Week 21 Sunday
Week 21 Sunday
Insincerities: Conscious and Unconscious
Matthew 6:24; 7:3-5; James 3:10-12; 4:8
I thought we were through with discipline, but I now see we shall have to keep it as an undertone as well as an overtone of abundant living. Especially will we need it in dealing with the eighth of our fifteen major enemies: insincerity, conscious and unconscious. We already discovered in our study of the major enemies that this enemy, insincerity, while implicit in many of the others, is sufficiently important to stand out explicit. For insincerity is a quality that can undermine the whole of the Christian structure we build, and undermine it in a very hidden way. Insincerity is the termite of the personality.
Since we are all “only Christians in the making,” we can find in the best of us insincerities and unconscious hypocrisies. These insincerities and unconscious hypocrisies are the tribute we pay to truth and goodness. Even when we are not good and not true, we simulate truth and goodness, thus acknowledging that we ought to be true and good.
From top to bottom, life is filled with hypocrisies and insincerities. South Africa makes the springbok, a deer, its national symbol, and yet the South Africans have exterminated it.
Our cities are decorated for the birth of Christ; but underneath our Christmas celebrations lies the covetous commercial motive that Jesus condemned. A big star hangs in the sky at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, ostensibly to lead our minds to Christ; but underneath the star is a sign that says, “Hotel Bethlehem.” The star is to lead us to this hotel, instead of to the inn of long ago.
A lady indignantly dismissed her maid: “I had to dismiss her. I found that she was stealing those lovely Waldorf-Astoria towels I had.” Her moral indignation at someone else’s dishonesty made righteous her own!
O God, we do not see ourselves, for we look at the sins of others with open eyes and then turn a blind eye upon our own sins and weaknesses. Help us be as honest with ourselves as we are with others—and more, help us be honest with ourselves with your honesty. In your name. Amen.
Week 21 Monday
Insincerities: Are Your Ears Red?
Acts 5:1-11; Philippians 1:10; James 1:8
These insincerities creep into our Christian lives. I have just been looking at a marvelous mosaic of the Last Supper where Jesus is saying that one of the disciples will betray him. And they are all asking, “Lord, is it I?” On the mosaic, all the ears of the disciples are red, but those of Judas are a little redder! When Jesus raises the question of betrayal, we point to Judas with indignation. Our indignation covers up our own betrayals.
If you want to find out a person’s weak points, note the failings in others for which he or she has the quickest eye. We can defend our own inconsistencies because we compartmentalize life; our religion functions in one part, but doesn’t go over into the other parts. The workers in a woolen mill struck to get a washroom so that they could wash off the grime and dirt before going home. When the matter was put up to the proprietor, his reply was, “What they need is a revival of religion.” And one was started!
A YWCA secretary urged upon an employer the necessity of giving sufficient pay to female employees so that they could pay even the low rates of board of the YWCA hostel. “No,” said the proprietor, “but we will increase our gifts to the YWCA.” The proprietor was willing to be charitable but unwilling to be just. He would allow his religion to function as charity, but was utterly unwilling to have it function as justice.
A South India proverb says: “I will love you as my own child, provided you do not ask me for food and clothing.” Again, an Indian proverb speaks of “Hathi ke dant,” the elephant’s teeth—one set for show, the tusks, the other set for chewing—the hidden motives we keep in the rear. The motto of Cortés, the Spanish conquistador, was, “For God and gold.” God was first on the motto, but gold was first in the conqueror’s affections. The thing that is important and decisive is not what is in our affectations, but what is in our affections.
O you Crystal Christ, probe deep within my heart and find there the hidden infections of insincerity. Drain them to the last poisonous drop, lest they poison my whole system. Make me clean within of every hidden contradiction, for I want to be harmonious and effective. In your name. Amen.
Week 21 Tuesday
Insincerities: Dualisms in Ourselves?
Matthew 26:34-35, 69-75
We must continue ferreting out these insincerities, for they are like lice that must be exterminated to the last one. We who preach the gospel; why do we do it? For self-display? For purposes of dominating others, their minds and souls, if not their bodies? Do we wait for the approving word at the close of the sermon, rather than the approval of God in the quiet? Do those who pay the piper really call our tunes? Do we proclaim truth that is palatable to others with an eye to our own palates and stomachs? Are we afraid to offend a rich contributor, but not afraid to offend our own moral nature?
An African American preacher was preaching a trial sermon, and at the close one of the members came up and said, “Pastor, it was a wonderful sermon, but we wonder whether you walk as you talk.” Blessed is the one who does, for then both talk and walk are with power; otherwise they cancel each other. A pastor said to the writer; “I’m like a train caller, calling out stations down the line to which I myself do not go.”
Some recognize this dualism in themselves: “I am opinionated, and I call it conviction,” said an honest soul. Another put his dualism this way: “I didn’t sin, because I was so proud that I didn’t want to have to apologize afterward.” One sin, pride, kept him from other sins!
I was talking to a leading general of a certain country. He was bitter and critical of other Christians. I suspected that under the bitterness lay the motive of masking his own decaying spiritual life; so I stopped his outpouring with the words of Jesus to Peter when he inquired, “Lord, what about him?” Jesus said to him, “What is that to you? Follow me” (John 21:21-22). No matter what the other man does, that doesn’t excuse you—“Follow me.” The general went on worse than before. I stopped him with the same quotation. Then he pounded his knee and said, “Good; you’ve got me.”
That last sentence of the general was honest and opened the door his eventual release from insincerities.
O Christ, you relentless Lover and Redeemer, corner my soul. Don’t let me wriggle and apologize and slip past your redemptions. Help me to take my medicine, however bitter to the taste of self it may be. For I would be whole, with no part sick. In your name. Amen.
Week 21 Wednesday
Insincerities: The Mask
Matthew 26:14-16, 47-49; John 6:70-71
We fool ourselves if we think we can hide behind masks and remain a double person. Either the mask becomes us, or we become the mask. In Greek drama, the actors wore masks. When the Romans took over the drama, they called both the mask and the actor persona. At first, persona referred only to the mask; then it was shifted to the person behind the mask. That is true; you become what your mask is. “You don’t put a mask on; you put it in,” says philosopher Gerald Heard.* If it is true to say that the mask becomes you, it is just as true to say that you become the mask.
Always a mask For years and years and years
Held in the slim hand, whitely, I wondered
Always she had a mask But dared not ask.
before her face,—
Smiling and sprightly, And then—
The mask. I blundered,
I looked behind,
Truly the wrist Behind the mask,
Holding it lightly To find
Fitted the task: Nothing—
Sometimes however She had no face.
Was there a shiver, She had become
Fingertip quiver, Merely a hand
Ever so slightly,— Holding a mask
Holding the mask? With grace.**
It was said of a certain university that it got hold of some wine (some new progressive ideas), but when the wine began to expand and was in danger of breaking the bottles, the authorities decided to save the bottles. They did, and all they had left was empty forms—their education became outer forms veiling emptiness. That is what happens to us too.
Gracious Master, I do not want to be just an empty person behind a mask. I want to be real—completely real. But there are many things to be faced and brought up. Help me to bring them up until nothing is behind. Merge my life into a living whole—like yours! Amen.
* Published source unknown, but see Gerald Heard, Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1924).
** Helen Haiman Joseph, “The Mask,” Saturday Review of Literature 9, no. 4 (August 13, 1932): 1.
Week 21 Thursday
Insincerities: Rationalizations
Matthew 6:1-5, 16-18; 23:2-7
All insincerities kick back. Jesus said, “Nothing is . . . hidden that will not be known. . . . What you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed upon the housetops” (Luke 12:2-3). The secret motives will write themselves into the lines of your face for the world to see. What you are behind comes out into your eyes, creeps into your words, into your looks, your attitudes, your very walk. There is nothing hidden.
Rebekah persuaded Jacob to cheat Isaac and Esau—the result? Jacob had a feud on his hands and became a fugitive. His inner shiftiness got into his feet and made him run. The effect on Rebekah? She became unhappy: “These Hittite women tire me to death” (Gen. 27:46 Moffatt). She was tired to death of these women, because she was out of sorts with herself. The cheating she engineered succeeded only in cheating her of inward peace, so that she couldn’t get along with herself or others.
A pastor allowed a love affair with another woman to develop. This illicit relationship kicked back, in fact, kicked him straight in the stomach. He developed stomach trouble as a result of this conflict in his life.
It may be said in passing that all such love affairs, where one or both parties are married, almost invariably result in frustration and unhappiness. No matter how the affairs may be rationalized and excused and dressed in cloaks of self-pity, because, for instance, of unhappiness in each individual’s own married relationship, the results are the same: frustration and unhappiness. No matter how you may argue that the affair is of God, since it seems “so sacred,” the results are the same. You run against that law, written not merely in sacred Scripture but also in the constitution of things: “Therefore a man . . . cleaves to his wife, and they shall be one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). You must choose between cleaving to your own wife or husband, or cleaving to your own moral nature, introducing a disastrous conflict within. The law kicks back—invariably.
O God, I come to you with myself. I have tried to rationalize my insincerities and explain them away. I am through with explaining them away—I want them to be taken away. I want a self I can live with, and I cannot live with a self that is warring with itself. Then help me—and help me now. Amen.
Week 21 Friday
A Ladder to Overcome Insincerities
Matthew 23:13-26
We now come to our ladder, on which we may step up out of pits of insincerities into the open light of frank and crystal living.
(1) Relax in the presence of God with all defenses down. In relaxed condition, allow anything to come to the surface of your thinking that will come. Say to yourself, “Here, in the presence of God, with barriers all down, I want every inconsistency to be brought to the surface, however disagreeable.” Then let your mind wander at liberty across your life. Let it fasten on any place of insincerity it will.
(2) Recognize insincerities for what they are. Don’t rationalize them and try to make them into something else. The mind is a part of the ego, whose pride is wounded by the discovered insincerity, and it will immediately leap to the defense. It will push its tentacles in all directions to find reasons, clumsy or clever, to explain why. Reasoning is usually finding reasons to justify our own emotions; we think with our emotions. The mind will gather flowers from everywhere, and sometimes from nowhere, and place them on the sore spot to prove that the sore spot is a garden and not what it is—a dung heap.
(3) If you are not to rationalize insincerities, neither are you to religionize them. On the bottom of an art object given to an institution, I saw an inscription written so that everyone could see: “Thine, O Lord, be the glory forever. Presented by ___.” It was obvious that the first phrase was a pious religious frontage to justify the obvious intention of the donor to get a good share of the “glory” for himself.
(4) Don’t confess marginal insincerities and sins and leave the central ones untouched. This is a very definite tendency. I have seen people confess to impatience when they ought to confess to an egocentric life; to unkindness to someone when they should confess to wholesale exploitation and greed; to an unkind deed when the whole life is filled with unkind attitudes. Someone defended Hitler because he did not drink or smoke.
O God, I am boring deep—help me be relentless. When my drill strikes hard resistance, help me go on through. For I want to strike the clear living water of your presence and power. Save me from stopping this side of that. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 21 Saturday
The Ladder on Insincerities (continued)
Luke 9:55-62; Acts 2:46-47; James 5:16
We continue our ladder: (5) After throwing out these insincerities, don’t smuggle them back. Phillip Lee, a Chinese minister, tells how his father had a passion for collecting magazines and papers. Every New Year, he would clean them out of his house and then bring them back again! You, too, will be tempted to bring back your dismissed insincerities, perhaps under different names and guises. If you allow them back, you will add to them the insincerity of allowing them back under assumed names and forms.
(6) Don’t take up the cross and then cancel it. Perhaps the insincerity is connected with positive purpose to do something at any cost. The tendency will be to take up the cross for a while, soften it, and then finally cancel it. The Russian cross has three crossbars, one of them slanted. One story says that a priest said to his flock, “You will not obey the cross, you will not live right; so I will take the cross out of the church.” He did. But there was such an outcry that he brought back the cross, “canceled.” “I bring it back to you, but I bring it back with a line drawn through it, for you have canceled the cross.” This “canceled cross” was taken up and copied as the original. Look for “canceled crosses” in your life: for toned-down resolutions, for softened determinations, slowed-up purposes. H. G. Wells speaks of “a muffled Christianity.”* Much of our Christianity is muffled.
(7) Deliberately go out and confess to someone your insincerities. That act will teach the self that all insincerities will have to be confessed. The self will be loath to harbor insincerities, since they must be confessed in the end. (8) Be a part of a group disciplined to crystal honesty and frankness. Your sense of loyalty to that group will keep you from private dishonesties and insincerities. (9) Every day with “open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, [be] changed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3:18 KJV).
O God, help me this day to stand before you with open face and open mind and open being. For I, too, would be changed into the same image—your image. For day by day I want to go from glory to glory, from clarity to clarity, a transparent soul. Amen.
* H. G. Wells, Marriage (New York: Duffield & Co., 1912), 8.