Week 17 Sunday
Week 17 Sunday
Receptivity: The First Law of Life
John 1:12-13; 15:1-18
We carry over from last week our ladder out of negativism and inferiority to step nine: Since the kingdom belongs to you, remember the two conditions for receiving and transmitting the resources of the kingdom: receptivity and response.
These two words are not only the alternate heartbeats of the kingdom; they are also the alternate beats of the whole of life. Everything grows and develops by those two things: receptivity and response. John sums up this thought in these words: “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become” (John 1:12 KJV). How did he get power—power to become? First, by receptivity—“as many as received him.”
A universal principle is here laid bare. Take a plant; how does it get power to become? By being proud, self-sufficient, unrelated, and unresponsive? No; by surrendering, adjusting, receiving, and giving. Suppose a plant tried to get power by asserting itself, by trying to “lord it” over the other plants. Result? It would lose its power over other plants and its power to become. It gains power by surrender and by response to its environment. When it is adjusted, it takes in from air and soil and sun, and gains power to become. Plant sin is anything that hinders that receptivity and response.
Someone has defined life as “response to environment.” You and I live physically when we respond to our physical environment: we can take in food and light and air. When response is shut off, we die physically. Our spiritual environment is the kingdom of God. When we respond to it, surrender to it, adjust ourselves to it, receive our very life from it, then we live—and live abundantly. We are in a state of receptivity, which is a state of faith, confidence, appropriation. We absorb kingdom life as the body absorbs food; we breathe in its purifying breath as the lungs breathe in air; we take up its vitality as the skin takes in vitamins from the light of the sun.
To believe is to receive, and to receive is to replenish.
O God, you who wrap me round as the atmosphere wraps my body round, let me respond to you as my physical body responds to its environment and lives. Let me breathe you now—deep breaths of you; let me receive you into every pore and fiber of my being. Help me live by you—then I shall live. Amen.
Week 17 Monday
Response: The Second Law of Life
Romans 8:13-14; 2 Corinthians 6:1-10
If receptivity is the first law of life, response is the second law. Perhaps we can say that they are two sides of one law. Jesus revealed the two sides in his summing up of the whole meaning of religion: “You shall love the Lord your God”—receptivity; “You shall love your neighbor as yourself ”—response (Mark 12:30-31). Love makes you receptive to God and responsive to humanity. Or better still: Love makes you receptive to God and responsive too—two-way traffic. You receive from God, and you give back to God. In receiving from God you are completed and perfected, and in your responding to God—shall we say it?—God is completed and perfected. For, having created another personality, God is not complete until God gains the love and loyalty of that personality. Our response is as necessary to God as it is to us. For a Love that loves but is not responded to is thwarted. God is all-important to us; we are important to God.
If receptivity and response are the two heartbeats of our relationship to God, they are also the two heartbeats of our human relationships. Love lets you receive from the other person; but just as truly, it makes you respond in self-giving to the other person. Without this clear two-way traffic the relationship will break down. One who is always receiving from another and not giving will break down a relationship, and one who is always giving and not receiving will just as truly destroy the relationship. Moreover, the receptivity and the response must be about equal. If one overbalances the other, if you are more of a receiver than a responder or more of a responder than you are a receiver, you cripple the relationship.
Impractical mysticism is strong on the receiving side, but weak on the responding side, and hence results in a lopsided religion, weak in positive contribution to human welfare. Activism is strong on the responding side, but weak on the receiving side, and hence ends in a religion lacking resources, depth, and permanence. A heart that tries to beat in one direction and not in the other ends in not beating at all.
O God, am I—I, who thought myself inferior—necessary not only to others but also to you? Then help me never to let you down. Help me humbly receive from you and humbly give back to you—a two-way traffic with you! I shall grow as I get and give. I thank you. Amen.
Week 17 Tuesday
Never Alone!
Matthew 14:19-21; 28:19-20; John 16:32
As you turn away from all negativism and inferiority attitudes to positive, abundant living, now take the tenth step toward release. Remember that you are not alone, never alone. At the time that you seem most alone, God is closest, watching every move on the checkerboard of life.
The Native Americans trained their boys in courage by making them spend a night in the forest amid the wild animals. How dreadfully alone each boy would feel on the night of his testing; but when the day began to dawn, he would see his father behind a nearby tree with drawn bow. Without the son’s knowledge, the father had been watching all night to see that no harm should befall the son. So is God with us.
The Quaker activist, John Wilhelm Rowntree, tells how, when he left a great physician’s office where he had been told that his advancing blindness could not be stayed, he stood by some railings for a few moments to collect himself. “Suddenly he felt the love of God wrap him about as though an invisible presence enfolded him, and a joy filled him such as he had never known before.”* That Presence will manifest when most needed.
Say to yourself, “I live and move and have my being, in all inner thoughts and outer expression, in the wealth of God every moment.” Say this when you least feel the truth of it and keep saying it.
Add these words to the above statement as you go forth to meet life: “With the peace of God in my heart and with good will toward my fellow humanity, I am ready for the work of the day.” And you will be ready for the work of the day!
Then when you lie down to sleep, say to yourself again: “Today I have lived and moved and have had my being in God, and while I sleep I still live and have my being in God. God will guide and purify my dreams, and in the morning I shall be further along.”
“Those who have the gales of the Holy Spirit go forward even in sleep,”** says Brother Lawrence.
O God, you and I will work this out together. I am yet weak and can take ouly a small part of the load—you’ll have to take the heavy end. But you have my will and, when it develops, you’ll have my strength too. I thank you. Amen.
*Published source unknown.
** Brother Lawrence: The Practice of the Presence of God, trans. Joseph de Beaufort (New York: F. H. Revell, 1895), 30.
Week 17 Wednesday
Your Handicaps Your Handles!
2 Corinthians 10:10; 11:6; 12:7-12
In your going on to victory, remember step eleven: Your very handicaps may be new points of departure. Perhaps you had a bad start in life—your heredity may be against you. But that need not be other than a spur to you to pass on to others a better heredity. If you look back into the human heredity of Jesus, you will find some ugly spots: “David was the father of Solomon by Uriah’s wife” (Matt. 1:6; see 2 Sam. 11). “By Uriah’s wife”—what a tragedy to have such a label stuck on one’s life! But what a glory it is that both David and Solomon survived that tragedy and contributed in spite of it! And think of the honest courage it took to put that statement into the genealogy of Jesus. He who was going to begin a new humanity had the blood of the old humanity in his veins. But the divine inheritance so overcame the human inheritance that he passed on a new inheritance to all humanity. Through his divine inheritance, you can begin a new heredity.
Suppose you are handicapped by a lack of beauty or physical grace; you can make up in accomplishment what you lack in endowment. Many great physical specimens have nothing but physical beauty because they get tangled up in their beauty and cannot free themselves from it to pass on to constructive achievement. Often, the people who have achieved great things in the world were people of ordinary looks.
As you look at your handicaps and make up your mind to use them as handles, it is well to remember that a secondary failure may make you a primary success; whereas a secondary success such as physical beauty may make you a primary failure.
My Lord, what I lack by nature I shall make up by grace. I cannot draw heavily on many things, but I can draw heavily on you. Make my very weaknesses into your strength. Help me take hold of my handicaps and convert them into handiwork. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 17 Thursday
Flee Forward!
Acts 5:40-42; Philippians 1:12-19; 1 Peter 4:14
Yesterday we saw the possibility of using our handicaps. Today we are going to see them as spurs that drive us forward. Jesus told his disciples that when the people turned them out of one village, they were to “flee to the next” (Matt. 10:23). In other words, if you have to flee, flee forward—to the next opportunity on your list. Some flee backward; but when Christians flee, it is always forward. This is step twelve: If you have the impulse to flee, then flee forward. All of us sometimes feel like running away. We differ only in our manner of running—some flee forward, and some flee backward.
Not having a college education made Rabindranath Tagore, India’s great poet, the greatest literary figure of India. He fled from the lack of a college education—forward! He could have drawn back and bemoaned his inferior education; instead he turned that lack into a spur, became superior in himself, and founded a new type of educational institution.
Once I was sitting in the back seat of a car—the kind of car that has a sliding seat in front. The man who was driving called to his wife in the back seat and said, “Please kick me forward, dear.” Life is bound to kick you, for all get knocks—some more, some less; the important thing is the direction in which you are kicked. Make life kick you forward!
A young woman told me that when I was talking to an audience about mental states of fear and resentments producing stomach disorders, she blushed, for she felt that I was talking personally to her! She had not accomplished as much as she was capable of doing in her teaching of voice, and so lost her own voice to give her an excuse for her failure. The trouble was not in her vocal cords, but in her defeatist mentality. She encountered this difficulty in accomplishment, and fled backward—backward into subterfuges and excuses. She should have taken the obstacle and turned it into opportunity—her failure into fruitfulness.
My Lord and my God, I see that my life will be made or broken at the place where I meet and deal with my obstacles. Help me not to run away from them, but to run toward them, to tackle and overcome them. Help me take the impulse to flee and compel it to make me flee forward. In Christ’s name. Amen.
Week 17 Friday
Nobodies Become Somebodies!
1 Corinthians 1:27-28; 6:9-11; Philemon 10-16
And now, step thirteen: Remember it is never too late to be a creative personality. No matter what happens to you, or when it happens to you, it is never too late to become creative. I know a woman, wife of a professor, who did not touch a paintbrush until she was fifty. Then she awakened, began to paint, and her paintings are being exhibited in this and other countries. She has gathered around her a group of women who before age fifty had done nothing contributive, but began to be creative after fifty. One took up sculpture, and though she had never tried that branch of art before, she became a teacher of sculpture in a great college and exhibited her own products in America and Europe.
Some artists gathered on a farm to paint the landscape. The farmer, becoming interested, painted the landscape on his own. The teacher, seeing the painting, asked who had done it. The farmer was “discovered” and became a famous landscape artist. His awakening had come at age sixty-eight.
Jesus is the great Awakener. Paul speaks of “all the stimulus of Christ” (Phil. 2:1 Moffatt). Christ stimulates the creative center in each one of us, making it first aware of God, and then aware of the infinite possibilities in God. I was at the bottom of my class until I met Christ, and then said to myself, “This is no place for a Christian,” and left it.
Someone said of a certain great city, “I never live a week in ___ when, bang, there goes another horizon!” That’s what happens when we are in company with Jesus: “bang, there goes another horizon!” In his company we begin to see farther, feel for people on a wider scale, and act more decisively. Jesus takes the nobodies and turns them into the somebodies. He was and still is the maker of people. No one can be in his company long without feeling an irresistible impulse to roll up the sleeves and say, “Where do I begin?” For the creative impulse comes from contact with the creative God.
O Christ, you creator of living thoughts in dead brains, you stimulator of living love in petrified hearts, you arouser of living action in decayed wills, you giver of life; I ask you to enter into me and to stimulate and quicken every fiber and nerve cell, that I too may become creative. Amen.
Week 17 Saturday
Plan for Creative Achievement
Acts 9:19-20; 1 Peter 4:2-11
We come now to the last step, number fourteen in our ladder toward release: Plan for creative achievement and put your plan into operation by however small a beginning.
Say with Jesus, “Do not weep for me” (Luke 23:28).
Say, “I’m through asking for pity, for compassion. I don’t want sympathy. I want a task, an open door. I’m through with living on a no; I’m going to live on a yes. I’m not inferior since I have hold of a superior God, and God has hold of me. I no longer belong to those who look back, for those who look back cannot fit into the kingdom of God, and I belong to the kingdom of God, the kingdom of the forward-looking.”
Say, “What God suffers for God means to have; what God takes hold of God never lets go. God has taken hold of me, and will never let me go, even though I stumble. Does not the Chinese word for Jesus translate as ‘the One who saves again and again’? Christ will save me again and again, even though I fail.”
Pray as one man did who had gone insane: “O Jesus, come into my soul, my mind, my body, into every brain cell.” Jesus did come into every brain cell, and the man is well and contributing today.
Write down all your negative thoughts, and then tear them up as a symbol that they no longer exist.
Write down your positive thoughts about what you can do, and begin at once to express these thoughts, in however small a beginning. If you cannot do one thing, flee forward and do the next thing. Then decide to do what you have decided to do, and do it now.
Say, “The Spirit entered into me and set me upon my feet” (Ezek. 3:24). The Spirit of God has entered into you; now you are to stand upon your feet and do a mature person’s work in the world.
As you go out each day, say, “I can do all things through [Christ] who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13). Repeat it the last thing before you fall asleep at night and the first thing in opening your eyes in the morning. The subconscious mind is very susceptible at those two periods. It will get into the subconscious and work with you, making you positive and creative.
O Christ, at last the doors of my life are turning outward instead of inward. At last I have lifted my feet out of the quicksand of self-pity. At last I have love in my heart, courage in my will, and faith in my inmost being. So let life come on. I thank you. Amen.