Week 29 Sunday
Week 29 Sunday
The Kingdom of God Is the Cause!
Matthew 13:44-45; 16:24-28; 25:34
Last week we studied the statement “The kingdom of God is within you” and tried to recover the thought underlying it for the mainstream of Christendom. We must pursue this thought until it becomes not an argument, but an axiom—something which we no longer hold, but something that holds us.
We saw that psychologists, by the very pressure of facts, are defining personality in Christian terms: The Christian is the norm. The educators are coming out at the same place. Someone asked Professor W. H. Kilpatrick, the great educator, what was the greatest discovery of modern education, and he replied: “The greatest discovery of modern education is: He that saveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for some great Cause shall find it again.”*
No, Professor Kilpatrick, that was not a discovery of modern education; it was a rediscovery, for Jesus used that phrase five times. For the “Cause” he substituted “the kingdom”; the kingdom is the Cause. Modern education, in its experiments with human nature and the way it works, comes to the conclusion that if we center on ourselves, we will go to pieces; only as we lose self in some great Cause beyond us do we find our selves coming back to us integrated and heightened. That is a law of human living as deeply embedded in our moral and spiritual universe as the force of gravity is embedded in our material universe.
A Roman Catholic businessman said to me at the close of an address to a service club: “You didn’t preach to us; you just told us things.” He saw that I was lifting up laws of the moral and spiritual world written into the constitution of things, and that they are self-authenticating—one doesn’t have to argue them; one simply states them, and they argue themselves. One doesn’t argue an axiom in geometry: “Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” One states it, and it argues itself.
The people who heard Jesus wondered at his “authority”; it was the authority of the facts.
O God, we have been feverishly trying to support your universe with our puny arguments. We are like those who organize a society for the protection of the sun, when someone slings mud at it. Forgive us and help us to trust implicitly in your self-authenticating truth. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
* Published source unknown.
Week 29 Monday
The Kingdom of God and Business
Matthew 22:36-40; 25:34
The kingdom of God is within you! Psychology, education, and even business are stumbling upon the laws of the kingdom in their search for a workable way to live. I say “stumbling upon,” for that expresses the chance discoveries that are being made. Someday our prejudices will drop away, as all other ways become manifestly unworkable, and we shall methodically and with abandon give ourselves to the discovery of the laws of the kingdom. Then in a decade, humanity will leap further forward in progressive abundant living than it is now doing in a century.
When someone asked Daniel Willard, the head of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, what was the outstanding qualification for a successful executive, he replied: “The ability and the willingness to put yourself in the other man’s place.”* But that is distinctly Christian; it is loving your neighbor as you love yourself, doing unto others as you would be done by, projecting yourself in understanding sympathy and making the other person’s difficulties and troubles your own. This great executive came to that conviction, not through dogmatic assertion from a pulpit, but through the method of trial and error—nothing else would work; life approved of this attitude and would approve of no other. This statement appears in bold text in a business journal: “More and more companies are finding it pays to treat callers with friendly courtesy.” Why? Because good will is written into the constitution of things; ill will is sand in the machinery. Life will work with good will but not with ill will. You may try with infinite cleverness to make your universe hold together by ill will, but sooner or later it will topple and fall to pieces. Ill will is against the nature of reality.
“Anima naturalis Christiana” (“the soul is naturally Christian”), said Tertullian. It is unnaturally something else, working against itself and ending in futility and frustration.
O God, how can I thank you enough for constituting me within so I can take you as naturally as the lungs take air? You and my soul have been estranged, but they are not strangers; we have been separated, but are not separate. You are my life, my breath, my being, my all. I thank you. Amen.
* Published source unknown.
Week 29 Tuesday
The Kingdom of God Is Among You!
Proverbs 3:29; Luke 10:29-37; 17:21
The kingdom of God is within you! But a further doubt arises: Is not another translation, “The kingdom of God is among you”? The answer is that “among you” and “within you” are so profoundly true that Jesus may have used either or both. We have seen that the kingdom of God is written into the constitution of your physical, mental, and spiritual makeup, so that you have a Christian brain, a Christian nervous system, a Christian stomach, Christian glands, and a Christian organism in its total makeup. One who said that he went about “awakening that of Christ in every man” was expressing this. So also was St. Francis when he sympathized with wicked men because they could not express the suppressed holiness within them. The kingdom of God is within you! But the kingdom of God is among you!
If there is a way to get along with yourself, there is a way to get along with other people; in both cases it is God’s way. If the kingdom of God is stamped into the constitution of your personal being, it is also stamped into your social relationships with one another. Unless your relationships proceed along the lines of certain inherent laws, they break down. You do not make or pass those laws, you only discover them; and if you break them you break yourself and the relationship. You may try with infinite patience and skill to build on some other than God’s way, but in the end you won’t get along with yourself or others. For instance, you needn’t love your neighbor as you love yourself; but if you don’t, you cannot get along with your neighbor. You do not get rid of your neighbors by not loving them; you transform them into a problem and a pain. They are back on your hands, not as neighbors but as problems. You broke the law of human relationships and so those relationships broke down.
Sociology does not construct the laws of human relationships, it discovers them. They are a “given”—something written into human relationships by a pen other than our own.
Gracious Lord, you have written the family spirit into our relationships with the rest of the family. When we break those laws, we turn the family into a feud, snarling up our relationships—and ourselves. Forgive us and help us to catch your mind in our relationship with other minds, your Spirit in relation to other spirits. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 29 Wednesday
The Kingdom of God and Human Relationships
Galatians 6:7-8; Colossians 2:19; 1 John 4:7
The kingdom of God is among you! Note the ways people try to get along with one another: Some try to dominate others; some are aloof from others; some are indifferent to others; some work with others; some work with and for others.
Which one of these attitudes will life approve? Suppose you take the first and try to dominate others in one way or another. What happens? The relationships break down and get snarled up. One man summed this up rather sadly when he said, “In the home I tried to be it, and I found my wife opposite.” The type of action determined the reaction. A dictator tries to conquer the world and finds an initial success; then he inevitably has to meet a combination of the world against him; he goes down. Like produces like. “All who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matt. 26:52).
“Do not be deceived; God is not mocked: for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap” (Gal. 6:7). “Do not be deceived” over initial successes in domination, for “God is not mocked”—the nature of reality is against you and in the end will break you.
“He who sows to his own flesh [the flesh of domination] will from the flesh reap corruption.” The situation and you will be corrupted, will deteriorate, will go to pieces, and will collapse. The nature of reality foretells the collapse. But “he who sows to the Spirit [aligns with the eternal realities] will from the Spirit reap eternal life” (Gal. 6:8). The sum total of reality will back you; you will have the power of survival, for you are living with and not against the grain of the universe. You reap an everlasting way to live—eternal life.
Assistant Secretary of State A. A. Berle Jr. says, “No group of human beings, however implemented, has been able to challenge the great design.”* The great design is the Great Design, the kingdom of God. Live according to it, and you live; go against it, and you perish.
You Designer of the Great Design, we thank you that our hearts are set upon the Great Design, to fit into it, to mold our lives by it, to be fully surrendered to its purposes, and thus to live and live abundantly. Amen.
* Published source unknown. Berle served as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American affairs from 1938 to 1944.
Week 29 Thursday
The Kingdom of God Is Mutual Aid
1 Corinthians 12:12-27; 1 John 4:20; 2 John 5-6
The kingdom of God is among you! It is stamped into our relationships with one another; it is the way we are made to live corporately. A college president tells a story of his boyhood: He and another boy were on a seesaw and were playing nicely until the idea struck him of jumping off when his end was down, letting the other boy down with a crash. The other boy then refused to play with him. Finally he persuaded him to play again, and then the other boy let him down in the same way, with the same crash. Then neither one would trust the other, so the play ended permanently. The one boy broke the law of friendship, and in the end lost the friendship of the other boy, and the game. “You can’t eat your friends and have them.”
You cannot violate the law of love any more than you can violate the law of gravity and not get hurt. Suppose the law of mutual aid, which is the law of life among the organs and members of our bodies, should be violated by the members—the stomach falling out with the heart and refusing to give it nourishment; the heart retaliating and refusing to give the stomach any blood; the feet refusing to cooperate with each other, one going in one direction and the other in the other; the arteries and the veins refusing to cooperate, the arteries withholding pure blood and the veins holding up the elimination of impurities—in short, if the organs of the body became selfish and competitive instead of unselfish and cooperative, the whole system would collapse, and with it the parts. If the parts should save their lives in self-centeredness, they would lose them. Only as they lose themselves in the interest of the whole do they find themselves again.
This law of mutual aid is not something imposed on the body from without as a decree; it is written into the very constitution of its being. As no one has imposed the law, so no one imposes the penalties; they are inherent and self-acting. Break the law of mutual aid, and the results come automatically: breakdown and disaster.
Our Lord God, we come to you as foolish children—children who try to live against your ways and end only in hurting ourselves. Forgive us. And give us sense—just plain sense—so we may see that your laws are your love, and that your laws are our life. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Week 29 Friday
The Retreat Away from People
1 Corinthians 1:10; Galatians 2:11-13; 1 John 4:21
The kingdom of God is among you! We saw that there were five ways in which people try to get along with others. We have considered the first—the method of trying to dominate others. That breaks down the relationships. The second: Some try to live aloof from others. This is the opposite swing of the pendulum; if we cannot dominate others, then we will live aloof from them.
What happens to those who try this attitude? Can they cut human relationships, retreat into their own shells without affecting their being? Not at all. Such people deteriorate. If they cannot have a world of real human relationships, they build up a world of false relationships. They fill their minds with fantasies and daydreams of superior personal grandeur; they are superior, and hence remain aloof from the common herd. Or they look on themselves as inferior and justify retreat on the grounds that they are not worthy to get into relationships with others. In either case, recessive individuals hurt their own mental and moral natures. Humanity is made inherently for relationships with others, and any attempt to live apart brings inherent penalties.
You break the law of love just as much by receding from people as you do by trying to dominate them. You can no more cut yourself off from people and live fully than a brain can cut off relationships with the heart and live. All life is bound up in a bundle of life, and one person cannot be separate without disruption. That is why a lonely recluse is off balance; he or she is trying to live against the kingdom of God, which is a kingdom of loving relationships.
To try to recede from people in order to protect oneself morally and spiritually from temptation is also false strategy. I find more temptations when I am alone than when I am with people. People can help us to be at our best by their expectations.
If receding from people will not work, neither will the third attitude of being indifferent to them produce any other result. These methods end in self-frustration and a breakdown of relationships.
Gracious Lord, you have set us within your family, and we would not run away from others. Teach us to enter into loving relationships with one another and to help and be helped in the interplay of life on life. For you meet us in others. Help us to see you in them. Amen.
Week 29 Saturday
Working with and for Others
1 Corinthians 3:3-9; Colossians 4:11; 3 John 5-8
The kingdom of God is among you! The fourth attitude we can take toward others is to work with others. This sounds like a great advance over the other positions, and yet, so imperious and so demanding is the kingdom of God that even this turns out to be inadequate. For we may work with others and yet reserve our inner life from others. So sensitive are these laws of the kingdom that an outer conformity to community will not do. If the inner self is withheld, the relationships break down.
There is only one attitude toward others that will work. Fifth: work with and for others. You must not only work with people; you must work for them as well. There must be positive outgoing good will, a desire to help the other person as you would be helped. Labor and capital can work together, but it is in a suspicious, semi-hostile mood, fulfilling the letter of contracts. Often, this relationship is only suppressed war, and will break out into overt hostility at the first provocation. Out of this situation only minimum production results—each does as little as possible for the other. Only when the relationship is built on a generous and just basis—say a half-and-half division of profits between capital and labor—will there be relaxed attitudes of good will, a new spirit in the relationships, and a new increase in total output and hence in profits. Just generosity is literally the best policy. It obeys the law of the kingdom, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). This law is written into the constitution of our relationships, and hence it has the backing of the universe. Just generosity produces stability. Injustice and inequality produce instability, for they are working against the kingdom; hence they break down.
When John Hay, the great statesman, declared that the only way for nations to get along with one another is for them to apply the Golden Rule to their relationships, he was expressing the fact that this law of positive good will is written in our relationships, and hence is inescapable.*
God, our Lord, forgive us that we have tried to live together on anti-kingdom principles. We see the results in messed-up relationships and wars and poverty and general ruin. These results are inherent and not imposed. Forgive us that we do not see, do not see. Open our eyes that we may see—and live. Amen.
* John Hay (1838–1905) served in the Lincoln, McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt administrations.