Tuesday
What Are You, My Brother?
John 2:23-25; Titus 2:12-14; Hebrews 2:6-9
No, the human heart will not be put off with subterfuges; it needs reconciliation, forgiveness, assurance.
“Is this the place where they heal broken hearts?” asked a Korean girl at a mission station. Whether that broken heart comes from outer sorrow or inner guilt, the need is the same. Dr. Howard Kelly, the great surgeon, said to a patient, “What you need is a New Testament.” And the healing in that New Testament the patient needed was the certainty of forgiveness, of grace, of reconciliation. We need a forgiving God.
As one writer puts it:
For what are we, my brother? We are a phantom flare of grieved desire, the ghostling and phosphoric flicker of immortal time, a brevity of days haunted by the eternity of the earth. We are an unspeakable utterance, an unsatiable hunger, an unquenchable thirst; a lust that bursts our sinews, explodes our brains, sickens and rots our guts, and rips our hearts asunder. We are a twist of passion, a moment’s flame of love and ecstasy, a sinew of bright blood and agony, a lost cry, a music of pain and joy, a haunting of brief, sharp hours, an almost captured beauty, a demon’s whir of unbodied memory. We are the dupes of time.
For, brother, what are we?
We are the sons of our father, whose face we have never seen, we are the sons of our father, whose voice we have never heard, we are the sons of our father, to whom we have cried for strength and comfort in our agony, we are the sons of our father, whose life like ours was loved, we are the sons of our father, to whom only we can speak out the strange, dark burden of our heart and spirit, we are the sons of our father, and we shall follow the print of his foot forever.*
Yes, we are sons of the Father, and our spirits will never rest until they see God’s face; but when we see it, we must read in that face reconciliation and forgiveness.
O God, my Lord, I would follow your footprints forever did I not know that your footprints have been turned in my direction—you are seeking me. It is I who have been fleeing from you. I flee no more—I come, I come. Amen.
* Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River (New York: Scribner, 1999; orig. 1935), 852-53.
Week 14 Wednesday
Relaxing in the Presence of God
Psalms 4:4-5; 34:8; 36:7; 91:1-2
We found yesterday that we are our own worst enemies; we allow into our lives alien things, for which we are not made, and crowd out God, for whom we are made.
And here at last we find
Strict diagnosis of our malady,
Which is, in short, that man is heaven-starved—
Men are born thirsting for infinity.
But we not only “thirst for infinity”; we thirst for something at the center of infinity that has a heart, that cares, that tells us the universe is friendly, that there is a Being who is infinite and good and redemptive. Give us that assurance, and we can stand up against anything.
How can we be assured? A girl of German extraction, used to being told just what to do and what to believe, wrote to me and said, “Please tell me that I am forgiven. If you say I am forgiven, I can be assured.”
I could assure her that she was forgiven, but the assurance of one person to another is slender assurance. The whole of life must assure. How can we get that life assurance? Let us take the steps the psychoanalyst uses to arrive at our synthesis.
First, recline in some semi-darkened room, put a towel over your eyes, and relax. Talk about yourself, letting your mind free to roam across your life as it will. Do not debate with yourself, but in a calm, detached way bring to the surface anything to which the mind returns again and again. You will probably touch this alien thing buried within you in a frightened, startled way. It is a sore point, a buried fear, a hidden guilt. At first you may not even want to acknowledge that there is any sore point in your life, for you have argued with yourself that everything is all right; you have built up defenses against raising any questions about anything. “Let sleeping dogs lie” has been your attitude. But now you are resolved to be perfectly honest and perfectly frank, even with yourself.
O God, I enter now a life of complete frankness and open honesty. I live with no hidden, closed caverns in the depths of me. I am from now on a child of light, and know no secrets withheld, no sore points suppressed. I am to be simple and unaffected—and yours. Amen.
Week 14 Thursday
Bringing Up Anything Touchy
1 John 1:5-10; 2:1-2
Since you have begun to bring up everything to the light, you are ready for the second step: Anything that appears touchy, bring up gently but decisively. Perhaps this sensitive spot is your difficulty. If so, segregate it, and see what is to be done about it. Don’t push it down out of sight and try to forget it. That makes it work havoc at a deeper depth, in the subconscious mind. Perhaps your difficulty is a hidden resentment, something you had pushed down into the subconscious mind and put the lid on. Now it is up, and you are looking at it frankly.
A farmer allowed one of his neighbor’s calves to be merged into his own herd and sold with the rest. But every time he looked to God, he could see nothing but that calf! Only when he confessed and restored did he find peace with himself and fellowship with God.
A young lady suspected that a hidden resentment against a minister for whom she had worked was the cause of her sense of a spiritual blank wall. She wrote a letter saying she was sorry for the resentments and kept it several days, hoping the mere writing of it would suffice. But the mind is a relentless thing; it won’t say peace when there is no peace. Only when she had dropped the letter into the mailbox did peace and release come.
Don’t do as a high-school girl of fourteen recently did. She was intelligent and beautiful. She came to me and said, “I’m like that girl you spoke about, all inwardly empty; worse, I’m in a tangle. I’ve been kicked out of four high schools and am about to be kicked out of the present one. Isn’t it too late to do anything now?” Too late at fourteen! She had concocted new lies to cover up old ones, and life had gone on from tangle to worse tangle, until now the law was closing in on her for forgery of checks. She started to be frank and have me help her, then suddenly decided to run away—literally—and did. She ran away from her surroundings, but not from herself.
Bring up everything that appears touchy.
O God, when I begin to untangle my life, help me go clean through with it. Help me come clean; compromise will only compromise my happiness, and any pulling back will only pull me back from release and from you. I’m going all the way through. Amen.
Week 14 Friday
Back to Normal with the Help of God
Mark 5:5; Ephesians 5:8-17; 1 John 5:11-12, 20
You perhaps are tempted to look to your surroundings or to others—to everything except to yourself and God—as the way out. Don’t. There is no other way out. Listen to the doctor’s story of this once desperate soul. Mrs. ___, twenty-five years old, was suffering from arthritis. She had gone from place to place in the United States seeking health, and had no faith in doctors, as she had consulted more than fifty. She was in a hopeless state of mind and filled with fears: afraid of getting well, afraid of losing her home, afraid of losing her husband’s love, afraid of never being able to walk again. She was convinced that life was a “total loss,” and was filled with a definite sense of guilt. Nurses would often come out of her room in tears because they could not do anything right; she was so hard to please.
Her first step toward God was to trust God with some simple fears. She began to cooperate, so that nurses no longer dreaded taking care of her. Then she began to walk. Suddenly, she developed all the symptoms of a gastric ulcer when a malicious friend wrote, telling her that her husband was unfaithful. She surrendered this sorrow to God, and the symptoms of the ulcer left. Then her husband came, and the matter was straightened out.
Twice she had a return of pain, once when she lost her temper with her father-in-law; but after she had straightened out the difficulty with him, her pain left. This patient confesses that two years prior to the arthritis she had been running away from life because of an affectional conflict, and that during the two years when her husband was studying, she had been living a double life: staying out late at night, drinking in order not to think, and smoking incessantly. She saw that her way of life was what had broken down her health and had given her arthritis, that the cause of her ill-health was not physical but spiritual. She concludes, “I’m back to normal with the help of God.” Sin is the abnormal; it is trying to live against life, and that cannot be done.
O my Lord and my God, I face, as this woman did, the tangled strands of life—tangled by my own sins and follies. Here and now I promise you that no stone will be left unturned, no pledge unfulfilled until I am free in you. Amen.
Week 14 Saturday
Turn from Yourself to Christ
Isaiah 45:22; John 3:14-16; Hebrews 12:1-2
We now come to the third simple step in our analysis. You have brought to the surface all conflicts, all guilts; now turn your attention and your loyalty from yourself to Christ. Bringing up all these conflicts and fears and guilt will leave a vacuum that only Christ can fill. When he comes in and takes possession, then, as you tum your attention within, you are not turning your attention to yourself, but to the Christ who is within you. Now you can be an introvert, for at that very moment you are an extrovert!
A very intelligent woman, of excellent character and ability, loved her father devotedly. When he died, she really loved no one, so her frustrated love turned upon herself. This upset her nerves and ended in further frustration. That frustrated love could be released and satisfied only as it centered on Christ, the Eternal and the Unfolding. Our love, fastened supremely on Christ, will give all lesser, legitimate loves their meaning and their place. They are hallowed by that supreme love. You dare love yourself if you love Christ supremely.
A doctor, Paul Scherer, told me of a brilliant woman, the brains of a drug ring, who listened in over the radio to find arguments against God; she didn’t merely disbelieve, she hated God. At that time she was taking three times the legal dose of sleeping pills in order to sleep. One night, something in the words she heard broke her antagonism. She was converted. And then the fight of disentanglement began. Again and again she would faint for want of the drug, but she refused to take it. She went among her gang and told what had happened to her. Her testimony broke up the ring. Five of them were killed in action after they went to England to help the wounded in order to make atonement for what they had done to destroy others. The woman is now a radiant Christian, in social-service work in a great city. A new loyalty and love broke the power of the old.
Love Christ, and then do what you like, for you will like the right. You will be free!
O my Lord and Master, I see that I can be free only when I am in love with you, for love of you is love of myself. What bondage—what freedom! I know now what the promise means when it says, “If the Son shall make you free, you shall free indeed.” I am free indeed. I thank you, Lord. Amen.