Week 28 Sunday
Week 28 Sunday
Afraid of Sanity!
Luke 8:27-37; Acts 26:22-25; 1 Peter 4:3-4, 14
A Church of England clergyman uttered a profound thing in one of our Round Table conferences: “I am trying to live the natural way of life, the Christian way.” In 2 Peter 2:19, we read, “They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption.” Note that phrase “slaves of corruption,” given over to something that is decaying. Evil is just that; it is life under the doom of decay. The Christian way is life under the bloom of development. Hence, the Christian way is the natural way.
It is true there is a false nature built up by our false living, but that false nature is not the real nature that God stamped in us at creation. That false nature that a person attempts to build up is at war with the real nature. Hence, the person who sins is at war with self as well as with God.
The new birth comes through the surrender, an abandonment of this false world of evil and the acceptance of this true world of good. The person becomes “a little child,” realigned to God’s original purpose. When we become God’s person, we really become a person.
We have become so naturalized in evil that we think the Christian way is the unnatural way. The people came and saw the demoniac out of whom Jesus had cast the evil spirits, “clothed, and in his right mind; and they were afraid” (Luke 8:35). Afraid of what?
They were afraid of sanity! We have become so accustomed to our insane ways of life that we are afraid of the real sanity of the Christian way. A man told me that he had ridden a bicycle with crooked handlebars for so long that when someone straightened them he fell off. He had become naturalized in crookedness! To us who are naturalized in this crooked and impossible order, the realism of Jesus seems idealism; but it is realism so far ahead of us that to us it is idealism. In fact, it is realism.
Evil is the great illusion; it is the illusion that you can live against the design of the universe and get away with it!
O Christ, we have been afraid of the splendid sanity of your mind, the amazing balance of your life—we have been afraid of life. And now I ask that you help me become naturalized in the homeland of my soul—the kingdom of God. Amen.
Week 28 Monday
The Homeland of the Soul: The Kingdom of God
Micah 6:8; Luke 17:20-21; Romans 8:9-11
In our prayer yesterday we spoke of “the homeland of my soul—the kingdom of God.” Is that true? Is the kingdom of God the homeland of my soul? Is it the soul’s native air? When we find it, do we find ourselves?
A recent letter from a brilliant but disrupted person said, “I am easy to please, but difficult to satisfy.” Why is it that a person’s surface sentiments are easily pleased, but in the depths he is difficult to satisfy? Is the reason that the soul knows its homeland and will not be put off with substitutes?
When Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21 KJV), he voiced one of the most important things ever uttered. The seeds of a new humanity are in that statement. It has seldom been taken seriously by orthodox Christianity; only the cults have taken it up and have used it. It must now be reclaimed and used. It must be put back into the stream of orthodox Christianity and become potent there. For this great truth is potent. I know the fear that has kept that verse from becoming current coin. If the kingdom of God is within us, in everybody, even the unchanged (for this verse was spoken to Pharisees who were unconverted), then the necessity of a new birth is gone. A merely optimistic view of human nature takes the place of the tragic view of human nature as sinful and in need of redemption; therefore salvation comes by insight instead of by repentance and surrender and faith. I appreciate that fear but do not share it.
If the kingdom of God is within us, written into the constitution of our beings, the way we are made to live, then sin is not less tragic but more so. For then we sin not only against a God afar off but also against a God who is in that kingdom within us; it is intimate rejection, intimate slaying. Moreover, we sin not only against God; we sin also against ourselves. Sin, therefore, is not the nature of our being; it is against nature—our nature—and against the God who made it.
O God, I see that sin grows not less tragic but more so. If I sin against the kingdom within, then when I sin, I sin indeed. I disrupt myself, my possibilities, my future, my all. And I sin against you—intimate Lover and King of that kingdom. Forgive me. Amen.
Week 28 Tuesday
Within You: At Your Doors!
Luke 10:9; John 7:9; Romans 7:24-25; 8:1-2
There are two great streams of religious thought in the world today. One stream maintains, “Everything is within you; all you need to do is to awaken your latent powers; you have the spark of the Divine within you—kindle it.” Or in the extreme form, as in the Vedanta in India, “You not only have the Divine within you; you are Divine, you are God—realize it.” The capital of this realm of thought is Benares, India.
The other stream maintains, “You are a sinful creature; there is nothing good within you; you need the invading grace of God from without to awaken you, to redeem you.” The capital of this realm of thought is Berne, Switzerland, the home of Karl Barth.
Do we have to vote with our lives on one side or the other of these viewpoints? No. Each has a truth, but it is only a half-truth; the whole truth is beyond each. The truth is in the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is fulfillment: “until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God” (Luke 22:16). The half-truth in each is fulfilled in the whole truth of the kingdom. The kingdom fulfills the truth in immanence: “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21 KJV). It fulfills the truth in transcendence: “the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15), the kingdom of God is at your doors. The kingdom is both pervasive in immanence and invasive in transcendence; it is within us and beyond us.
People are sinful in that we sin not only against the God who made us but also against the kingdom written into the texture of our being; we sin against ourselves. This view makes sin worse than if humanity is looked on as naturally sinful; for if people are naturally sinful, then is sin so bad? Why should I be punished for doing what is natural, for fulfilling my own nature? But if sin is not only sinful but also unnatural, then sin is doubly bad; it is revolt against God and myself. Sin is not natural; it is an attempt to live against my real nature.
So sin is anti-life.
O God, you have not fashioned us in our inmost being and then abandoned us, turning us over to forces too strong for us. You are protesting at every step our self-ruin. Help us not to consent to our own ruin. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 28 Wednesday
The Kingdom of God and Moral Tension
Romans 6:2, 11-23; 1 John 4:4
If the kingdom of God is within us, then where is the necessity for the tensions between the kingdom and ourselves, leading to crisis and repentance and the new birth? Doesn’t this kingdom-within-you emphasis flatten out those tensions and do away with the crisis?
On the contrary, this kingdom-within-you emphasis heightens those tensions and leads more definitely to crisis, for now we see that we are in revolt against God and ourselves. I find I obtain twice the response for repentance and conversion from this appeal than I do under the appeal that people are naturally sinful and cannot do a thing about it unless God sovereignly rescues them. The emphasis that we are naturally sinful not only flattens out tensions but also the self. For if we are naturally sinful, why fight against nature? It will be a losing battle anyway. That paralyzes hope, and consequently, the will.
Often in India, I have seen a person excuse his or her sin by saying, “I am a human being.” Well, if you are a human being, that is one of the most potent reasons for not sinning; for when you sin, you feel less than human, out of harmony with yourself, with God, with your fellow humans; even Nature drapes herself in mourning. But when you do right, do you feel less than human? You feel your personality heightened; you are at home in the universe, universalized; you walk the earth a conqueror. Goodness is native to us, and sin is unnatural: an aberration, a deflection, a defeat, a degradation. It is the accustomed, but not the natural. It is no more natural than a cancer is natural, than sand in the eye is natural.
The view that people are naturally sinful led to these lines:
When _ _ _ _ at Swanwick had quit it,
A young man said, “Now I have hit it.
Since I cannot do right,
I must find out tonight
What sin to commit, and commit it!”*
O God, I do set up a tension between myself and my sin. In your name I revolt against it, repudiate it, break with it forever. I accept my native land—yourself, your kingdom. Here I am at home, free, and at my best. I thank you. Amen.
* Source unknown. “Swanwick” may refer to a Christian conference center located in Swanwick, Derbyshire, England.
Week 28 Thursday
The Kingdom of God and Original Sin
Deuteronomy 32:5; Proverbs 2:12-15; Isaiah 59:8
The kingdom of God is within you! If so, then what of “original sin”? Is it all a mistake, and are we to talk about original goodness instead of original sin? Yes, for our origin is in God, and therefore goodness is original, for God is good. God has stamped the divine ways within us. But there is a truth in original sin, which we should call “racially acquired sin.” The human race has sinned generation after generation and has passed on to posterity unnatural bents to evil. The natural urges—self, sex, and the herd—have been twisted by unnatural use to unnatural bents. The self becomes an end in itself instead of being a means to the ends of the kingdom of God. Sex also becomes an end in itself instead of being dedicated to the ends of procreation for which it was intended. The herd, or social instinct, becomes fastened on lesser social entities such as class, race, or state instead of on the kingdom of God. All of these become perverted and therefore need to be converted, to be converted to the ends for which they were originally intended.
If we are made in the image of God, then sin is not natural; it is the acquired. It is an attempt to live against nature, to live against life and escape the consequences. We pay tribute to this fact when we say of a bad man, “He is crooked,” implying that he is departing from goodness, the straight. But if sin is the natural, then it is the straight, the standard; and goodness is the unnatural crookedness. When we say of a man, “He is impure,” we thereby suggest he has departed from the pure, the original intention. Impurity is therefore unnatural; purity is natural. “My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure.”* Why? Because the sum total of reality is behind the pure person. He or she is aligned to the nature of things and therefore strong with the strength of ten. Impurity is lined up against the nature of things; hence, any impure person is weak in personality. The eyes are shifty; the face grows dull and lusterless; and the personality sags.
O God, you are teaching me your ways, written in your Word, and also written in me. My flesh, my nerves, my very being begin to be vocal with your purposes and vibrant with your vitality. I am the vehicle of your victory—help me to surrender to your purposes that I may live abundantly. Amen.
* Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Sir Galahad,” Selections from Tennyson, ed. F. J. Rowe and W. T. Webb (New York: Macmillan, 1890), 51.
Week 28 Friday
The Kingdom of God Is the Norm
1 Corinthians 2:15-16; Philippians 4:8-9; Colossians 1:12-18
When we say, “The kingdom of God is within you,” are we talking theological fiction or teleological fact? In other words, are we imposing our views on nature, or are those views written within the purposes of nature? I have mentioned Dr. Fritz Kunkel’s book, Let’s Be Normal! Did he as a psychologist, studying the human personality in the cold white light of science, find that there is a norm written within us, and that to depart from that norm is to end in disruption and self-frustration? Yes! The psychologist would spell that “norm” with a small n, but we who believe that our origin is in God would spell it “Norm.” The kingdom of God within us is that Norm. To depart from it is to lose ourselves, to frustrate ourselves. To this Dr. Kunkel would agree, for his Christian faith and his psychological studies bring him out at the same place: There is a Norm written within us, and to depart from that Norm is to be abnormal, hence unhealthy and frustrated.
The Christian is the normal person; everyone else is abnormal. Everyone else is a little “off”—sometimes very much “off.” These people are not merely bad, but foolish, trying to live against the Norm—an impossible attempt. It is bound to end in only one way, in self-defeat and self-frustration. Self-defeat and self-frustration are inescapable, for the nature of things works that way. Sin and its punishment are one and the same thing, for sin is “missing the mark” (amartia), a departure from the Norm. A cancer is abnormal tissue; hence it is a cancer. One does not have to impose punishment on a cancer for being a cancer, because being a cancer is its own punishment; it is bound to destroy itself and the other tissue in the body by its very nature. The end is death.
“The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23): “the wages,” the natural outcome, the payoff, is bound to be death, for the sin itself is death, a departure from Normal; it is “on its own,” has no roots in reality, and hence will perish from lack of sustenance.
O my Lord God, I stand in awe of your goodness. I see your footprints everywhere. They are within me. When I turn within, I am on holy ground, for your presence is in every flaming bush of emotion, in every call that comes from the deeps of my being. I am your Temple. “May everything within your temple say, Glory.” Amen.
Week 28 Saturday
The Kingdom of God and the Natural Man
Isaiah 11:2; Ezekiel 2:1-2; Ephesians 5:8-18
The kingdom of God is within you! If the kingdom of God is our real nature, then what shall we do with the statement of Paul: “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:14)? Moffatt recaptures the original in his translation: “The unspiritual man rejects these truths of the Spirit of God.”* The context shows that the discussion is not between the natural and the unnatural, but between the “spiritual” (vv. 13, 15) and the unspiritual. The “spiritual man” is controlled by the kingdom of God; hence he is the truly natural man. The “unspiritual man” is living against that kingdom within; hence he is the unnatural man.
Again, we ask, “Is psychology, when it becomes truly biological—that is, when it is according to the facts of life—coming out at the same place as the Christian?” Let Dr. Henry Link, a psychologist, answer:
I define personality as the extent to which the individual has developed habits and skills which interest and serve other people. . . . Its emphasis is on doing things with and for other people. Its essence is self-sacrifice, not self-gratification. Indeed, the pursuit of personality just to win friends and position is quite likely to result in self-consciousness.**
Note that Dr. Link defines “personality” in Christian terms—self-losing service to others—and this with unmixed motives. But a person losing self in service to others with unselfish motives is the picture of a Christian. Dr. Link says that this is “personality.” Are the Christian and personality one and the same? Yes! When you discover the Christian way, you discover your own way as a person. To adopt the Christian way is to have your personality heightened. For it is unified, adjusted to the nature of reality, and is therefore no longer under the law of self-frustration, but of self-fulfillment.
“The Spirit enabled them to express themselves” (Acts 2:4 Moffatt). True self-expression began when they were filled with the Spirit. Now they could let nature caper!
O God, I have been afraid to surrender myself to your will, lest my own will be lost. How foolish I have been. I now see that your will is my own deepest will, and that to find your purposes is to find my person. Oh, let me express myself in you! Amen.
* CEB: “But people who are unspiritual don’t accept the things from God’s Spirit.”
**The Rediscovery of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 60-61.